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AutoSys Workload Automation vs BigFix comparison

Why PeerSpot?
Sponsored
 

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
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
47
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 (5th)
BigFix
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
100
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (8th), Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (22nd), Patch Management (8th), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (11th), Autonomous Endpoint Management (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Workload Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
AutoSys Workload Automation6.5%
Control-M10.2%
Automic Automation4.6%
Other78.7%
Workload Automation
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
BigFix1.9%
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint6.5%
CrowdStrike Falcon5.6%
Other86.0%
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

"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."
"I find the historical tracking feature of JAMS invaluable for reviewing past events."
"JAMS Scheduler helps centralize the management of jobs across all platforms and applications, which is very important for our organization because it has improved scalability and reduced costs."
"By using JAMS, my company has seen benefits such as getting to know about Google products and the latest features that are newly launched by Google, and they help me in building my projects portfolio and engaging with knowledge."
"It makes everything that we want to do so much easier. We have had a number of instances in the past where we have had developers who have been working on a project, and even though we have had JAMS for all these years, they will create some SQL Server Agent job, or something like that, to run a task. When it is in code review and development is complete, the question always comes around, "Can JAMS do this?" The answer has always been, "Yes." Pretty much anything we have ever developed could be run by JAMS."
"JAMS positively impacts my organization because it helps make it easier to manage JD Edwards scheduled jobs and fills the gap that the JD Edwards application has with scheduling, resolving a lot of those issues."
"JAMS is easier to use and cheaper than our previous solution. The installation is more straightforward, and JAMS has a graphical user interface, so it's more accessible."
"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."
"We have not encountered any stability issues with the supported versions."
"CA Workload Automation AutoSys Edition is one of the most powerful schedulers that you have on the open systems, or going between Window servers; to be able to schedule and take advantage of the different powers that the automation has with it."
"We have great faith in the CA tech support website, and their responses to us every time we have a question, even if it's just a question on functionality, never mind it might be a problem that may come up, they respond to us very quickly; so we feel very, very secure with that."
"I find that it provides better agility in regards to job execution features."
"The scheduling feature allows us to know when jobs are going to run and makes sure they run in the order needed."
"CA Workload Automation automates across multiple platforms, enables you to tie into audit systems, gives you a lot of visibility as far as workload goes, and allows you to automate it as well."
"Centralizing all this into a single workload automation tool using the CA product has really helped a lot of customers."
"Automation of patch process."
"The most valuable feature is patch management, a must have, even for Linux and iOS."
"With BigFix, in 10 to 15 minutes, you're up and running."
"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."
"It is for multiple use cases. A lot of people are looking at it just for security, and that's really endpoint security. The endpoint management part of it in terms of being able to constantly do patching for Windows, Unix, macOS, Cloud, Raspberry, VMware, and all Linux flavors is important, and they are very good at that. They have support for virtually every OS on the market."
"It's great if you're looking for an all-in-one inventory management, patch management and security tool."
"It allows us to quickly deploy capabilities that we need, whether it be security or non-security. We use it to keep systems up to date, deploy new drivers, find the information we need in the case of security incidents. The capability allows us to gather a lot of information very quickly and it also allows us to have a centralized reporting feature and a centralized deployment capability which is nice."
"We did a proof of concept, looked at the other competitors and after scaling all of them on a matrix, IBM ended up being the best option for us."
"The stability on this solution is rock solid; I will put money up against it, and BigFix is absolutely unbelievably stable."
 

