We performed a comparison between ActiveBatch Workload Automation and Fortra's JAMS based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: ActiveBatch Workload Automation offers a versatile and user-friendly experience with prebuilt jobs, real-time monitoring, scalability, and support for a wide range of platforms. Fortra's JAMS stands out for its strong job dependency tracking, automation capabilities, warnings, support, and emphasis on code-driven automation.
ActiveBatch could enhance its managed file transfer, user interface, trigger reliability, documentation, support services, software setup process, customization options, and pricing. Fortra's JAMS would benefit from improvements in client interface, search functionality, training resources, documentation, UI responsiveness, integration capabilities, source control features, and access permission management.
Service and Support: ActiveBatch Workload Automation has received positive feedback regarding its customer service, specifically highlighting the helpful and reliable technical support. However, there are concerns regarding the service model and availability of the hotline. Fortra's JAMS is highly praised for its responsive and knowledgeable support team, promptness of responses, and availability of documentation and training resources. Customers express overall satisfaction with JAMS' customer service.
Ease of Deployment: The initial setup for ActiveBatch Workload Automation was straightforward, with a minor need for additional documentation during file import. Configuring it on different operating systems like Windows and Linux proved to be slightly complex. Fortra's JAMS had a simple and easy setup procedure, with users easily following instructions on the webpage and swiftly deploying new tasks. Although some users encountered confusion or difficulties, they were able to seek assistance from JAMS support.
Pricing: Users find the setup cost for ActiveBatch Workload Automation to be quick and simple, with reasonable and competitive pricing. Users consider the pricing of JAMS to be fair and affordable.
ROI: ActiveBatch Workload Automation has been highly regarded for its positive impact on net revenue. Fortra's JAMS is admired for its cost-effectiveness, time-saving features, and improved productivity, all achieved without requiring additional staff.
Comparison Results: ActiveBatch Workload Automation is the preferred choice when compared to Fortra's JAMS. Users praise ActiveBatch for its versatility, easy-to-use interface, prebuilt jobs, and user-friendly configuration. It stands out in scheduling, monitoring, and providing valuable insights.
"I found ActiveBatch Workload Automation to be a very good scheduling tool. What I like best about it is that it has very less downtime when managing many complex scheduling workflows, so I'm very impressed with ActiveBatch Workload Automation."
"ActiveBatch provides summary reports and logs for further analysis and improvements in monitoring servers, which is very handy."
"Approximately ~20 hours of manual effort have been reduced to ~5 hours with the help of ActiveBatch."
"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."
"The user interface is really incredible."
"ActiveBatch can automate predictable, repeatable processes very well. There is no real trick to what ActiveBatch does. ActiveBatch does exactly what you would expect a scheduling piece of software to do. It does it in a timely manner and does it with very little outside interference and fanfare. It runs when it is supposed to, and I don't have to jump through a bunch of hoops to double check it."
"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's Self-Service Portal allows our business units to run and monitor their own workloads. They can simply run and review the logs, but they can't modify them. It increases their productivity because they are able to take care of things on their own. It saves us time from having to rerun the scripts, because the business units can just go ahead and log in and and rerun it themselves."
"The code-driven automation for more complex scheduling requirements frees up time because it's really easy to use... It's almost like a stand-alone software that we can't live without."
"We also use the solution’s Interactive Agents. If we need to push something to our dealer portal, we can just drop a file in a folder and it goes. Running interactive tasks helps me users focus on business processes since I don’t have to take care of running the jobs manually."
"I didn't know about JAMS because I don't have a person with any challenges with the purchase administration. The feature or the user interface is user-friendly because of the readable icons or very descriptive icons. Though I'm a beginning user of JAMS, I had no issues using it."
"The product is easy to use."
"One of the things I like the most, as a SQL DBA, is the fact that we can manipulate tables in the background. Also, the fact that you can have your own views and work with the product the way it fits best is a very helpful feature."
"I find the historical tracking feature of JAMS invaluable for reviewing past events."
"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."
"It's a full-featured job scheduling tool. The part that I liked the best was the support team. This tool was new, and we were all learning it and setting up the different jobs that were complex in nature. Their support team was very responsive in helping us out through the setup and resolving the issues. They have been incredibly awesome."
"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."
"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."
"The help center and documentation are not that helpful."
"I have faced struggles to understand, set up the tool, and implement it in my early days as a new user."
"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."
"As more organizations are moving towards a cloud-based infrastructure, ActiveBatch could incorporate more capabilities that support popular cloud platforms, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud."
"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."
"ActiveBatch UI could use a little more help, and video tutorials would be greatly appreciated for user guides."
"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."
"The search capability needs to be improved because when we try to search for a job, it's hard to do."
"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."
"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."
"I would like a simple web interface that I could give to my team to go in and kill jobs or see why jobs died so that we don't have to drill down deeper into the application and know everything about it. It would be good to have a really clean web engine that would say here are the jobs running. We can then click to see the time running and whether any of them fails and other similar things. I know they have one, but it's not very simplistic."
"As an admin, I would like to have a web-based GUI instead of a client application that we have to install on our PCs."
"The product does not allow the users to cut and paste the job names from the screen."
"Fortra is getting much better with documentation and examples, but there is still room for improvement."
ActiveBatch by Redwood is ranked 4th in Workload Automation with 35 reviews while Fortra's JAMS is ranked 5th in Workload Automation with 27 reviews. ActiveBatch by Redwood is rated 9.2, while Fortra's JAMS is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of ActiveBatch by Redwood writes "Flexible, easy to use, and offers good automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Fortra's JAMS writes "We can scale up our organization's scheduling and automation without having to add staff to the department". ActiveBatch by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal by Redwood, Redwood RunMyJobs and VisualCron, whereas Fortra's JAMS is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal by Redwood, Redwood RunMyJobs and VisualCron. See our ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Fortra's JAMS report.
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