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AutoSys Workload Automation vs BigFix 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
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Workload Automation (3rd)
AutoSys Workload Automation
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
84
Ranking in other categories
Workload Automation (4th)
BigFix
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
100
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (10th), Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (24th), Patch Management (7th), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (10th), Autonomous Endpoint Management (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Workload Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
AutoSys Workload Automation6.6%
Control-M10.7%
Automic Automation5.2%
Other77.5%
Workload Automation
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
BigFix1.7%
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint6.7%
CrowdStrike Falcon5.8%
Other85.8%
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
 

Featured Reviews

LV
Principal Data Base And Infrastructure Engineer at a outsourcing company with 501-1,000 employees
Automation has replaced nightly monitoring and delivers reliable, unified job scheduling
We have really enjoyed working with JAMS in terms of notifications, alerts, and streamlining. There used to be a process with Automate, which is another product from Fortra, but even before that, the other division of the company that we were merging with had a tool that was built in-house called a file handler or file distributor. It was an in-house developed tool, but it was not as streamlined or as efficient as JAMS is. We literally had to have a dedicated nighttime person monitoring. Although we are 24/7, the divisions of the company that we were using JAMS for have been small scale. While we have automated it, we have streamlined it in such a way that notifications go out and alerts go out, but if there is anything, then we get paged and alerted, and if anything needs to happen at midnight, we can wake up. On the other hand, with the tool I mentioned, the file handler and distributor, we used to have a dedicated nighttime person that had to be sitting and monitoring it to see when a file arrived, whether it met the conditions, and then execute the next particular job. By using JAMS, we have gained a lot more efficiencies in terms of all of those to streamline it, and there is no necessary need for having an overnight engineer just keeping an eye on all of this.
PK
Assistant VP at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Experience significant automation with robust integration and user-friendly interfaces
There are areas of AutoSys Workload Automation that have room for improvement. They are implementing good enhancements in the R24 release. The web UI needs some improvement. Cloud integrations are limited to 25 or 30 configurable plugins and integrations to the cloud. They can improve in that area. They have separate tools, not AutoSys Workload Automation, such as Atomic and other SaaS-based solutions that can run inside the cloud. AutoSys Workload Automation can be configured in the cloud, but it requires a substantial number of VMs depending on the load. For on-premises deployment, it is a very good solution. They need to increase their footprint in the cloud and improve the web UI. They are making excellent progress in the R24 release.
InderjeetSingh4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
End-to-end automation has simplified patching and software deployment across thousands of servers
There is one feature in BigFix called the automation patch policy that requires enhancement. When an action is initiated through the patch policy, it appears on the console but arrives in chunks. When targeting hundreds of servers from the patch policy, the actions come in chunks such as ten out of six, ten out of nine, or ten out of fifteen. This fragmented approach creates a significant challenge for the patching team to monitor the action status. I would recommend that the development team provide a single action or one to two actions instead of multiple actions requiring individual monitoring. A broad status update could be provided to the client indicating the overall progress of the patch policy implementation rather than requiring monitoring of every individual action. This would reduce the bandwidth required by the team to track multiple actions on the console.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product is easy to use."
"Previously, we manually managed file transfers by writing our scripts. The automated MFT feature is great for me and the company. It helps us know where the files are going and enables us to track errors if anything fails. It also makes the connection seamless for third-party vendors."
"In summary, this product is top class."
"The ability to sequence jobs is excellent; it means we don't have to schedule them individually, and if one fails, it doesn't unwind the entire workflow."
"This feature helps my team day-to-day by running hundreds and hundreds of jobs on JAMS in a timely fashion, which is extremely important and sensitive, providing a lot of reporting to the entire firm and beyond."
"The fact that we no longer need to use Excel spreadsheets is huge. Before JAMS, every group was keeping track of their own batch jobs. Nobody really knew what the other jobs were. So, if jobs failed, other groups wouldn't necessarily know. With JAMS, everything is done through a single scheduler. You can choose who to notify."
"I like how you can add new execution methods on the fly. It isn't overly complex to add Python script support to an execution method in the JAMS system. The scheduling is excellent. You can schedule a maintenance window and take that resource unit out of everything. It halts all of the jobs."
"JAMS has improved my organization by taking a myriad of manual processes and allowing us to automate them. It enables our folks to focus more on tasks that require their human intelligence and their creativity and less on just mundane tasks. It increases efficiency, accuracy, and consistency."
"Now that we've got it and had it, it's very easy to use."
"It is very valuable for us when we are trying to arrange or orchestrate jobs into a system. It is helpful for triggering jobs for a scheduled task."
"This solution has made my clients' workplaces a lot less labor-intensive."
"The web UI is beneficial and the granular security policies allow us to cover all of our audit requirements."
"Centralizing all this into a single workload automation tool using the CA product has really helped a lot of customers."
"The really nice thing is that, as the business grows, we're not seeing the infrastructure grow."
"This solution provides us with more details on jobs failing and also gives us restorability, bridging our platforms and giving us the ability to recover as the environment has become more complex over the last 10 years."
"It gives a real-time view of all the batch processing that we have, monitoring-wise it is really good, and it also gives us the ability to connect different software processes."
"We've been able to fully automate our TWS installs, to the point where a user requests it and we don't do anything."
"Now, the process is centrally controlled, reported, and has an independently formed location (also over Internet)."
"The architecture for patching and the 100% correct reporting makes BigFix stand apart from other solutions."
"For our clients, what was normally a full 30 days of work is now down to a couple of days to get the data in and actually get out and patch the thing."
"It's easy to use, not complicated."
"If you utilize the tool to the maximum capacity available to you, your ROI is significantly five to seven-fold over cost."
"Being able to intelligently create reports, gather data, export CSVs and give that to the leadership of some of the client groups that my team supports has been a benefit to my organization."
"One of the biggest benefits BigFix has had for our organization is the ease and efficiency to perform many different tasks, across pillars and platforms, all from one pane of glass."
 

