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ActiveBatch by Redwood vs VisualCron comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

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

JAMS Scheduler
Sponsored
Ranking in Workload Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
ActiveBatch by Redwood
Ranking in Workload Automation
8th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (12th), Managed File Transfer (MFT) (10th)
VisualCron
Ranking in Workload Automation
25th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Managed File Transfer (MFT) (20th), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (30th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of JAMS Scheduler is 3.4%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ActiveBatch by Redwood is 3.2%, up from 2.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VisualCron is 2.2%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
JAMS Scheduler3.4%
ActiveBatch by Redwood3.2%
VisualCron2.2%
Other91.2%
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

LV
Principal Data Base And Infrastructure Engineer at a outsourcing company with 501-1,000 employees
Automation has replaced nightly monitoring and delivers reliable, unified job scheduling
We have really enjoyed working with JAMS in terms of notifications, alerts, and streamlining. There used to be a process with Automate, which is another product from Fortra, but even before that, the other division of the company that we were merging with had a tool that was built in-house called a file handler or file distributor. It was an in-house developed tool, but it was not as streamlined or as efficient as JAMS is. We literally had to have a dedicated nighttime person monitoring. Although we are 24/7, the divisions of the company that we were using JAMS for have been small scale. While we have automated it, we have streamlined it in such a way that notifications go out and alerts go out, but if there is anything, then we get paged and alerted, and if anything needs to happen at midnight, we can wake up. On the other hand, with the tool I mentioned, the file handler and distributor, we used to have a dedicated nighttime person that had to be sitting and monitoring it to see when a file arrived, whether it met the conditions, and then execute the next particular job. By using JAMS, we have gained a lot more efficiencies in terms of all of those to streamline it, and there is no necessary need for having an overnight engineer just keeping an eye on all of this.
Sai  - PeerSpot reviewer
Ai/Data Analyst at CSD
Automation has streamlined complex data workflows and now saves time on recurring reporting
To improve ActiveBatch by Redwood, the UI could be more modern and intuitive, and another thing that comes to mind is that it can feel overwhelming when workflows become large and complex. Troubleshooting can take extra time when there are multiple dependencies, jobs, and integrations running together. Better visualization of workflow relationships and easier debugging would really help. I would also appreciate seeing more simplified onboarding and documentation for newer users, as there is a learning curve at the beginning. Another improvement area could be smarter analytics or AI-driven recommendations, such as proactively identifying workflow bottlenecks, failed job patterns, or optimization suggestions instead of relying mostly on manual monitoring. From an operational perspective, faster configuration for integrations and cloud-based workflows would make implementation smoother, especially in environments working heavily with APIs and data pipelines. I have covered the main points regarding needed improvements. Overall, the platform is very capable and reliable for automation and workflow scheduling, especially in data-heavy environments. Most of the improvements I want are around making it easier for day-to-day use, such as a more intuitive UI, simpler troubleshooting for complex workflows, better onboarding for newer users, and more intelligent monitoring or optimization insights. The core functionality is strong, and the biggest opportunity is improving the overall user experience and simplifying operational management.
Sourav-Dutta - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead - Database Administrator at SMART ENERGY SYSTEMS LLC
It's user-friendly, and I didn't need long to understand the process
We use VisualCron for all our automation needs, like connecting to FileZilla, calling APIs, generating PGP keys, creating encryption files with the PGP key login to Azure, etc. It can automatically log in to SQL Server and execute SQL script jobs in bulk. We had 2,000-3,000 users at my previous…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"JAMS offers diverse scheduling capabilities for any kind of job, including Linux, PowerShell scripts, and SQL, enabling automation of jobs, which has proven beautiful after three years of usage."
