ActiveBatch by Redwood vs vCenter Orchestrator comparison

ActiveBatch by Redwood and VMware are both solutions in the Process Automation category. ActiveBatch by Redwood is ranked #5 with an average rating of 9.5, while VMware is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.1. ActiveBatch by Redwood holds a 0.6% mindshare in PA, compared to VMware’s 0.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of ActiveBatch by Redwood users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of VMware users who would recommend it.

ActiveBatch by Redwood

Read 35 ActiveBatch by Redwood reviews

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231 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

vCenter Orchestrator

Read 50 vCenter Orchestrator reviews

165 Views
127 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

ActiveBatch by Redwood

vCenter Orchestrator

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

vCenter Orchestrator and ActiveBatch compete in the automation software category, tailored for virtual environments. ActiveBatch holds the upper hand with superior workflow automation and integration capabilities, offering more flexibility across platforms despite its higher cost.

Features: vCenter Orchestrator specializes in virtualization with scalability, data migration, and seamless integration into VMware suites. It offers a strong set of automation and management features catering to comprehensive virtualization management. ActiveBatch focuses on robust scheduling, end-to-end workflow visibility, and integration flexibility. It effectively automates a range of processes across diverse environments, providing excellent workload management and platform integration.

Room for Improvement: vCenter Orchestrator struggles with workflow complexity and high pricing. Users desire better cross-platform integration, improved licensing models, and enhanced user guidance. ActiveBatch presents a steep learning curve due to UI complexity and integration issues. Users seek better support resources, UI enhancements, and comprehensive documentation.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: vCenter Orchestrator is mainly on-premises, noted for solid support but needs faster response times. ActiveBatch supports Public and Hybrid Cloud environments, offering flexibility in deployments and well-regarded customer service.

Pricing and ROI: vCenter Orchestrator, although pricey, offers cost benefits in large-scale deployments with its advanced features. ActiveBatch is competitively priced with flexible licensing. While the initial setup can be complex, its pricing aligns with market expectations, delivering effective ROI for businesses needing extensive integration and automation.

To learn more, read our detailed ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. vCenter Orchestrator Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. vCenter Orchestrator

April 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

ActiveBatch by Redwood

Ranking in Process Automation

5th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Managed File Transfer (MFT) (6th), Workload Automation (4th)

vCenter Orchestrator

Ranking in Process Automation

10th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Process Automation category, the mindshare of ActiveBatch by Redwood is 0.6%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of vCenter Orchestrator is 0.2%, down from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Process Automation

Featured Reviews

Shubham Bharti

Senior Analyst at Capgemini

Flexible, easy to use, and offers good automation

Occasionally, I find myself contemplating if there is room for improvement in the user interface (UI), and envisioning that with certain enhancements. The UI could potentially offer a more refined and user-friendly experience, fostering smoother interactions and facilitating easier navigation for users engaging with the application. New users might encounter a minor setback due to the absence of readily accessible training videos, which could have otherwise proven to be an invaluable resource in aiding their initial familiarization with the platform, potentially hindering their seamless onboarding process and delaying their ability to harness the software's full range of capabilities to its utmost potential.

Read full review

David Villota

EMEA Hosting Engineer at Yanfeng Automotive

Provides automatic monitoring capabilities that save time for users

In my company's IT environment, we use the tool to deploy production environments for products, including live manufacturing systems. The product improves my company's IT automation processes since we can use fewer resources currently. In my company, we need to spend less time considering that vCenter Orchestrator monitors everything. In general, we don't have to be present in our company to do active monitoring. Automatic monitoring is available for everything with vCenter Orchestrator, so we have proactive alerts in our company. The most valuable feature of the product in streamlining our company's workflow stems from the fact that we need to spend fewer resources and less time in general. Our company can spend time on more effective tasks like working with the plans to improve processes and so on, instead of taking care of the systems. The benefits of the product's integration capabilities were useful for HPE. My company has HPE infrastructure, and we are keen to integrate everything into the host, VMware ESXi. It is really important to have an easy integration method that allows for everything to be installed easily in a matter of minutes. I was not involved in the product's setup process. My colleague took care of the product's setup process. From what I know, I can say that the product's setup phase was straightforward. Some custom setups were to be done manually in the tool, but everything was well documented. I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. One of the benefits of the product is that it is a low-cost and stable solution that offers a lot of resources. I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"It can connect to a number of third-party/legacy systems."

"Approximately ~20 hours of manual effort have been reduced to ~5 hours with the help of ActiveBatch."

"ActiveBatch helped us automate and schedule routine tasks such as data backups, file transfers, database updates, and report generation, which frees IT staff to focus on other studies."

"Since we are no longer waiting for an operator to see that a job is finished, we have changed our daily cycle from running in eight hours down to about five. We had a third shift-operator retire and that position was never refilled."

"For developers, it is easy to orchestrate the workflows and the integration has been very easy."

"As far as centralization goes it's nice because we can see all these processes that are tied to this larger process. The commissions, FTP processing, the reporting, the file moves to the business users — all that is right there. It's very easy to read. It's easy to tie it together, visually, and see where each of these steps fits into the bigger picture."

