Automate vs Tidal by Redwood comparison

The compared Fortra and Tidal Software by Redwood solutions aren't in the same category. Fortra is ranked #5 in RPA , with an average rating of 8.9, and holds a 1.6% mindshare in the category. Tidal Software by Redwood is ranked #6 in WA , with an average rating of 9.6, and holds a 3.9% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Fortra users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Tidal Software by Redwood users who would recommend it.

Automate

Read 26 Automate reviews

1,578 Views
764 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Tidal by Redwood

Read 37 Tidal by Redwood reviews

2,585 Views
1,090 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Automate

Tidal by Redwood

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Automate and Tidal by Redwood based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about UiPath, Microsoft, Automation Anywhere and others in Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

To learn more, read our detailed Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

April 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 849,963 peers since 2012

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

Automate

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (5th)

Tidal by Redwood

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Workload Automation (6th)

Mindshare comparison

Automate and Tidal by Redwood aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Automate is designed for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and holds a mindshare of 1.6%, up 1.0% compared to last year.
Tidal by Redwood, on the other hand, focuses on Workload Automation, holds 3.9% mindshare, down 4.0% since last year.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Workload Automation

Featured Reviews

Anabel Marco

Account Director at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Automates processes efficiently with cost-effective scaling and robust customer support

Web scraping is quite good since it offers a lot of possibilities. Another important feature for me is its compatibility with MBI, the Power that is ISEQUADO Centers. I appreciate the ability to scale and increase the number of bots or studios without additional expense. Automate's non-reliance on additional orchestrators makes it quite cost-effective.

Read full review

Steve Mikula

IT Scheduling Manager at Paychex, Inc.

Very reliable processing engine, and scheduling is flawless—crucial elements in our financial transaction processing

Because we've been on it for 20 years, it's pretty easy for us to automate jobs with Tidal at this point. It has become second nature. It's pretty simplistic to set up and get going, although there are different levels of complexity you can have within the product. It depends on how simple you want to keep it. If you just keep it: Job A, Job B, Job C, Job D, that becomes pretty simple. But when you start integrating some complex calendars that use sub-calendars—and you can go three, four, or five deep to set up schedules—it becomes more complicated. The beauty of it is you can go as deep as you need to. We can get really complex or we can keep it simple. We have some use cases for both scenarios. The thing that I like the most is the reliability of the engine. The actual scheduling part of the product is pretty much flawless, but the stability of the product is what I find to be reassuring. We are a financial company, we move billions of dollars a day, and if we don't have our transactions processed in a timely manner we can be penalized and our clients can be penalized. It can have a serious financial impact.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Fortra's Automate has effectively replaced the workload of an entire employee, saving us significant time and money."

"The product effectively handles all the tasks we require."

"We use it for specific cases, mainly secure file transfers, which are vital for us. And it works for us."

"A great feature that you seldom see in these kind of systems is the ability to use a database as trigger to launch a task. This is something I asked for a few years ago and that was added."

"Compared to other vendors, it's the scheduling tool because a lot of vendors want to charge you extra for their enterprise-level license to have a scheduling tool built in to give you the ability to set up regular schedules to run and do certain data checks."

"Web scraping is quite good since it offers a lot of possibilities."

"The solution is continuously adding more integrations to help with workflows and bot and task creation."

"The best feature of Automate is its ease of use, which is a major selling point."

More Automate pros

"It saves times due to automation. With some files, we do hundreds a day for a particular vendor. This would be hard to do manually. Also, the speed at which we can do this is excellent."

"The versatility of being able to run on many different types of servers is valuable. There is also a versatility of different services that you could run jobs on. It's highly versatile. You can run a lot of different types of scripts on a lot of different types of servers. It interfaces with all of them."

"By leveraging machine learning algorithms, Tidal Automation can use this data to optimize turbine settings and improve overall efficiency and performance."

"Tidal helps administrators and users to see the information that is relevant to them in that single pane of glass. They can see jobs running, they can see job history, and they can see job progression. If you look at alternatives like Airflow and clouds, you'd have to design your own UI to monitor the progress of the different jobs that you've created in Airflow. So Tidal is huge for us."

"The best feature of Tidal Workload Automation Software is its ease of integration with other systems, including ERP, CRM, and BI tools."

"Especially in the newer versions of Tidal, the segmentation of user permissions enables us to give people operator permissions for their jobs, to rerun jobs, but view-only for other groups' jobs. We're able to keep people from hurting themselves or other groups accidentally. The permissioning is really good."

"We use the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads. The solution’s ability to manage and monitor these workloads is very easy and accurate. We have file dependencies for running jobs. The job does not start until a file exists on a completely different server, then where the job will run. So, it is cross systems."

