We performed a comparison between AppWorx Workload Automation, Automic Workload Automation, and Stonebranch based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC, Tidal Software by Redwood, Redwood Software and others in Workload Automation."The automated solution is the most valuable piece. Otherwise, we would have to be doing everything manually on every server."
"Scheduling is a good feature."
"The interface is good."
"The most valuable features of AppWorx Workload Automation are simplicity and reliability. Additionally, they recently transformed the UI which is better."
"We have a lot of nightly jobs that need to be run. Therefore, we perform a lot of calculations and processes during nighttime hours."
"It is really a robust product."
"It is an object-based approach to task and process design in conjunction with conditional logic and event-based scheduling actions, which enables a build once/use often design methodology to be employed."
"The solution is very user friendly so anyone can use it."
"It's allowing us to increase our overall volumes of data that we're working with, without actually increasing the overall amount of team that we need to monitor it."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is that we can control between a lot of operating systems and other products because we have a lot of old and new products in our environment. It helps us to control all of them together."
"Without automation, it would be nearly impossible to do all the jobs that we are doing."
"It is flexible. We can do additional scripting in Automic script, in combination with JSL language."
"Support is good and it works fine."
"We automate very manual, robust tasks, which are very time consuming and not error-free."
"We use it in every aspect of our IT operations, and the scalability is very good."
"The very special feature that we use is the connection to ServiceNow."
"The features are upgraded, and every six months they're releasing patches."
"I love the Universal Controller. It's been great for us. We host it on-premise... It's High Availability, meaning there's failover from one server to the other if one goes down."
"We lean a lot on the multi-tenancy that they offer within the product, the ability to get other people to self-manage their estate, versus having a central team do all the scheduling."
"When it comes to agent technology and compatibility with other vendors, from a platform perspective it was the one vendor that fit all the platforms that we have, from your old platforms - mainframe, NSK, IBM i - to the new ones, going into cloud and container"
"The most valuable feature is the reliability of the agents, because we need them accessible and we need to run stuff. The agent technology and compatibility are top-notch."
"I like the dashboard and the various workflows."
"The support is good from Stonebranch Universal Automation Center."
"The interface is very user-friendly and easy to navigate."
"It is not really scaling per say because they are not putting much into it. They are trying to push their new product."
"Reporting, forecasting and intelligence could be improved."
"We are looking for additional features that would allow us to call APIs and integrate the product with other tools more effectively."
"It has been a deprecated product, because it is so old. There has been a couple of new solutions that are a little more advanced."
"The internal security model can be complex when configuring multiple user groups."
"The graphical interface is pretty cool but not the best so it could use some improvement."
"The scalability could improve."
"As a general process automation and integration tool, it has been superseded by other offerings, notably the Workload Automation suite."
"The tool lacks interoperability features."
"I would not recommend using Automic's technical support for complex problems."
"ServiceNow creates problems with the Automic entry of the connector, so the stability could be a little bit better with this product."
"Depending on the properties of the jobs and pre- and post-conditions, there needs to be more flexible and richer conditions that I can check for. This would be a great addition."
"For the user interface of version 12.1, I cannot find a lot of utilities and objects from previous versions, making me change my habits. This is not good."
"Most of our issues are related to the system, not the job scheduling, such as, bugs and unexpected downtime of the application or database."
"This solution's out-of-box automation sets could be improved. They could be industry standardized out-of-box, or even runbook automation processes could be useful—just some plug-and-play automation processes out-of-box. It has many integration capabilities, from APIs to databases, but if the customer sees some out-of-box automation processes in it, it could be useful."
"It has a very complicated interface, which could be made to be more user-friendly."
"The Universal Controller is decent for the money it costs... It needs some work to have full features, compared to other products that are out there, specifically IBM's Workload Scheduler."
"It would be ideal if they had the exact same features as the CA Workload Automation DE series. It would be helpful to have calendaring options."
"One hiccup we've had is due to the fact that we have other internal scheduling tools. We're able to talk to them, but we have trouble with some of the networking between them, so we're still trying to work out the kinks there."
"I would rate Stonebranch somewhere in the middle for ease of setup. It wasn't too straightforward for us because our infrastructure is complex."
"There is a component called the OMS, which is the message broker. We rely on infrastructure, resiliency, and availability for that piece. If that could change to be highly available just as a software component, so that we don't have to provide the high-available storage, etc. for it, that would be a plus. It would just be cheaper to run."
"Occasionally, we have an agent that doesn't come back up after patching. That doesn't happen very often... It's really just a restart of the agent and it comes back up. But that might be one thing that could be improved."
"I have a request regarding our agent on the mainframe. It may time out when communicating to the Universal Controller, when the mainframe is extremely busy. That can cause a task which is running at that time to not see the results of the job that ran on the mainframe. It happens sporadically during times of really busy CPU usage. We're expecting that enhancement from them in the fourth quarter."
"It can be hard to manage the task monitor."