Cons

"Improvements could be made in the service desk's knowledge and communication skills among engineers to better address customer needs and ensure issues are fully resolved."
"Sometimes the UI is not the most responsive I've ever used. But because it does its job, I don't complain."
"As an admin, I would like to have a web-based GUI instead of a client application that we have to install on our PCs."
"If there were a softcover book on how to really take advantage of all of JAMS' tools, I would buy it. I do better with training books than online searching, so a book would be helpful."
"The monitoring of the JAMS product and its performance is an area of concern for me."
"JAMS could be improved with a web client that is accessible and as fast as a normal website, eliminating the need to RDP to the servers to access the JAMS client."
"The product does not allow the users to cut and paste the job names from the screen."
"All my machines at work are Macs. JAMS client is a Windows-based thing. It is all built on .NET, which makes perfect sense. However, that means in order for me to access it, I need to connect to a VPN, then log onto one of our Azure VMs in order to access the JAMS client. This is fine, but if for some reason I am unable to do so, it would be nice to be able to have a web-based JAMS client that has all the exact same functionality in it. There are probably a whole bunch of disadvantages that you would get with that as well, but that is definitely something that would make life easier in a few cases."
"We are trying to see if we can use this from a cloud perspective with AWS, Azure, and other clouds, but it seems that there is no cloud integration in this product. We would like to see cloud integration. We are very pleased with this solution, but we are moving our application to the cloud, and we found out that it doesn't support any cloud features. So, we are trying to find a replacement."
"We would like to see good improvement on the historical reporting capabilities."
"There is always something that can be improved, but I do like this product."
"More benefits with the agent upgrades, and that's about it. Other than that we have no complaints with it. It's been awesome."
"I am looking forward to more of their dashboard features. I think it would be very valuable for us to have dashboard features that could be delivered to our customers in the form of a URL, and they could refresh that URL whenever they wanted to get up to date performance metrics out of our systems."
"Since Broadcom acquired this product, the technical support has not been as good. They should really be faster and more knowledgeable."
"CA Workload Automation AE (AutoSys Edition) should have a few features like the CA7 FQJOB command (to get all the downstream/upstream jobs with the batch current position)."
"​A better graphical user interface, because we have a lot of people using the client utility, and we want to get them away from that.​"
"I would like to see a web UI SDK so we could take what is provided currently and be able to build our own customized web UI for particular customers that want to sell service."
"The solution should have some kind of a local caching methodology, where the patches can be taken locally into a localized relay server, and from there, the patch can be applied, so that there is not much usage of the network required."
"I would like to see the integration of user security between the different products to be improved. There's separate security for compliance, separate security for web reports, and the console, and you have to manage those things separately."
"There is no support for patch management on SLES on IBM pSeries (only the Intel platform is supported)."
"Technical support depends on who you get. I deal with some amazing support folks, and then I've dealt with some less-than-amazing support folks."
"The reporting structure could be a little more simplistic. Currently, it throws too many vulnerabilities. Some of them are not needed because they are only informational and limitations, and they are not of much help. It doesn't need to show us these things."
"I would like to see different types of reporting and the ability to integrate closer with the cloud."
"I would like to see improvements in the Web UI program and also a BigFix console for Mac OS."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It was $10,000 for the first year. Then, there is a maintenance cost for licensing every year that we get billed $5,000 for every year."
