Rocket Zena vs Stonebranch comparison

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2,486 views|1,473 comparisons
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3,058 views|1,288 comparisons
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 12, 2023

We performed a comparison between Rocket Zena and Stonebranch Universal Automation Center based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

Features: Rocket Zena is highly regarded for its simplicity, intuitive interface, and diagram capability. It provides Linux configuration, Docker-based deployment, versatile job scheduling, and a browser-based client. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center receives high acclaim for its efficiency, visual presentation, and capability to establish job dependencies. It boasts a graphical interface, a valuable task monitor, and reliable scalability.

Rocket Zena could improve its visibility into connections between applications, monitoring of agents, UI loading time, intuitive UI, installation process, task stacking, documentation, distributed platform availability, and notification feature. Stonebranch could benefit from cloud availability, enhanced analytics, improved task monitor, mobile app, and collaboration with the vendor for future releases.

Service and Support: Rocket Zena's customer service and support is commended for their quick responses and willingness to understand and address problems. However, obtaining higher-level support may be time-consuming. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center's customer service is highly praised, with users finding the support to be very good, excellent, and always available. The support team is knowledgeable and resolves issues efficiently.

Ease of Deployment: Users had mixed experiences with the initial setup of Rocket Zena, with some finding it easier and others finding it complex. The integration with SAP was particularly challenging. The initial setup of Stonebranch Universal Automation Center was rated as average in terms of ease, however, the complexity of the infrastructure may lead to some difficulties.

Pricing: Rocket Zena is highly regarded for its cost-effectiveness and affordability, especially for smaller businesses. It is applauded for having a lower setup cost compared to Control-M. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center is noted for being cheaper than its rivals and has received positive feedback on its pricing.

ROI: Rocket Zena has demonstrated its value by saving time and enhancing accuracy, resulting in a positive return on investment and reduced stress. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center has achieved notable cost savings compared to the previous tool.

Comparison Results: Rocket Zena is the preferred product over Stonebranch Universal Automation Center. Users appreciate Rocket Zena's ease of use, user-friendly interface, and efficient management of complex operational workflows. It offers cross-platform job scheduling, a web-based client, and a whiteboard interface for task setup and troubleshooting.

To learn more, read our detailed Rocket Zena vs. Stonebranch Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"From a Linux configuration point of view, Rocket Zena is straightforward. It's fairly easy to set up the server and agents once you know how to do it.""The most valuable feature is the FTP file transfer.""We haven't had any problems since we installed it. It runs as expected, we haven't had any critical problems. It helps keeps the business running 24/7.""I like the whole product, but specifically, I like the license part. It's very easy to acquire a license for this product.""I have found the scheduling feature the most valuable. I can map dependencies by using ASG-Zena. It gives a nice, quick visualization as to where things are.""Its FTP feature is very good, as is scheduling any process or task with the Zena client. I have found it to be very helpful. If a task fails, it gives you a prompt.""In the latest upgrade, Zena added a web-based client. The more I use it, the more I like it. It's an excellent interface. They do a good job of steadily improving the solution to make it more useful.""I have used other tools with similar capabilities; it's the ease of use."

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"The interface is very user-friendly and easy to navigate.""I have found the agents to be so much simpler, when compared to ESP.""The Universal Agent is the most valuable feature. Being agent-based and being able to go across multiple technology stacks, which is what our workflows do, Stonebranch gives us the ability to bridge those disparate technologies. It enables us to remove the dependency-gap with the agent so we know the status of the workflow at each step.""I can name the aliases on the agent, so if we need a passive environment for an agent, that's one of the nice features. If our primary goes down, I can bring up the passive one and I don't have to change anything in the scheduling world. It will start running from that new server.""The support is good from Stonebranch Universal Automation Center.""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.""I like the dashboard and the various workflows.""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"

More Stonebranch Pros →

Cons
"Another one that is probably a little bit bigger for me is that when there is an issue or there's an error, it writes on a different screen. I have to find the actual process name and go to a different screen to view the alert that got generated. On that screen, everyone's processes, not just the processes of the folks in my department, are thrown. It takes me a while to find the actual error so that I could go in there and look at the alert. It could be because of the way it was set up, but at least for me, it isn't too intuitive.""One area where it could be improved is communication between the different servers. Sometimes there are processes that have already been completed but we get a status notification that they're still active.""Rocket Zena is a mainframe-based job scheduler. I would like it to be more open so that we can use it on a distributed platform.""The scheduling mapping is a little disjointed. There is no wizard-type approach. There are a lot of different things that you have to do in completely different areas. They could probably add the functionality for creating all components of a mapping or an OPA schedule. The component creation could be done collectively rather than through individual components.""The documentation has room for improvement.""In the web interface, it stacks the tasks across the top, and they accumulate until you close or clean those out. That seems a little cumbersome. You must right-click and close all tabs constantly to keep the console clean and manage your views.""The UI is not intuitive, and it would be nice if there was a web interface.""In the next release, I would like the user experience to be improved. The user interface should be more appealing to gen-z."