"Fortra's JAMS helped us centralize job management across our platforms and applications. This is critical because we schedule tasks across multiple applications and operating systems, using triggers and start dates to coordinate their execution."
"This feature helps my team day-to-day by running hundreds and hundreds of jobs on JAMS in a timely fashion, which is extremely important and sensitive, providing a lot of reporting to the entire firm and beyond."
"By using JAMS, we have gained a lot more efficiencies in terms of all of those to streamline it, and there is no necessary need for having an overnight engineer just keeping an eye on all of this."
"Previously, we manually managed file transfers by writing our scripts. The automated MFT feature is great for me and the company. It helps us know where the files are going and enables us to track errors if anything fails. It also makes the connection seamless for third-party vendors."
"Getting JAMS in place was a game changer for us back then."
"We can see all the batch execution status within the tool itself, which saves money, time, and cost, allowing us to handle everything in one single tool."
"In summary, this product is top class."
"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."
"Since implementing ActiveBatch by Redwood, I have reduced manual job management time by approximately 50% and significantly decreased scheduling errors, allowing critical workflows to run more reliably and automated alerts to enable me to address potential issues much faster."
"One of the valuable features is the ability to trigger workflows, one after another, based on success, without having to worry about overlapping workflows. The ability to integrate our BI, analytics, and our data quality jobs is also valuable"
"ActiveBatch by Redwood has positively impacted my organization by improving efficiency through reducing manual intervention and minimizing downtime, which made operations significantly smoother."
"One of the most valuable features of this solution is the versatility of the prebuilt jobs."
"What ActiveBatch allows you to do is develop a more efficient process. It gave me visibility into all my jobs so I could choose which jobs to run in parallel. This is much easier than when I have to try to do it through cron for Windows XP, where you really can't do things in parallel and know what is going on."
"We leverage the solution's native integrations regularly. We have to get files from a remote server outside the organization, and even send things outside the organization. We use a lot of its file manipulation and SFTP functionality for contacting remote servers."
"By implementing a sophisticated scheduling mechanism, the system allows for the precise triggering of jobs at user-selected frequencies, enabling a seamless and automated execution of tasks according to specified time intervals."
"The most valuable feature of VisualCron is its ability to schedule interactive jobs so that you can have interdependencies within the job and interdependencies of a job on another job, and so on."
"What I like about VisualCron is that like its name, it's a very visual tool. In my previous company, there were a lot of scripts for all kinds of services, and through VisualCron, you get to group all flows and get a nice visual overview. VisualCron also has an alerting feature, so you receive alerts from it. VisualCron makes everything clearer and easier to maintain. Every other solution that I was looking for almost always needed a programmer, but with VisualCron, you can do what you need to do without programming skills, so this is another valuable feature of the tool."
"The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%."
"Using the Windows Task Scheduler means you have to do some coding while using VisualCron means the tool takes care of the coding from the backend; you're just using the visual interface of VisualCron, creating the logic, and telling the tool what actions need to be performed, so VisualCron would take care of everything on the backend for you, which helps you manage time better."
"VisualCron is a very powerful program to automate different steps in your business processes. We use it to automate replacing files and inform departments about the replacement."
"It helped us reduce manual steps."
"VisualCronv is currently handling so many different critical processes for our company, it's become a key factor in our livelihood and success."
"'ve only had a few cases where I've had to request support in the past 12 years of use, but the support response time and resolution were was extremely quick."
 

