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Automic Automation vs VisualCron comparison

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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

JAMS Scheduler
Sponsored
Ranking in Workload Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Automic Automation
Ranking in Workload Automation
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
104
Ranking in other categories
Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (15th)
VisualCron
Ranking in Workload Automation
25th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Managed File Transfer (MFT) (20th), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (29th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of JAMS Scheduler is 3.5%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Automic Automation is 4.6%, down from 7.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VisualCron is 2.3%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Automic Automation4.6%
JAMS Scheduler3.5%
VisualCron2.3%
Other89.6%
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2890770 - PeerSpot reviewer
Developer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Centralized scheduling has improved automation and reduces manual monitoring for complex workflows
The best features JAMS Scheduler offers are centralized job scheduling, dependency management, and monitoring. I also appreciate the alerts and retry options because they help us handle failures without constantly checking jobs manually. Centralized scheduling makes it easier to manage all our jobs from one place instead of maintaining multiple schedulers or scripts. Dependency management is especially useful for chaining workflows because JAMS Scheduler can automatically trigger the next job only when the required previous step completes successfully. Another useful feature is the monitoring and alerting. If a scheduled job fails or runs longer than expected, we can quickly identify it and take action, which is particularly helpful for production support and reducing manual monitoring. JAMS Scheduler has helped quite a bit with identifying common job failures, missed schedules, dependency issues, and execution errors. The alerts and job history make it easier to identify the failure point and take corrective action without manually checking every workflow. JAMS Scheduler's code-driven automation has been useful for handling more complex scheduling logic and workflows that go beyond simple time-based triggers. It is important for us because we can combine scripts, dependencies, conditions, and parameters to support different production scenarios without creating too much manual intervention.
Peter Grundler - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at Tricise
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.
Sourav-Dutta - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead - Database Administrator at SMART ENERGY SYSTEMS LLC
It's user-friendly, and I didn't need long to understand the process
We use VisualCron for all our automation needs, like connecting to FileZilla, calling APIs, generating PGP keys, creating encryption files with the PGP key login to Azure, etc. It can automatically log in to SQL Server and execute SQL script jobs in bulk. We had 2,000-3,000 users at my previous…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature for us is that it's DR-ready. With respect to disaster recovery, it has the built-in capability for failover to our DR site. If all of the required ports are open, it can be done seamlessly."
"One of the best features JAMS Scheduler offers is that it is cheaper than any other scheduler, making it a significant advantage alongside its user-friendliness that allows easy checking of logs and failures."
"JAMS saves us on the order of thousands of hours per year."
"JAMS has positively impacted our organization by saving us time, reducing errors, and improving workflows."
"JAMS gives operations teams a single place to manage, monitor, and track job execution, which from my perspective as a developer improves coordination between teams because everyone has visibility into the status of critical workloads and simplifies troubleshooting since job history, execution status, and other relevant information are all easily accessible, ensuring that business-critical processes are executed consistently and reliably across the organization."
"The most valuable aspect of JAMS is its robustness."
"I cannot say enough about JAMS Scheduler support, as it has been the fastest, greatest, best support I have had on any product in my 35 professional years of work."
"Being able to automate things ensures that things can run overnight or in the early morning when it needs to, and it frees up a lot of bandwidth for my time during the day when I don't need to be bothered with handling all of these repetitive tasks."
"In some of our departments, it has had a great impact on efficiency, costs, and resources."
"Stability has been great, and my team, we call ourselves "the invisibles" because things run so well that sometimes you almost feel like you have to try to break something to actually get acknowledged."
"No competitor has this mass possibilities to design processors for automation solutions."
"The ability to be able to automate more of our business processes."
"The very special feature that we use is the connection to ServiceNow."
"As far as our schedules, if we have problems, we can create our own process in the automation, which is good."
"The solution helped us fix issues and optimize them. We now run with zero errors."
"We use it in every aspect of our IT operations, and the scalability is very good."
"Support is AAA+, fast, and very detailed."
"We don't have to do any coding. We just plug and play and it works."
"VisualCron makes everything clearer and easier to maintain."
"The most valuable feature of VisualCron is its ability to schedule interactive jobs so that you can have interdependencies within the job and interdependencies of a job on another job, and so on."
"VisualCron has enabled us to efficiently automate and maintain many tasks with minimal effort from our internal IT resources."
"VisualCron is a handy tool that we (the IT department) provide for the business departments to obtain easy access when automating and scheduling."
"What I found most beneficial from VisualCron is that you can directly connect it with different databases, user accounts, and credentials. You can run queries from one machine to another using the credentials, unlike PowerShell, that's run by the machine itself. With VisualCron, you can directly ask other machines and run requests through user credentials. Suppose you have an AWS or Azure environment. In that case, you can maintain the connection between on-premises and cloud-based machines, which is the type of setup in the organization I'm working for. You can directly call some of the services via VisualCron on your local on-premises machine, and I found that an excellent feature of the tool."
"The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%."
 