"Tidal Automation is very efficient and can quickly automate most manual and repetitive tasks."

More Tidal by Redwood pros

Cons

"I would prefer not having to log in to update a ticket; being able to respond via email would be beneficial."

"There is a lack of good development for artificial intelligence, such as machine learning."

"I would like the updates to be easier to deploy. Integration with Amazon S3 is somewhat lacking."

"I would like to see some better web automation, a wizard like the one in the product WinAutomation would be very nice."

"Fortra's Automate is not as reliable as I would like it to be."

"Error messages should be better. For error status, there should be better documentation because a lot of times, error messages that you get are quite vague. For example, you get a message saying that the workflow has run into an unknown status, which is vague. It just tells you that it failed, but you don't know how or why it failed. It makes debugging difficult."

"The product also has a limited use case in some respects."

"The vendor is currently working on a solution that allows us to automatically create a process that is based on a document that we receive via email."

More Automate cons

"The drill-down into details using the Graphical Views feature is a bit difficult and not that helpful. If you want to go into the details, you have to go to the Job Activity. Graphical Views is not that easy for getting that kind of information."

"They can do better reporting in terms of production statistics reporting."

"One thing I would like to see improved is that, currently, when an action is executed and finishes in Tidal, it's marked as either "success" or "failure." I would like more options that would flag a job according to multiple options, rather than just "good" or bad"... Tidal has told us that it's possible to do so through the product or with a workaround."

"The UI might have the potential to provide a more polished and user-centric encounter, promoting seamless engagements and simplifying the navigation process for individuals interacting with the software."

"I know they are working on it, but there needs to be better reporting. Currently, there are only three or four reports that we can get off of the system. That needs to be improved. They already have a solution to this in the new version. I.e., a schedule of all the jobs running for one day, specifically calling out what dependencies that job relies on. It would be like a flow chart of how the day's jobs would run."

"One area for improvement is the command-line interface and the API to bulk-load jobs. It's a little bit kludgy, but we still manage without it. They're working on it and it's getting better all the time. In addition, the documentation for their API for creating jobs needs to be updated. It's a bit of a learning curve."

"Setting up the initial product was a little hard."

"The job failure alerts can be updated with more details for better troubleshooting."

More Tidal by Redwood cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is a bit high for a small business like ours, but we manage with Fortra's Automate."

"It has gone up in price. The price of Fortra's Automate has increased since we first started using it. It does a lot but also costs a lot. It was a lot more affordable before Fortra owned the software."

"Once you buy the software, you just pay for the support for backend help."

"I like the way this solution is priced because you can buy a license, or you can buy the software outright."

"I'm only involved in running the product and maintaining the systems, so I can't speak to the cost."

"From a distributor's side, one of the biggest selling points is its price point. Without going into any numbers, compared to UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism, we're significantly cheaper. The main difference is that other competitors usually charge you per process. However, in Automate's case, it's priced per bot. So, a bot can run multiple processes at the same time, but you are only priced for a single bot."

"I believe the price falls within a reasonable range, which significantly influenced our decision regarding the product. This aspect is crucial for any technological solution, especially in our country where enterprises might be hesitant to invest heavily in something untested or uncertain about its practicality and potential returns."

"The pricing is quite reasonable. We can run the process with one bot. The limitation is at the server level because they have some resources, and sometimes that is enough. It isn't too expensive, so you can get a good return off of one, and you can also have a pack of five bots that is quite competitive."

More Automate pricing and cost advice

"Our annual maintenance cost is competitive for what we have and what they do."

"We are satisfied with the pricing of Tidal. It's in the moderate range and it feels very achievable for us."

"I have had no issues with the licensing."

"Their pricing seems very fair. It is more than the other solutions, but the functionality and the support are very much there. You pay for the job scheduler, and then they have certain things that are built into it, such as the FTP processes. If you then want to do JD Edwards jobs, you need an adapter. If you want to do SQL jobs, there is another adapter. Similarly, if you want to do Oracle jobs, there is an adapter. It is like there is the base and then there are the adapters for the jobs that you want to do, but it seems that's also how they pay for each of those adapters and keep them up to date."

"Tidal is a low-cost tool and not expensive in comparison to other tools."

"There are project, system, and server costs. Some of the things that they are doing is introducing new products. They are introducing what they call their Repository, which is a way for you to move a job. That doesn't cost anything to us, because it is reusing a tool called Transporter. The repository is the successor to Transporter, so we already own it and are sort of grandfathered in. But that new product requires a server and database, so now we have to go out and get a server and database. So, there is a cost there."

