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.
"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."
"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"
"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."
"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."
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.
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