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"It can't handle negative written codes.""There is room for improvement with its connectivity with the Microsoft SRS system. It is very weak. They keep telling us it works with it, and technically it does, but it does not provide a lot of visibility. We have lost a lot of visibility migrating to Stonebranch, compared with just running tasks on the SRS server. That's really about the only thing that is a sore point for us.""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.""Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics.""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 would rate Stonebranch somewhere in the middle for ease of setup. It wasn't too straightforward for us because our infrastructure is complex.""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.""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."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "I don't know the exact cost, but I believe that it is approximately $150 to $180,000.00 Singapore dollars per year. This would be approximately $100 to $120,000 USD per year."
  • "The pricing and the licensing are good. It is affordable and can be used to improve and optimize productivity."
  • More Rocket Zena Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "When we reviewed this solution against other vendors, Stonebranch blew everybody out of the water in terms of cost."
  • "Outside of licensing fees, there aren't any other costs."
  • "I don't have pricing information, but I do know it's cheaper than our old legacy system. Other than the standard licensing fees there are no additional costs."
  • "We're transaction-based, as far as our licensing goes. We have 50,000 transactions a month and our licensing cost is $55,000 a year..."
  • "The price of the solution is at a medium level compared to the competition."
  • "Stonebranch is cheaper than Control-M, so many companies are using Stonebranch."
  • More Stonebranch Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:In the latest upgrade, Zena added a web-based client. The more I use it, the more I like it. It's an excellent interface. They do a good job of steadily improving the solution to make it more useful… more »
    Top Answer:The pricing and the licensing are good. It is affordable and can be used to improve and optimize productivity.
    Top Answer:In the web interface, it stacks the tasks across the top, and they accumulate until you close or clean those out. That seems a little cumbersome. You must right-click and close all tabs constantly to… more »
    Top Answer:We like that it has GUI and is not just a command line.
    Top Answer:The pricing is good. I would rate it eight out of ten. The pricing is similar to AutoSys. It's lower than Redwood, which was on the higher side in terms of pricing.
    Top Answer:It can be hard to manage the task monitor. We are still working with the vendor, and we are trying to make the changes as per our requirements. We are asking them to build some new solutions so they… more »
    Ranking
    12th
    out of 49 in Workload Automation
    Views
    2,486
    Comparisons
    1,473
    Reviews
    7
    Average Words per Review
    999
    Rating
    8.3
    16th
    out of 49 in Workload Automation
    Views
    3,058
    Comparisons
    1,288
    Reviews
    4
    Average Words per Review
    499
    Rating
    7.5
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    ASG-Zena
    Stonebranch Universal Automation Center
    Learn More
    Rocket Software
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    Overview

    Zena enables you to optimize business process flows with advanced workload automation that reduces manual intervention, system downtime, and processing errors. You can easily define processes and tasks, making them repeatable so you can focus on other priorities.

    Zena gives you the power to simplify management of complex cross-platform processes while making it easier to manage challenging hybrid IT operations environments. It speeds time-to-market while reducing the ongoing total cost of ownership associated with workload automation and enterprise application processing.

    With Zena, IT leaders have the power to visualize and manage the execution of thousands of workloads across end-to-end Operational processes, while increasing the quality, velocity, and efficiency of their delivery.

    Rocket Zena Features

    Rocket Zena offers the following features:

    • Optimization of process flows: Rocket Zena allows you to optimize complex business process flows across your hybrid IT infrastructure, spanning from mainframe to cloud. It provides full visibility into your operations processes end-to-end.

    • Simplification of operations: The solution simplifies the management of complex cross-platform processes, making it easier to handle challenging hybrid IT operations environments.

    • Advanced workload automation: Rocket Zena offers advanced workload automation capabilities for operations. It reduces manual intervention, system downtime, and processing errors by enabling you to define processes and tasks that are repeatable.

    • Visualization and management of workloads: IT staff can visualize and manage the execution of thousands of workloads across end-to-end operational processes. It enhances the quality, velocity, and efficiency of delivery.

    • Maximize workload automation flexibility: Zena features a graphical process whiteboard for task definition, minimizing redundant definitions and maximizing flexibility in designing workflows.

    • Integration with ease and at scale: The solution seamlessly integrates workload management on multiple platforms and facilitates the integration of critical applications with newer technologies, eliminating manual scripting and reducing overall costs.

    • Centralized scheduling management: It enables centralized scheduling management through a console with dashboard capabilities. Zena provides predefined and customizable views and reports to meet individual user needs.

    • Production statistics and reports: Zena simplifies monitoring and intervention by providing customizable dashboards. It offers drill-down capability to quickly navigate to problem areas and take necessary action.

    • Improved operational excellence: The solution helps optimize business process flows through advanced workload automation, increasing productivity and scalability. It also reduces operational complexity and ensures high process completion by automating complex processes with reliability and repeatability.

