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ActiveBatch by Redwood vs VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
ActiveBatch by Redwood
Ranking in Workload Automation
9th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (13th), Managed File Transfer (MFT) (10th)
VMware Aria Automation Orch...
Ranking in Workload Automation
17th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of JAMS Scheduler is 3.6%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ActiveBatch by Redwood is 3.3%, up from 2.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator is 1.4%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
JAMS Scheduler3.6%
ActiveBatch by Redwood3.3%
VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator1.4%
Other91.7%
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

SP
Developer at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
Centralized scheduling has improved automation and reduces manual monitoring for complex workflows
The best features JAMS Scheduler offers are centralized job scheduling, dependency management, and monitoring. I also appreciate the alerts and retry options because they help us handle failures without constantly checking jobs manually. Centralized scheduling makes it easier to manage all our jobs from one place instead of maintaining multiple schedulers or scripts. Dependency management is especially useful for chaining workflows because JAMS Scheduler can automatically trigger the next job only when the required previous step completes successfully. Another useful feature is the monitoring and alerting. If a scheduled job fails or runs longer than expected, we can quickly identify it and take action, which is particularly helpful for production support and reducing manual monitoring. JAMS Scheduler has helped quite a bit with identifying common job failures, missed schedules, dependency issues, and execution errors. The alerts and job history make it easier to identify the failure point and take corrective action without manually checking every workflow. JAMS Scheduler's code-driven automation has been useful for handling more complex scheduling logic and workflows that go beyond simple time-based triggers. It is important for us because we can combine scripts, dependencies, conditions, and parameters to support different production scenarios without creating too much manual intervention.
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.
Mayank-Goyal - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Consultant at MBCOM
Have streamlined multi-cloud provisioning and reduced virtual machine delivery time from days to hours
In terms of Orchestrator as a tool there is a lot of room for improvement, specifically in being more developer-friendly though it has come a long way. From that perspective, certain modern features are missing, especially when compared to developer tools such as Visual Studio Code or other code editors. That's essential, considering it's the primary development tool for VMware. In terms of Automation, there should be more features that align with what public cloud interfaces can provide. Not everyone is a developer; therefore, if they can offer out-of-the-box features for the most common scenarios that customers need, it would be highly beneficial for end users.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"One of the best features JAMS Scheduler offers is that it is cheaper than any other scheduler, making it a significant advantage alongside its user-friendliness that allows easy checking of logs and failures."
"JAMS Scheduler has positively impacted our organization by helping us reduce manual intervention by automating recurring jobs and ensuring workflows can consistently run on schedule."
"It makes everything that we want to do so much easier. We have had a number of instances in the past where we have had developers who have been working on a project, and even though we have had JAMS for all these years, they will create some SQL Server Agent job, or something like that, to run a task. When it is in code review and development is complete, the question always comes around, "Can JAMS do this?" The answer has always been, "Yes." Pretty much anything we have ever developed could be run by JAMS."
"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."
"The feature or capability to import a job is most valuable. We can import an existing job from different platforms, and all the configurations get migrated as well without modifying the code, job schedule, etc."
"The most valuable feature is the easily accessible data in the database because we run a lot of SQL scripting against the database."
"We have seen a practical return on investment, mainly through reduced manual monitoring and fewer missed job executions."
"I cannot say enough about JAMS Scheduler support, as it has been the fastest, greatest, best support I have had on any product in my 35 professional years of work."
"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"
"There are hundreds of pre-built steps."
"Approximately ~20 hours of manual effort have been reduced to ~5 hours with the help of ActiveBatch."
"Automating the scheduled data workflows and integrations helped improve analyst productivity by around 25 to 30%, mainly because less time was spent manually triggering jobs or fixing missed dependencies."
"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."
"I find this to be the easiest product that I have ever used, especially compared to Robot Schedule and CA AutoSys as well as an in-house scheduling software that I had designed and developed at one time."
"The nice thing about ActiveBatch is once we have created a specific job that can be easily be replicated to another job, then minimal changes will have to be made. This makes things nice. Reduction of coding is substantial in a lot of cases. The replication of one job to another is just doing a few minor tweaks and rolling it into production. This decreases our development costs substantially."
"It's a critical component of how we do things now."
"The best features of VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator include peace of mind and lesser complexity; simplicity is crucial, and there is no complexity in the system."
"Primarily, customers are looking for workflows and day-to-day actions, as well as advanced templates."
"With automation, I can provision a virtual machine in just one to two hours; this is a drastic improvement."
 