Cons

"The product does not allow the users to cut and paste the job names from the screen."
"The client is horrible. Every time JAMS puts out a survey on what they can improve, I always say, "The client: When you are setting up jobs, it is quite horrible." The response has been, "Well, we are just using the Windows foundation," and I am like, "Why isn't it only your product?" We can get around it now that we know its quirks, but it is not the most user-friendly of tools out there. The UI is completely unintuitive. We had to go and open up a support ticket with JAMS just to get something back. It is not user-friendly at all."
"Fortra is getting much better with documentation and examples, but there is still room for improvement."
"To improve JAMS, it should resolve the issues with the JD Edwards application and the need for the SSH agent in the current version, which has been a problem for a while."
"All my machines at work are Macs. JAMS client is a Windows-based thing. It is all built on .NET, which makes perfect sense. However, that means in order for me to access it, I need to connect to a VPN, then log onto one of our Azure VMs in order to access the JAMS client. This is fine, but if for some reason I am unable to do so, it would be nice to be able to have a web-based JAMS client that has all the exact same functionality in it. There are probably a whole bunch of disadvantages that you would get with that as well, but that is definitely something that would make life easier in a few cases."
"For the most part, JAMS is very stable. Occasionally, if you leave multiple windows open over a period of time, it is necessary to end that task and restart."
"In terms of improvements, I believe JAMS can enhance its user interface for better user experiences."
"One thing that I know that the JAMS people said that they were working on that would be huge for us is a search capability so that you could search for tasks. It may be available in version 7 or in a future release of 7. I think that's on their roadmap. But right now, for us to do a search, we have to search through database queries."
"We have faced a couple of issues where we were supposed to log a defect with ActiveBatch. That said, the Active batch Vendor Support is very responsive and reliable."
"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 help center and documentation are not that helpful."
"Some of the advanced features in the user interface are a bit confusing even after referring to the documents."
"I can't get the cleaning up of logs to work consistently."
"Whenever there is an overload, we are seeing crashes happening."
"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 monitoring dashboard could have been more user-friendly so that in the monitoring dashboard itself we can see the total number of jobs created in the system and how many were currently active/scheduled/chained."
"VisualCron seems to operate like an efficient machine when it comes to improvements and enhancements and new features. I always appreciate the quick response I get when bringing up an issue or coming up with suggestions. I've mentioned before that it would be great to see a move away from SQLCE and XML configuration files."
"Some preferences and permissions are not quite self-explanatory, but those are rather advanced features."
"An area for improvement in VisualCron is its cluttered interface."
"VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve."
"There are some conditions in the mail trigger, but you can only use them as an "AND" condition, not as an "OR" condition. This is an improvement that could be useful. For example, some people put "invoice" in the subject and others put "invoice" in the body. If I want to make a trigger for everybody whose sending invoices, I have to make two jobs for this now."
"Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way."
"I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run."
"VisualCron is software, and you will experience performance degradation when you scale up. VisualCron takes too much memory or CPU power. We have to increase the hardware resources of a specific server or system."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is reasonably priced, and we don't have any add-ons."
"It's expensive, to be honest, but it does the job."
"The pricing of JAMS has not been an issue for us, as it has allowed us to save time."
"Take advantage of its scalability. You can start small. The initial cost is very reasonable. Once you have started picking up the tool and adopting it, then you can scale up from there and buy more agents."
"JAMS is priced competitively compared to similar solutions and offers flexible licensing options to cater to user needs."
"JAMS is close to the lower end of the pricing models for enterprise scheduling solutions. They are much cheaper than Control-M, as well as some other products that I've used. I also don't know of another solution where you can actually get true, unlimited licensing, where you can have as many instances and as many agents as you want."
"Our licensing is pretty cheap because we have a state solution. So, we pay only $1,000 a year."
"The pricing is very fair. We have seen very minimal to no price increases over the years. We are not banging down the door of support all the time either. I would imagine if we were a company that submitted a dozen support tickets a week for the last nine years, then it might be a little different because we would be eating up everybody's time. However, for what we get out of it, the pricing is extremely fair. Back when we were originally looking and brought in JAMS, we were looking at a couple of the other competitive products that were in this space, but the pricing from JAMS was far and away better than what the other competitors could offer for the same functionality."
"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."
"It allows for lower operational overhead."
"Currently, we are paying approximately $7,000 yearly, which includes support."
"If you compare ActiveBatch licensing to Control-M, you're looking at $50,000 as opposed to millions."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"ROI is one month."
"The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."
"ROI is 95 percent."
"The price is a bit high."
"We are fine with a rather cheap setup. Licensing with VisualCron is fair. You have a simple one-year licence in different sizes. There isn't a licensing jungle with hundreds of options and opt-ins."
"VisualCron is correctly priced because it wasn't very cheap, and it wasn't overly expensive, so the price for it was set correctly. When my previous company bought VisualCron, it was €800 per server per year. On a scale of one to five, I would rate the pricing for VisualCron a five because it was just right. The tool was affordable, and it has one of the most competitive pricing in the market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Construction Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise24
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise52
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JAMS?
I was not really involved in the pricing, setup cost, and licensing at that level. I am more involved in the technica...
What needs improvement with JAMS?
In terms of improvements, I believe JAMS can enhance its user interface for better user experiences. I would like to ...
What is your primary use case for JAMS?
My primary use case for JAMS is enterprise workload automation and batch job orchestration. I use it to schedule and ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ActiveBatch Workload Automation?
I was not directly involved in the pricing, setup cost, and licensing decisions for ActiveBatch by Redwood, so my exp...
What needs improvement with ActiveBatch Workload Automation?
ActiveBatch by Redwood could be improved with a more modern and intuitive user interface, faster performance for very...
What is your primary use case for ActiveBatch Workload Automation?
My main use case for ActiveBatch by Redwood is enterprise workload automation, job scheduling, and orchestrating busi...
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Also Known As

No data available
ActiveBatch
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Teradata, Arconic, General Dynamics, Yum!, CVS Health, Comcast, Ghiradelli, & Boston’s Children’s Hospital
Informatica, D&H, ACES, PrimeSource, Sub-Zero Group, SThree, Lamar Advertising, Subway, Xcel Energy, Ignite Technologies, Whataburger, Jyske Bank, Omaha Children's Hospital
7 Eleven, ABB Sécheron SA, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Amazon Europe Core, Apple, Assa Abloy, Aston Martin, Banco Santander, BMW (Australia)
Find out what your peers are saying about ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. VisualCron and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
914,109 professionals have used our research since 2012.