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Automate vs Automic Automation vs Tidal by Redwood comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Automate2.0%
UiPath Platform18.7%
Microsoft Power Automate17.3%
Other62.0%
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Workload Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Automic Automation8.1%
Control-M19.1%
AutoSys Workload Automation10.2%
Other62.599999999999994%
Workload Automation
Workload Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Tidal by Redwood4.7%
Control-M19.1%
AutoSys Workload Automation10.2%
Other66.0%
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Ibukun Shweta - PeerSpot reviewer
Automation optimizes scheduling, but improvements needed in error reporting and script execution
In my particular use case, for session management, it would be better if I could get a more granular view into connectivity issues to servers. Sometimes, although your flows or tasks are running as scheduled, connecting to the servers can hit a snag without alerts or error logs to check. Some servers might need patching or could be affected by network issues or latency. The workflow sometimes gets stuck without clarity on the errors. An explicit error report would be helpful, especially when the connection fails unexpectedly. It's complex to analyze problems that might arise from firewall issues or other anomalies that could hinder the flow from executing as expected. The depth of these connection challenges would benefit from better debugging capabilities. As for improvements, if Automate wasn't designed primarily for script execution, that's understandable. However, for Linux, I would prefer to see less complexity in workflows to achieve a natural completion of scripts. There are features, such as 'wait for terminal output,' that should more intuitively detect completion based on the shell prompt. Improving those aspects would make Automate more efficient for my needs. Regarding error reporting, I think Automate should offer better error reporting when connecting to servers. Currently, there are many instances where I see empty logs, indicating that, while tasks are scheduled, commands are not executing successfully. This is a significant concern, especially with critical workloads where visibility into errors is essential.
Peter Grundler - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps to move away from manual tasks and offers wide platform support and web-based interface
Customers want to move away from manual monitoring and checking processes. Automating these processes helps in time-saving and reduces human error. When you automate business processes, it reduces mistakes. It eliminates the risk of manual errors such as typos. There is a 20% to 30% reduction in human error. It fulfills all the needs when it comes to visibility and control across various operating platforms. It is the perfect product for managing processes that span multiple operating platforms. Automic Automation has the widest platform support compared to other products, such as Control-M, Tivoli from IBM, or Stonebranch. It definitely helps with compliance processes. We have had a lot of customers for two years with a focus on compliance, and it works. They were successful. Due to the fact that our customers can automate a lot of things, it reduces operating costs. It is hard to give a number because the savings are different for each customer. If a customer never had any automation, there could be about 80% savings after implementing Automic Automation, whereas for a customer who already has automated tasks, the difference will be less by adding Automic Automation. They might see 5% to 10% more savings. Automic Automation helps improve our ability to meet SLAs. In the recent versions, SLA management has been integrated, which previously was an external component. Because a lot of customers used it and asked Broadcom to implement SLA management into the workload engine, Broadcom included it. We see more and more customers running their SLA management via the Automic Automation product.
Steve Mikula - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The pricing is excellent. I would give them perfect marks in that regard."
"The solution is continuously adding more integrations to help with workflows and bot and task creation."
"I find the ease of use from a programming perspective very valuable."
"We have found the pricing to be very reasonable."
"The best feature of Automate is its ease of use, which is a major selling point."
"We are still in the process of rolling it to production and tweaking it (our AD groups are a mess), but the improvements are priceless. Having users ID's created the same way every time without human error is the best part. We don't need to worry about why groups were not added, user rights not set to folders or missing a private folder being created, typos or just even knowing when things are done and logged."
"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."
"This tool has machine learning and voice recognition and computer vision, which are both quite useful aspects. These aren't available in other tools. It's a good addition to this tool and it gives the solution an edge on the market."
"We can run the solution on both cloud and on-prem environments."
"Support is good and it works fine."
"The modulation of some of the things, like how the things are connected and disconnected. You have different login objects that you can quickly put to other different objects and other objects that you create, which makes transporting things very easy from one environment to the next."
"Automic Automation's integration with cloud platforms for enhancing operational efficiency is positive, as it has many supported endpoints for cloud applications out of the box."
"It saves my customers time, money, resources, and efficiency."
"Automic Automation's most valuable features are perspective analytics and coding."
"The reason we went with Automic is very simple. We were using ESP, which was a Broadcom product. So, Automic happened to be a natural fit. It was a much easier transition from ESP to Automic. We had familiarity with the vendor and the product."
"Automic Automation is a highly complex yet versatile tool."
"For us, the calendaring system is very robust. Some of the teams have very specific requests for when they need jobs to run. That's been really valuable, because a lot of times, when people run scripts, if they run on a holiday, they're going to fail... A couple of times a month it probably saves us work and the necessity of logging in from home and checking to make sure everything's okay."
"Tidal Automation is very efficient and can quickly automate most manual and repetitive tasks."
"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 had a number of different schedulers in this organization and we've been porting everything that was running out of these other, unrelated schedulers into this scheduler. That has afforded us the ability to set up direct dependencies between processes that couldn't talk to one another before. Over the 15 years, we've definitely gained a lot from that. What had been manual controls have become automated controls..."
"It's the most efficient tool in doing repetitive tasks and saves a lot of time with minimum possibility of error."
"Tidal Automation’s most valuable feature is customization. It can work and connect with any app."
"By leveraging machine learning algorithms, Tidal Automation can use this data to optimize turbine settings and improve overall efficiency and performance."
"Tidal integrates with other third-party systems, which makes it easy to connect and exchange data."
 

