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Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow vs Astro by Astronomer comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 18, 2026

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
Amazon Managed Workflows fo...
Ranking in Workload Automation
21st
Average Rating
6.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Astro by Astronomer
Ranking in Workload Automation
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
4.9
Number of Reviews
30
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 Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow is 1.8%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Astro by Astronomer is 1.3%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
JAMS Scheduler3.6%
Astro by Astronomer1.3%
Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow1.8%
Other93.3%
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.
IP
Business and Technology Strategy Lead at Cognix Inc
Operational workflows improve as we address needs but technical support costs affect resources
Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow is easy to use and offers great scalability. The more we include and extend our capabilities, we can easily scale up according to our needs. When we compare it to other tools in the market, such as Control-M and other technologies, Airflow offers a lot of flexibility. Using this tool minimizes costs and maximizes efficiency.
FS
Data Platform Engineer at Babbel
Unified orchestration has reduced costs and improves governance for complex data workflows
I would say it would be much more helpful if Astro by Astronomer can provide an MCP to use and integrate with Astro by Astronomer and their AI agent Auto, so that we can use our tools like Claude, Code, or Cursor to have a central location where we integrate that MCP in Databricks via the AI gateway, and then we can have a place where we can connect to Astro by Astronomer, Databricks, other tools such as Jira and DataDog, and then have a much more comprehensive analysis and overview and monitoring of the entire data ecosystem. Having an MCP integration would tremendously help us to have a more comprehensive data platform that is more AI-ready. That is one of the features that I can think of. Another thought would be having an integration with Kubernetes instead of just scheduling everything on Astro by Astronomer workers. That would be helpful. One thing I can think of is that the Astro by Astronomer local developer environment can be improved further, but perhaps that is a very niche use case that I have in mind, and it may not be useful for others. There is room for improvement around having an improved UI and also integration with other tools. On governance, I would say we can have a more granular level of governance even inside workspaces. Having much more granular control over people belonging to the same team in Astro by Astronomer could have different access to different DAGs, depending upon our tagging strategy. That is one of the areas I can suggest in terms of improvement. The AI capabilities can be improved further. I would compare the current AI capabilities to newer models provided by Claude such as Opus or Codex.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The overall product is fantastic. I love it. It has been a fantastic, solid product. If I have one tiny bit of a problem with it, the support team gets in touch with me right away. I don't know if I've had another service that has been as fantastic as the JAMS support team."
"The most valuable feature is the easily accessible data in the database because we run a lot of SQL scripting against the database."
"Saving five to six hours of our working time weekly is significant because it reduces the need for manual scheduling, which is vital for our job and routine checks, helping my team focus more on their other operational responsibilities and making our workflow more organized."
"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."
"The planning capabilities are most valuable."
"Being able to automate things ensures that things can run overnight or in the early morning when it needs to, and it frees up a lot of bandwidth for my time during the day when I don't need to be bothered with handling all of these repetitive tasks."
"Because we have gone from a lot of manual processes to automated processes with JAMS, we have been able to free up IT staff time, and for just the Technical Operations Center team that I manage, it has saved about 20 hours a week."
"JAMS gives operations teams a single place to manage, monitor, and track job execution, which from my perspective as a developer improves coordination between teams because everyone has visibility into the status of critical workloads and simplifies troubleshooting since job history, execution status, and other relevant information are all easily accessible, ensuring that business-critical processes are executed consistently and reliably across the organization."
"Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow is easy to use and offers great scalability; the more we include and extend our capabilities, we can easily scale up according to our needs."
"One of the product's main strengths is that it is well-suited for a DevOps pattern, allowing us to automate our CI/CD pipeline."
"Astro by Astronomer has positively impacted my organization because it is reliable, allowing me to depend on it for managing the Airflow instances along with the infrastructure and error handling."
"Astro by Astronomer has positively impacted my organization by automating ingestion pipelines, transformations, and error handling, and it has given us relief."
"The best features Astro by Astronomer offers include a large operator and library that I can work with for different use cases."
"Astro by Astronomer has positively impacted my organization by significantly improving developer productivity, reducing downtimes, alleviating overhead associated with upgrades, and delivering nearly a 45% reduction in cloud spending, translating to a high return on investment."
"It is mainly an improved version of Apache Airflow, and it has improved everything from the open source Airflow."
"The best features Astro by Astronomer offers, in my opinion, are easy setup and good tutorials."
"Previously, developing DAGs took days and sometimes a sprint, now I can deliver within a couple of hours."
"<p>When I say it simplified development and user experience, I mean that it definitely made onboarding easier and reduced time significantly.</p>"
 

Cons

"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 area of improvement I see for JAMS Scheduler is making the user interface more intuitive for new users, especially when configuring complex job dependencies."
"The cost has definitely gone up tremendously. That is where I do know, as much as the feature sets are there, and if the newly acquired company is going to be doing a pushback, they might just say, 'Do we still need to pay this much? Or at that point, should we look into an alternative?'"
"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."
"They recently switched to subscription-based pricing, which increased."
"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."
"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."
"One area for improvement would be making the user interface more intuitive, especially for new users working with complex job dependencies."
"The documentation provided is good."
"To be very honest, technical support from AWS is extremely expensive."
"If I had to think of one area where I see potential for improvement, it would be integration with infrastructure virtualized services like vCenter, Hyper-V, and storage systems like Hitachi and IBM FlashSystem."
"I believe my experience with pricing, setup, cost, and licensing could be better."
"If I had to pick one thing that could be improved, it would be the speed when working in clouds."
"Astro by Astronomer could improve by reducing costs or decreasing infrastructure management and having less dependency on Kubernetes so that the infrastructure is simpler."
"One area for improvement is the recent change in the UI with task groups introduced in version two point three and above."
"There is room for improvement around having an improved UI and also integration with other tools."
"I would recommend making it easier to read the logs in Astro by Astronomer because the logs are pretty hard to follow, especially for the pipelines that are processing much data, such as our DBT, where we have issues finding something in the logs."
"One challenge I find with Astro by Astronomer is the cost because it is relatively higher than other tools."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"JAMS is priced competitively compared to similar solutions and offers flexible licensing options to cater to user needs."
"The product is reasonably priced, and we don't have any add-ons."
"The licensing model for JAMS is straightforward and based on the number of agents, not the number of jobs you run. It's cheap and fairly simple."
"There are no additional costs other than the license for Fortra's JAMS which is affordable."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The product is reasonably priced, and we don't have any add-ons."
"I haven't been involved in the financial side for several years, but we buy one host and unlimited agents, and we get a reasonable price for that. We're happy with the amount we pay and the scalability it provides."
"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 is not an inexpensive solution but it is less expensive than other options."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Energy/Utilities Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Educational Organization
13%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise30
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise25
 

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 needs improvement with Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow?
Customization in general depends on the use cases that we are trying to address, but I don't have a specific thing ri...
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow?
Custom Generalizations do not directly correlate with specific sections conventional to reviews. Less clarity on dire...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow?
Our use case for Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow is more focused on operational workflow. We created an o...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Astro by Astronomer?
It was as we expected in terms of cost because previously we had three different orchestrators, and now we have only ...
What needs improvement with Astro by Astronomer?
If we can improve something, it would be to have hibernation for the production deployment. Currently, setting up hib...
What is your primary use case for Astro by Astronomer?
The main purpose of Astro by Astronomer today is Airflow. We are using Airflow in order to orchestrate our data pipel...
 

Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Teradata, Arconic, General Dynamics, Yum!, CVS Health, Comcast, Ghiradelli, & Boston’s Children’s Hospital
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