"The REST API adapters and native integrations for integrating and orchestrating the software stack are very flexible."

"Managing the workload and monitoring the tasks were very difficult with manual interventions. Now, by using ActiveBatch, the process is automated and it runs tasks on a scheduled basis."

More ActiveBatch by Redwood pros

"It is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution."

"The platform integration is straightforward, especially with recent updates, making connecting with various systems and streamlining workflows easier."

"The open, flexible architecture has brought in the agile computing environment along with better Dr capabilities. Automation management and operational tasks across VMware and third-party applications, like our HMIS and other business productivity applications, have delivered peace of mind."

"The backup and recovery times are very quick."

"I like the tool's DNS feature."

"It has the best workflow feature."

"Because of the central management, the scripting engine and workflow engine are integrated with VMware without any burden to integrate different products."

"The implementation phase for vCenter Orchestrator was easy."

More vCenter Orchestrator pros

Cons

"Any product is going to have some room for improvement, no matter what. I see the company has already ventured into AWS and they're constantly trying to improve the managed file transfer which they have recently improvised. I think they bought a software called JSCAPE and they're trying to improve it, which is good. I am not sure if JSCAPE would be part of the base product but currently, you have to buy a separate license for it, which doesn't make sense. If it was Microsoft, ServiceNow, or integrating with other software vendors, I would understand but JSCAPE is now in-house and I'm not sure if they can justify having a separate license for JSCAPE. I would probably expect them to be packaging JSCAPE into the base product. They did switch over from a perpetual license model to a subscription model, which hurt the company a little bit. Nobody is offering the perpetual model anymore. As long as the transition is fair for both the companies, I think it should be fine and not burn us out."

"Between version 10 and version 12 there was a change. In version 10, they had each object in its own folder. But on the back end, they saw it at the root level. So when we moved over to version 12, everything was in the same area mixed together. It was incredibly difficult and we actually had to create our own folders and move those objects—like schedules, jobs, user accounts—and manually put those into folders, whereas the previous version already had it."

"An area for improvement in ActiveBatch Workload Automation is its interface or GUI. It could be a little better. There isn't any additional feature I'd like to see in the tool, except for the GUI, everything looks good."

"It could be easier to provide dashboards on how many jobs are running at the same time; more monitoring."

"One thing I've noticed is that navigation can be difficult unless you are familiar with the structure that we have in place. If someone else had to look at our ActiveBatch console and find a job, they might not know where to find it."

"The thing I've noticed the most is the Help function. It's very difficult, at times, to find examples of how to do something. The Help function will explain what the tool does, but we're not a Windows shop at the data warehouse. Our data warehouse jobs actually run on Linux servers. Finding things for Linux-based solutions is not as easy as it is for Windows-based solutions. I would like to see more examples, and more non-Windows examples as well, in the Help."

"I have faced struggles to understand, set up the tool, and implement it in my early days as a new user."

"It does have a little bit of a learning curve because it is fairly complex. You have to learn how it does things. I don't know if it's any worse than any other tool would be, just because of the nature of what it does... the learning curve is the hardest part."

More ActiveBatch by Redwood cons

"Mainly VMware integrates with other products, but there is no easy way to link with other products from a different vendor. We can integrate with other products from the same vendors fairly well, but if they could make it so integration is easier with other vendors, that would really help."

"Enhancing the platform's setup process intuitiveness and offering more flexible pricing options could further improve its accessibility across different company sizes."

"As we work towards more stability on the solution, sometimes we'll try something and it breaks and it's easier to restart the service. That's the only drawback. We've experienced this with other applications as well."

"I would like to see more automation added in the future."

"vCenter Orchestrator's debugging capacity could be improved."

"The price of this product is high and could be improved."

"The product’s cost needs improvement."

"This is an expensive solution."

More vCenter Orchestrator cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I like ActiveBatch Workload Automation's licensing model because they're not holding you down on an agentless model or agent model, where every server needs to have an agent. That's the main selling point of the solution and I hope they stay that way."

"If you compare ActiveBatch licensing to Control-M, you're looking at $50,000 as opposed to millions."

"Currently, we are paying approximately $7,000 yearly, which includes support."

"I don't think we've ever had a problem with the pricing or licensing. Even the maintenance fees are very much in line. They are not excessive. I think for the support that you get, you get a good value for your money. It's the best value on the market."

"ActiveBatch is currently redesigning themselves. In the past, they were a low cost solution for automation. They had a nice tool that was very inexpensive. With their five-year plan, they will be more enhancement-driven, so they're trying to improve their software, customer service, and the way that their customers get information from them. In doing that, they're raising the price of their base system. They changed from one pricing model to another, which has caused some friction between ActiveBatch and us. We're working through that right now with them. That's one of the reasons why we're why we were evaluating other software packages."

"The price was fairly in line with other automation tools. I don't think it's exorbitantly expensive, relatively speaking."

"The pricing was fair. There are additional costs for the plugins. We have the standard licensing fees for different pieces, then we have the plugins which were add-ons. However, we expected that."

"It allows for lower operational overhead."