Cons

"The UI is completely unintuitive. We had to go and open up a support ticket with JAMS just to get something back."
"JAMS could be improved with a web client that is accessible and as fast as a normal website, eliminating the need to RDP to the servers to access the JAMS client."
"One issue which can prevent jobs from running is when a script gets into a loop."
"JAMS has built-in reporting. I've never really used it. I tried using it a few years ago and I couldn't figure it out. It was wonky. It could be improved upon."
"When looking at a folder in JAMS with many jobs, it would be good to have better information in the list display of what's inside those jobs. We get some information, but other important details are missing."
"Improvements could be made in the service desk's knowledge and communication skills among engineers to better address customer needs and ensure issues are fully resolved."
"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."
"The ACL or access permission area needs to be improved. When it comes to defining and providing security permissions, it's a bit confusing if you are new to JAMS. JAMS needs to improve the features for security access or permissions."
"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 can't get the cleaning up of logs to work consistently. Right now, we are not setup correctly, and maybe it is something that I have not effectively communicated to them."
"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."
"There are some issues with this version and finding the jobs that it ran. If you're looking at 1,000 different jobs, it shows based on the execution time, not necessarily the run time."
"Some improvements can be made to the user interface."
"I can't get the cleaning up of logs to work consistently."
"Providing some detailed training materials could be very helpful for new users who have very limited technical information about the tool."
"Setting up the software was hard."
"Some students, especially beginners, may find the learning curve to be steep due to a lack of requisite knowledge in backend languages like YAML, Python, or JavaScript."
"I would like to see improvements related to AI integration, which could make understanding from a language perspective easier."
"VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator is a very solid and acceptable product, but after the transition to Broadcom, prices are very high."
"There are areas of VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator that have room for improvement, specifically in being more developer-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing of JAMS has not been an issue for us, as it has allowed us to save time."
"There are no additional costs other than the license for Fortra's JAMS which is affordable."
"In the end, you'll find that it's really worth the price. There is some sticker shock, but it's worth every dime."
"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."
"Fortra's JAMS pricing structure has deteriorated significantly since its acquisition by Fortra."
"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."
"It was $10,000 for the first year. Then, there is a maintenance cost for licensing every year that we get billed $5,000 for every year."
"This is a good product at a fair price."
"If you compare ActiveBatch licensing to Control-M, you're looking at $50,000 as opposed to millions."
"It allows for lower operational overhead."
"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."
"Currently, we are paying approximately $7,000 yearly, which includes support."
"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."
"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."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
20%
Computer Software Company
16%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Construction Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise30
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise52
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JAMS?
My experience with pricing for JAMS Scheduler was good. The pricing was reasonable, and the vendor only charged us fo...
What needs improvement with JAMS?
JAMS Scheduler can be improved by sectioning off credentials and also the web functionality and setting that up.
What is your primary use case for JAMS?
My main use case for JAMS Scheduler is to trigger integrations as well as send out alerts and reports. For sending al...
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator?
Currently, I find the pricing to be on the expensive side. After the Broadcom acquisition, the licenses skyrocketed i...
What needs improvement with VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator?
In terms of Orchestrator as a tool there is a lot of room for improvement, specifically in being more developer-frien...
What is your primary use case for VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator?
My use case for VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator or now known as VCF Operations Orchestrator which is part of VCF ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
ActiveBatch
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

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
1. VMware 2. Dell Technologies 3. Cisco Systems 4. IBM 5. Hewlett Packard Enterprise 6. Microsoft 7. Oracle 8. Amazon Web Services 9. Google Cloud 10. Intel 11. Accenture 12. Fujitsu 13. Hitachi Vantara 14. NetApp 15. Red Hat 16. SAP 17. Siemens 18. T-Systems 19. Verizon 20. AT&T 21. Vodafone 22. Orange 23. BT Group 24. Deutsche Telekom 25. Ericsson 26. Nokia 27. Samsung 28. Sony 29. Toshiba 30. Panasonic 31. LG Electronics 32. Philips
Find out what your peers are saying about ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
921,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.