Cons

"The product does not allow the users to cut and paste the job names from the screen."
"The UI is completely unintuitive. We had to go and open up a support ticket with JAMS just to get something back."
"If around 5,000 or more jobs run at a time, JAMS slows down, and we have to wait around five to 10 minutes or restart JAMS scheduler services."
"JAMS has built-in reporting. I've never really used it. I tried using it a few years ago and I couldn't figure it out. It was wonky. It could be improved upon."
"For the most part, JAMS is very stable. Occasionally, if you leave multiple windows open over a period of time, it is necessary to end that task and restart."
"For scalability, I would rate it as seven because when we have a huge volume, sometimes the tool is not so responsive."
"The cost has definitely gone up tremendously. That is where I do know, as much as the feature sets are there, and if the newly acquired company is going to be doing a pushback, they might just say, 'Do we still need to pay this much? Or at that point, should we look into an alternative?'"
"The biggest area with room for improvement is the area that my organization benefits the most from using JAMS, and that is in custom execution methods. I happen to have a very good C# developer. Ever since we got JAMS, he has spent a lot of time talking to JAMS developers, researching the JAMS libraries, and creating custom execution methods. He's gotten very good at it. He is now able to create them and maintain them very easily, but that knowledge was hard-won knowledge. It was difficult to come by, and if I should ever lose this developer, then I would be hard-pressed to find anyone who could create JAMS custom execution methods quite as well as he can since there really isn't all that much help, such as documentation or information, available on how to create custom execution methods."
"The new UI feels unready. It makes your browsers crash."
"We would like to have token-based authentication. Where we do not have to use a password, and can use tokens for authentication in other systems."
"If you're getting deep into some of these workflows, you may have 20 different windows open and, if you didn't already have that deep understanding of how enterprise orchestration works, it would be very overwhelming to get up to speed on something like that... It needs some way to minimize the amount of windows and get it to where you could have all the information you need available on the screen."
"That's probably one of our biggest pain points right now. When we go to a new version, the agents have to all be upgraded."
"There are issues with compatibility when installing agents on legacy operating systems."
"They should work to reduce pricing."
"My biggest complaint is that there is no list price. We work with Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, etc., and all of them have list pricing. Automic, right up until today, has never had list pricing. This makes things difficult, because we need to plan budgets for the next year and can't."
"There is one missing part in the product concerning recurring tasks. You can schedule a recurring task by a context action, and run it as recurrent, but it creates a time container which can be quit and disappears."
"VisualCron seems to operate like an efficient machine when it comes to improvements and enhancements and new features. I always appreciate the quick response I get when bringing up an issue or coming up with suggestions. I've mentioned before that it would be great to see a move away from SQLCE and XML configuration files."
"VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve."
"The documentation is a bit weak."
"There are some conditions in the mail trigger, but you can only use them as an "AND" condition, not as an "OR" condition."
"There are some conditions in the mail trigger, but you can only use them as an "AND" condition, not as an "OR" condition. This is an improvement that could be useful. For example, some people put "invoice" in the subject and others put "invoice" in the body. If I want to make a trigger for everybody whose sending invoices, I have to make two jobs for this now."
"Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way."
"I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run."
"VisualCron is software, and you will experience performance degradation when you scale up. VisualCron takes too much memory or CPU power. We have to increase the hardware resources of a specific server or system."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing model for JAMS is straightforward and based on the number of agents, not the number of jobs you run. It's cheap and fairly simple."