"vCenter Orchestrator is an expensive solution."

"The solution is a bit expensive."

"I rate the product price a seven to eight out of ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."

"We provide the VMware solution to our clients, for which they pay a perpetual license."

"Our licensing is on a yearly basis. We pay for the license and then we pay the support every year."

"My organization didn't have to pay extra for vCenter Orchestrator. It was already included, so it's basically free. Even VMware regular support is included."

"The concept of hyper-convergence is smart. I don't know if it can be applied with less cost to be more affordable for small or medium-sized companies. The cost is a very important factor for it. We are currently depending on SAN storage. However, the hyper-converged solutions are depending on the storage within the hosts, such as vSAN in the VMware. It is a smart solution."

"We pay a yearly fee, based on our entries."

More vCenter Orchestrator pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

Insurance Company

Retailer

Computer Software Company

23%

Financial Services Firm

17%

Government

12%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about ActiveBatch Workload Automation?

Managing the workload and monitoring the tasks were very difficult with manual interventions. Now, by using ActiveBatch, the process is automated and it runs tasks on a scheduled basis.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ActiveBatch Workload Automation?

I'd advise users to start by knowing what the actual requirement is and thoroughly assess the automation needs. New users should take advantage of the demos and trial versions so they get an idea o...

See all answers

What needs improvement with ActiveBatch Workload Automation?

After upgrades we are facing a few issues and errors triggered, so focusing on this would be appreciated. Some of the advanced features in the user interface are a bit confusing even after referrin...

See all answers

What do you like most about vCenter Orchestrator?

The stability of the product is very good.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for vCenter Orchestrator?

We're running a low-profile budget. This is not our main focus on investment technology, so we're trying to reduce costs due to the change from perpetual to subscription licenses.

See all answers

What needs improvement with vCenter Orchestrator?

After the change from perpetual licensing to subscriptions, the cost model changed. We are considering alternatives since we lost the perpetual aspect, and support is changing.

See all answers

Comparisons

Control-M vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 21% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 18% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 14% of the time

Tidal by Redwood vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 9% of the time

Stonebranch vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 9% of the time

More ActiveBatch by Redwood Competitors

VMware Aria Automation vs vCenter Orchestrator

Compared 54% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs vCenter Orchestrator

Compared 22% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs vCenter Orchestrator

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft System Center Orchestrator vs vCenter Orchestrator

Compared 12% of the time

More vCenter Orchestrator Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveBatch by Redwood

April 2025

Download ActiveBatch by Redwood product report

Buyer's Guide

vCenter Orchestrator

April 2025

Download vCenter Orchestrator product report

Also Known As

ActiveBatch

No data available

Overview

ActiveBatch by Redwood automates and manages batch processes, data integration tasks, and workflow scheduling. It's used for file transfers, data processing, server monitoring, and report generation, supporting both on-prem and cloud environments.

Organizations implement ActiveBatch by Redwood to automate complex job scheduling and data workflows, integrating seamlessly with FTP, SQL, PowerShell, and other systems. With features like real-time monitoring, error handling, and centralized management, users can significantly boost productivity while minimizing manual intervention. Its flexibility in supporting on-premises and cloud environments makes it adaptable for diverse IT landscapes. The tool simplifies workflow orchestration with an extensive library of pre-built steps and robust API integrations, ensuring efficiency in handling various workloads.

What are ActiveBatch by Redwood's key features?

Job automation: Automates routine and complex jobs.
Real-time monitoring: Offers instant insights into job performance.
Customizable workflows: Tailors workflows to specific business needs.
PowerShell integration: Supports advanced script execution.
Job triggering: Initiates tasks based on specific conditions.
File handling: Manages file transfers and processing efficiently.
Server management: Monitors and handles server tasks consistently.
API integration: Connects with various applications for streamlined operations.
Alerting: Provides notifications for critical job events.
Flexible scheduling: Enables detailed and adaptable job scheduling.

What benefits and ROI can users expect?

Centralized management: Simplifies oversight of all processes.
Productivity boost: Reduces manual effort and errors.
Time savings: Accelerates task completion and workflow execution.
Comprehensive visibility: Enhances monitoring of all job activities.
Reliable performance: Ensures consistent task execution.
Scalability: Adapts to growing business and IT needs.

In various industries, ActiveBatch by Redwood is used to streamline operations, whether in finance handling large-scale data processing, healthcare managing patient records, or retail optimizing supply chains. It addresses specific needs by offering robust automation, efficient job scheduling, and seamless integration with existing systems, driving operational excellence and efficiency.

ActiveBatch by Redwood

VMware vCenter Orchestrator simplifies the automation of complex IT tasks and integrates with VMware vCloud Suite components to adapt and extend service delivery and operational management, effectively working with existing infrastructure, tools and processes.

VMware

Sample Customers

Informatica, D&H, ACES, PrimeSource, Sub-Zero Group, SThree, Lamar Advertising, Subway, Xcel Energy, Ignite Technologies, Whataburger, Jyske Bank, Omaha Children's Hospital

Beiersdorf Shared Services

Buyer's Guide

ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. vCenter Orchestrator

April 2025

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