    • Integration with applications and platforms: Zena connects with a range of applications and platforms such as Microsoft SQL Server, Docker, Amazon Web Services, Oracle, Micro Focus, SAP, PeopleSoft, and more, allowing seamless integration within your workflows.

    • DevOps and value stream management: Users have access to design-time configuration of DevOps value streams, enables the use of variables for reusable and customized workflows, and provides monitoring and management of run-time execution of value streams.

    • Branching and condition management: Zena allows specifying critical branching for tasks with infinite conditions to ensure automation flows meet business requirements.

    • Mainframe and hybrid cloud support: The solution has the capability to span mainframe to cloud environments, distributing work across the entire IT ecosystem, including hybrid cloud environments and sysplex awareness on mainframes.

    Rocket Zena Benefits

    Some of the benefits of using Rocket Zena are:

    • Optimization of operational business flows

    • Simplification of complex cross-platform processes

    • Reduction of manual intervention, system downtime, and processing errors

    • Speeding up time-to-market

    • Lowering the total cost of ownership associated with workload automation

    • Enhanced visibility and management of workloads across end-to-end operational processes

    • Maximizing workload automation flexibility

    • Seamless integration with multiple platforms and applications

    • Centralized scheduling management with customizable views and reports

    • Improved operational excellence and reliability

    • Reviews from Real Users

      Akash Vishwakarma, a RPA Developer at a consultancy observes: "Its FTP feature is very good, as is scheduling any process or task with the Zena client. I have found it to be very helpful. If a task fails, it gives you a prompt."

      Gus Calero, a Sr. IT Product Manager at a healthcare company shares his view: “You're able to view in a diagram format. The view that it provides is easy, and you can move to the left, up, or down. You can double-click on a certain process. It'll drill into that process and all of its underlying components.”

      Bridgette Friedman, a System administrator at a wholesaler shares her experience: "In the latest upgrade, Zena added a web-based client. The more I use it, the more I like it. It's an excellent interface. They do a good job of steadily improving the solution to make it more useful."


    The Stonebranch Workload Automation solution, part of our Universal Automation Center platform, helps organizations automate, manage, and orchestrate their IT processes - across hybrid IT environments. 


    1. Workflow Orchestration and Automation: Holistically control scripts, jobs, tasks, and IT processes running across your on-prem, hybrid cloud, and/or multi-cloud environments.

    2. Real-Time Automation: With our event-driven automation technology, it is now possible to achieve real-time automation across your entire hybrid IT environment.

    3. Self-Service Automation: With a focus on ease-of-use, you can empower your workforce with self-service automation using member roles and permissions.

    4. BI & Analytics: Centralize operational control and insight with proactive monitoring, reporting, and alerts

    Product Features:

    - Drag-and-drop Workflow Creation: You don’t have to be a developer to create automation. Custom scripting is a thing of the past. Easily create workflows with an intuitive drag-and-drop user interface.

    - DevOps enabled: Align priorities between IT Ops and DevOps with Jobs-as-Code, Infrastructure-as-Code, and bundle-and-promote features.

    - Limitless 3rd Party Integrations: Integrate into any platform or application from the mainframe to the cloud. Use pre-packaged integrations, build your own, or download integration blueprints from the community-driven opensource marketplace.

    - Available on-premises or as a SaaS-based deployment, the UAC is a modern platform built to scale with your business.

    Sample Customers
    Fraternidad Muprespa
    Nissan, Coop, United Supermarkets, Groupon, CSC, Orbitz, Johnson & Johnson, BMW, Qantas.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm38%
    Government25%
    Healthcare Company13%
    Wholesaler/Distributor13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm27%
    Insurance Company17%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm36%
    Insurance Company12%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Manufacturing Company12%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm26%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Insurance Company8%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business30%
    Large Enterprise70%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise5%
    Large Enterprise82%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business4%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise79%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business16%
    Midsize Enterprise10%
    Large Enterprise74%
    Buyer's Guide
    Rocket Zena vs. Stonebranch
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Rocket Zena vs. Stonebranch and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Rocket Zena is ranked 12th in Workload Automation with 9 reviews while Stonebranch is ranked 16th in Workload Automation with 26 reviews. Rocket Zena is rated 8.4, while Stonebranch is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Rocket Zena writes "A continuously evolving, stable solution, with responsive support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Stonebranch writes "Allowed us to develop workflows without having to train and develop very specialized skillsets". Rocket Zena is most compared with Control-M, Rocket Zeke, IBM Workload Automation, AutoSys Workload Automation and ActiveBatch by Redwood, whereas Stonebranch is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, Control-M, Redwood RunMyJobs, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence and IBM Workload Automation. See our Rocket Zena vs. Stonebranch report.

    See our list of best Workload Automation vendors.

    We monitor all Workload Automation reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.