"The product is reasonably priced, and we don't have any add-ons."
"Fortra's JAMS pricing structure has deteriorated significantly since its acquisition by Fortra."
"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 priced competitively compared to similar solutions and offers flexible licensing options to cater to user needs."
"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."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"I haven't been involved in the financial side for several years, but we buy one host and unlimited agents, and we get a reasonable price for that. We're happy with the amount we pay and the scalability it provides."
"I don't have information on the exact licensing cost of AutoSys Workload Automation because that's managed by the tools and financing teams. For agents, it's close to $4,00, but for the server setup, it's usually a one-time license initially, and it's AMC which is paid every year and comes close to $8,000 to $10,000."
"The return on investment would be very high because doing things manually without this product would be extremely expensive."
"The price of this solution is reasonable and there is an annual license required."
"I certainly think the pricing is worth the value."
"The pricing needs to be improved. Some of my client's complained that it was too expensive."
"Validate how many agents you need beforehand."
"There is an annual license to use AutoSys Workload Automation."
"We paid to use the solution monthly."
"There's not much big cost. We only have to pay the agents' cost for the server, and for the systems."
"When purchasing, buying with other IBM tools provided us with a very good discount in pricing."
"The price is very fair."
"The tool's price continues to go up. The cost per endpoint can vary, ranging from approximately 30 to 80 dollars per year. Compared to other products, pricing is in the middle. You need to buy an additional database license, but most users already have it."
"So, the pricing is slightly more expensive than the others. I have to keep buying licenses every time I add a new device."
"It might be about $23 a client."
"The license is subscription-based."
"Its price is very reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
34%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Retailer
5%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise23
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise79
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise68
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JAMS?
I was not really involved in the pricing, setup cost, and licensing at that level. I am more involved in the technica...
What needs improvement with JAMS?
In terms of improvements, I believe JAMS can enhance its user interface for better user experiences. I would like to ...
What is your primary use case for JAMS?
My primary use case for JAMS is enterprise workload automation and batch job orchestration. I use it to schedule and ...
How does Control-M compare with AutoSys Workload Automation?
Control-M acts as a single, centralized interface for monitoring and managing all batch processes, which is helpful b...
What needs improvement with AutoSys Workload Automation?
There are areas of AutoSys Workload Automation that have room for improvement. They are implementing good enhancement...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BigFix?
I rate the price for BigFix as medium, neither low nor high.
What needs improvement with BigFix?
There is one feature in BigFix called the automation patch policy that requires enhancement. When an action is initia...
What is your primary use case for BigFix?
My current use case involves being one of the products and one of the clients implementing this tool.
 

Also Known As

No data available
CA Workload Automation, CA Workload Automation AE
Tivoli Endpoint Manager
 

Interactive Demo

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Teradata, Arconic, General Dynamics, Yum!, CVS Health, Comcast, Ghiradelli, & Boston’s Children’s Hospital
Gaumont, Mercantil do Brasil, CCEE, Hanwha Life
US Foods, Penn State, St Vincent's Health US Foods, Sabadell Bank, SunTrust, Australia Sydney, Stemac, Capgemini, WNS Global Services, Jebsen & Jessen, CenterBeam, Strauss, Christian Hospital Centre, Brit Insurance, Career Education Corporation
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC, Broadcom, JAMS Software and others in Workload Automation. Updated: July 2026.
909,679 professionals have used our research since 2012.