"Our licensing model for Tidal is on an annual basis. It is very good and works well for us. Tidal's licensing is very transparent and simple. It lets you know, for the amount you use, that's the price that you pay. So, we buy X number of licenses, and we know that this is where we are. I'm very happy with that. I saw the licensing modules on other platforms, and I didn't like them. Other companies and solutions would calculate the connections, adapters, and instances. I think that's the reason that BMC was pretty expensive: They just didn't understand what our needs are."

"Our yearly licensing costs are between $10,000 to $20,000. They have always been reasonable with us. I like that non-production licensing is about half the cost of production licensing. Licensing is by adapter typically. We have had scenarios where we have had to take an adapter from one environment to another, and they've allowed us to do that. They have made it a very reasonable process. There's definitely a feeling that they will work with you."

More Tidal by Redwood pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

849,963 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

21%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Computer Software Company

10%

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about HelpSystems AutoMate?

We use it for specific cases, mainly secure file transfers, which are vital for us. And it works for us.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for HelpSystems AutoMate?

I am a consultant and I am making a lot of processes in human resources, payroll, certifications, trainings, web scraping, pre-reporting, and many processes that need to be automated on the web. My...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortra Automate?

The pricing is quite good compared to its competitors. Competitors are often more expensive than Automate. I would rate the pricing as an eight out of ten.

See all answers

What do you like most about Tidal Automation?

Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Tidal Automation?

The price is reasonable in terms of the product’s functionality.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Tidal Automation?

Initially, it is complicated to understand the functionalities as there is limited product documentation. The setup and configuration of the software is a bit complicated. Providing the training vi...

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Power Automate vs Automate

Compared 38% of the time

UiPath Platform vs Automate

Compared 35% of the time

Automation Anywhere vs Automate

Compared 8% of the time

Blue Prism vs Automate

Compared 7% of the time

VisualCron vs Automate

Compared 7% of the time

More Automate Competitors

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 43% of the time

Control-M vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 23% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 7% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 7% of the time

IBM Workload Automation vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 5% of the time

More Tidal by Redwood Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Automate

April 2025

Download Automate product report

Buyer's Guide

Tidal by Redwood

April 2025

Download Tidal by Redwood product report

Also Known As

HelpSystems Automate, Automate

Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler

Overview

Automate offers a user-friendly solution with a drag-and-drop interface for efficient task automation and integration with major platforms like SAP and Azure, making it ideal for quick deployment with minimal coding and training.

Automate provides powerful features for businesses seeking efficient automation, offering compatibility with databases, email integration, and cloud platforms. Its simple interface supports both beginners and experienced users, simplifying tasks like invoice processing, HR automation, and data transformation. Cost-effective pricing and flexible licensing enhance its appeal while integration capabilities and scheduling tools ensure smooth workflow automation.

What are Automate's Key Features?

Drag-and-Drop Interface: Simplifies automation with intuitive design.
Integration Capabilities: Connects with platforms like SAP and Azure for seamless data flow.
Database and FTP Triggers: Enhances automation potential through direct data interaction.
Efficient Scheduling: Automates tasks with precise timing and control.
Web Scraping: Automates data extraction for quick analysis and reporting.

What Benefits and ROI Should Users Expect?

Rapid Deployment: Minimizes coding efforts for quick implementation.
Cost-Effectiveness: Offers flexible pricing models to suit budget constraints.
Operational Efficiency: Reduces manual workloads and enhances productivity.
Comprehensive Integration: Facilitates improved data management across systems.
Scalability: Adapts to growing business needs with ease.

In industries such as healthcare, banking, and logistics, Automate is used for tasks like invoice payment automation, data transformation, and task automation. This leads to streamlined processes and reduced manual workload, illustrating its value in enhancing operational efficiency through diversified workflows.

Fortra

Tidal Software is a leading provider of enterprise workload automation solutions that orchestrate the execution of complex workflows across systems, applications and IT environments. With a comprehensive portfolio of products and services, Tidal optimizes mission-critical business processes, increases IT cost efficiencies and satisfies legal and regulatory compliance requirements. Hundreds of customers around the world count on Tidal for modernizing their workload automation and driving their digital transformation. Tidal Software is headquartered in Chicago with offices in Houston, London, Minsk, Belarus and Chennai, India. For more information, visit tidalsoftware.com.

Tidal Software by Redwood

Sample Customers

Aldergrove Financial Group, Preferred Health Professionals, Mindbeam Technologies, First Credit Union in British Columbia, Vestcom International, Prime Liberty Benefits, University of Tampa, CNLBancshares, World Precision Instruments, BJ's Restaurants, Globe Pequot Press, Accudata Technologies, Norton Healthcare, Pacific Toxicology Laboratories

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

April 2025

Download Free Report

Find out what your peers are saying about UiPath, Microsoft, Automation Anywhere and others in Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Updated: April 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

849,963 professionals have used our research since 2012.

We monitor all Robotic Process Automation (RPA) 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.