Cons

"We have had a lot of people working from home who can't always connect to the JAMS server. We use VPN, as most companies do, and we have it set up so that everybody can access the JAMS server. But many times, our people cannot access it... JAMS could do a better job of telling you what the problem is when you try to log in to the server."
"Fortra is getting much better with documentation and examples, but there is still room for improvement."
"JAMS handles exceptions fairly well but there are some areas where it might improve a little bit. It has to do with being able to automatically handle exceptions, out-of-the-box, rather than having to code them."
"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 JAMS automation code isn't so clean."
"JAMS lacks source control features. Our previous solution had job control language, but JAMS doesn't. When migrating between versions, JAMS doesn't migrate all the data, like job change history, etc. Also, the scheduler doesn't have a way to make jobs invisible, so you can temporarily turn a job off if you decide not to run it today."
"I would like to see the ability to interface with Microsoft group-managed service accounts, but they're still in the research phase. They need to ensure everything's legit and safe. The report designer and dashboards could also be improved. We're running 7.3, so I don't know if they have updated the reporting in 7.5, but I think the reports and dashboards could be better."
"The client is horrible. Every time JAMS puts out a survey on what they can improve, I always say, "The client: When you are setting up jobs, it is quite horrible." The response has been, "Well, we are just using the Windows foundation," and I am like, "Why isn't it only your product?" We can get around it now that we know its quirks, but it is not the most user-friendly of tools out there. The UI is completely unintuitive. We had to go and open up a support ticket with JAMS just to get something back. It is not user-friendly at all."
"A couple of key features would be really being able to support a scheduler that, instead of a centralized scheduler, maybe a distributed one, so where a scheduler doesn't come down; not everything stops all at one time and so on."
"The main push is the web UI."
"We had one time when we did an upgrade, which did not go smoothly. I remember clearly that we had about 53 open tickets with CA in one week."
"The scalability could be improved upon."
"With requirements, they have "always" and "skip" on them. That would be nice, for them to have it on triggers also."
"AutoSys Workload Automation does not perform performance tuning, monitoring, or management."
"This product needs to improve its graphical user interface."
"Reduce the number of operational files. This would make the job of a system programmer supporting ESP easier."
"I want to see a solution for being able to deploy automated software to a Mac running OS X 10.13, something that's going to deal with kernel exceptions and answering prompts for user permissions for data folders and whatnot. They need to really streamline and automate the Mac software deployment."
"They need better integration."
"The main shortcoming of BigFix was integration with vulnerability management."
"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."
"I would eventually like to see a SaaS offering, a cloud-hosted BigFix instance where we only have to put a relay in our environment."
"We have had scalability issues because we bend the laws of the physics for the tool."
"The first setup was complex."
"BigFix can improve the way machines report back to the console. In the external relay management environment, it has become more of a hybrid environment with most of the machines not being on-site. The need of having public-facing reporting items interconnected is becoming more and more crucial. In general, the reporting could use some enhancement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"The product is reasonably priced, and we don't have any add-ons."
"The pricing is very fair. We have seen very minimal to no price increases over the years. We are not banging down the door of support all the time either. I would imagine if we were a company that submitted a dozen support tickets a week for the last nine years, then it might be a little different because we would be eating up everybody's time. However, for what we get out of it, the pricing is extremely fair. Back when we were originally looking and brought in JAMS, we were looking at a couple of the other competitive products that were in this space, but the pricing from JAMS was far and away better than what the other competitors could offer for the same functionality."
"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."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"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."
"In the end, you'll find that it's really worth the price. There is some sticker shock, but it's worth every dime."
"People need to pay attention to how they use their ESP agents on the distributed platform. That's where some of the cost comes in, based on how many you need or how many you use."
"I certainly think the pricing is worth the value."
"We paid to use the solution monthly."
"CA pricing has been a problem, and not looked upon favorably here at all."
"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 price of this solution is reasonable and there is an annual license required."
"The return on investment would be very high because doing things manually without this product would be extremely expensive."
"There is an annual license to use AutoSys Workload Automation."
"There's not much big cost. We only have to pay the agents' cost for the server, and for the systems."
"It is too costly. It is one of the best tools, but because of pricing, not all clients support it. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"You get what we call the Platform Edition, which you get for free. The patch service is maybe $0.50 per workstation per month. Then there's the basic server cost, which is about $1.50 per server per month. You also get into Lifecycle which does power management, OSD remote control, and those types of things, and that might be about 10 times the price - which works out to about $13 per server and, maybe $5 per workstation per month."
"Compliance, inventory, and licensing are really pricey. They should lower the price. It discourages users from getting onboard."
"When purchasing, buying with other IBM tools provided us with a very good discount in pricing."
"Its price is very reasonable."
"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."
"The price of BigFix is better than the solutions. You are able to pay monthly or annually. There are not any hidden costs with BigFix. There is an additional cost for the SQL database."
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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
32%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise25
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: August 2026.
915,287 professionals have used our research since 2012.