"Fortra's JAMS pricing structure has deteriorated significantly since its acquisition by Fortra."
"JAMS is relatively inexpensive, with additional costs only incurred for tags, other services, and optional support renewals."
"Definitely check how many single processes you want to run and count them as jobs. That is how you would work out your pricing on JAMS. For example, if you're running a number of commands and you can put them all into one script and run that script, you can count that as one job."
"It's certainly a lot cheaper than Tivoli and Control-M. In comparison to them, you get a lot more bang for your buck. You get pretty much the whole functionality and more, in some cases, when compared to Control-M, but at a fraction of the price."
"JAMS is close to the lower end of the pricing models for enterprise scheduling solutions. They are much cheaper than Control-M, as well as some other products that I've used. I also don't know of another solution where you can actually get true, unlimited licensing, where you can have as many instances and as many agents as you want."
"All licensing models are a little overpriced, but JAMS offers a good value, especially given their support response times and ability to handle unforeseen issues like the SFTP transfers. I hope to find more use cases to get a better bang for our buck."
"There are no additional costs other than the license for Fortra's JAMS which is affordable."
"We have increased efficiency with this application."
"Our company had paid around 5,000 to 6,000 USD per license for a month."
"The cost of arrays is high. If you want to buy an array for an application, and see value from it, you need about half a million dollars. That is too expensive."
"The pricing keeps going up, which is concerning."
"The pricing was client-wise, but they are changing it to execution-wise pricing. So, we are in negotiation."
"It has helped us reduce costs."
"This solution is pretty well-priced."
"We cannot use all the functions because they are too expensive."
"The price is a bit high."
"The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."
"ROI is one month."
"ROI is 95 percent."
"VisualCron is correctly priced because it wasn't very cheap, and it wasn't overly expensive, so the price for it was set correctly. When my previous company bought VisualCron, it was €800 per server per year. On a scale of one to five, I would rate the pricing for VisualCron a five because it was just right. The tool was affordable, and it has one of the most competitive pricing in the market."
"We are fine with a rather cheap setup. Licensing with VisualCron is fair. You have a simple one-year licence in different sizes. There isn't a licensing jungle with hundreds of options and opt-ins."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
6%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise30
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise67
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JAMS?
The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for JAMS Scheduler are favorable.
What needs improvement with JAMS?
One area of improvement I see for JAMS Scheduler is making the user interface more intuitive for new users, especiall...
What is your primary use case for JAMS?
My main use case for JAMS Scheduler is scheduling daily RPA jobs, such as running an invoice process automation after...
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?
Automic Automation has some disadvantages; it is more simplified, and sometimes it can be complicated. The technical ...
What is your primary use case for Automic Workload Automation?
I have been dealing with Automic Automation for probably around ten years. I have been both a partner with Automic, w...
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Also Known As

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Automic Dollar Universe
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Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Teradata, Arconic, General Dynamics, Yum!, CVS Health, Comcast, Ghiradelli, & Boston’s Children’s Hospital
ING, Adidas, 84.51, ESB
7 Eleven, ABB Sécheron SA, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Amazon Europe Core, Apple, Assa Abloy, Aston Martin, Banco Santander, BMW (Australia)
Find out what your peers are saying about Automic Automation vs. VisualCron and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
918,169 professionals have used our research since 2012.