Cons

"I would prefer not having to log in to update a ticket; being able to respond via email would be beneficial."
"Fortra's Automate is not as reliable as I would like it to be."
"They do not encrypt passwords, so this is an issue with HIPAA compliance."
"The documentation for errors needs improvement as many of the error messages we receive are very vague."
"The documentation is not that great."
"Sometimes when we communicate with the ERP system and there is an issue, we are not always aware of the specifics of Automate and the source of the problem."
"Some companies have asked for voice integration. This is likely part of the roadmap."
"Currently, there are many instances where I see empty logs, indicating that, while tasks are scheduled, commands are not executing successfully."
"After the merger, it is getting more American. Now, they do not have support in French and have limited German documentation. This is a critical problem for companies who have older generations who did not have English in school."
"I would also like to see a little bit more connectivity, more, "Play nice with other toys." For instance, we have IServ as our primary tool for our service request tickets. In order for it to play nice with Automic, we had to actually create a file and put it somewhere, where Automic can see it. I would like to see more connectivity with other tools, or more compatibility with other tools."
"We would like to have some features with the AWI with the founding technique, which cannot currently be delivered."
"The support has declined somewhat over the years due to various takeovers. It's not as personal as it used to be."
"Every time we have an upgrade for a new version, we have stability problems, because the versions are not as good as they should be."
"I would not recommend using Automic's technical support for complex problems."
"I would like more training on workload automation, because I do not have a complete insight of the product yet."
"Its dashboard can be improved. In version 12, they have already moved to a web-based interface from a UI. We are looking into this feature now. We are also looking for available APIs that we can use to interface the engine into our other systems. There should be a subservice facility that we can use to interface with Microsoft Teams and send out authorization on job executions. We have seen a feature like this in other products that we are looking into."
"Setting up the initial product was a little hard."
"The biggest improvement they need to work on is doing better QA checks before they release new patches and service packs. We do find that you can't trust getting the new product right away, as they have to get some bug fixes out. They do tend to have some bugs in the first iteration."
"I don't know if Tidal wants to get into the business of monitoring long-running jobs, but that could be a feature for the future: a job launching and monitoring tool. Using Tidal for monitoring doesn't seem like a good fit, but if they could offer something that did that as an add-on or include it, it might be helpful."
"One of the weaknesses of the product is, when something happens, it's difficult to find out the root cause. There are a lot of logs you can take a look at in Tidal. Sometimes, they are useful, but other times, they're not. That is mostly relegated to the administrative team. Users for the most part don't see that and don't know anything about that. They just know they have a problem, then it's up to the administrative team to see what happened and figure out the problem."
"We've had some quirky stuff happen on an occasional basis where a job does not take off. For example, a job we expected to be finished by 3:00 a.m. is sitting there and not executing when we come in in the morning. We have to go all the way back to the dependencies and then we can see that one of the dependencies has become unscheduled, for some reason. No changes were made to the schedule but this prerequisite job has, all of a sudden, become unscheduled. I have brought this up with Tidal's support but they have never had an answer for it."
"Some users have complained that the initial setup process is complicated and time-consuming, while others have suggested that the software could offer more freedom in customizing processes."
"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."
"Tidal Automation could be further integrated with other systems used in the operation of tidal energy systems, such as weather forecasting tools, energy management systems, or asset management software."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I'm only involved in running the product and maintaining the systems, so I can't speak to the cost."
"The cost is a bit high for a small business like ours, but we manage with Fortra's Automate."
"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."
"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."
"It comes with a package that costs approximately $20,000 USD per year."
"From a distributor's perspective, one of the biggest selling points of Automate is its price point."
"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."
"We came to a very good deal, but it took us three years to finalize."
"They have increased the license price a little bit. It is more than what we expected about two years ago. So, there could be some surprises when it comes to pricing."
"They have changed the pricing on their licensing, and it's cheaper than before."
"Pricing is competitive compared to other major vendors."
"Automatic is heavily integrated in our organization. The cost to change would be a huge factor for us, and we have not found any other product that is better out there."
"There are different licensing fees for cases where high availability is important."
"There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"We have received a lot of time and cost efficiencies from using the product."
"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."
"I have had no issues with the licensing."
"Our annual maintenance cost is competitive for what we have and what they do."
"We've been able to purchase more adapters because the cost of the product has been very reasonable."
"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."
"The solution enables admins and users to see the information relevant to them, but this is bundled as an add-on that we would have to pay for."
"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."
"If you are willing to shop around to other vendors, you can possibly get a good price on your support license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Performing Arts
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Computer Software Company
12%
Insurance Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise66
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise38
 

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.
What is your primary use case for HelpSystems AutoMate?
The main purpose is for automation. That has been the purpose why I have been using it so far.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortra Automate?
Regarding pricing, it is very friendly. I would not say that it is really cheap or very expensive, but it fits within...
What do you like most about Automic Workload Automation?
It is easy to manage complex workloads and use electronic workflow automation.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Automic Workload Automation?
The pricing was client-wise, but they are changing it to execution-wise pricing. So, we are in negotiation.
What needs improvement with Automic Workload Automation?
The support and knowledge of incident management could be enhanced. There have been unresolved issues persisting for ...
What do you like most about Tidal Automation?
Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Tidal Automation?
The price is reasonable in terms of the product’s functionality.
What needs improvement with Tidal Automation?
Initially, it is complicated to understand the functionalities as there is limited product documentation. The setup a...
 

Also Known As

HelpSystems Automate, Automate
Automic Dollar Universe
Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler
 

Overview

 

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
ING, Adidas, 84.51, ESB
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