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AutoSys Workload Automation vs IBM Workload 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

As of June 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of AutoSys Workload Automation is 11.7%, down from 17.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Workload Automation is 6.9%, down from 8.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tidal by Redwood is 3.9%, up from 3.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Antony Askew - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps us manage complex workloads, reduce our workload failure rates, and save us time
The visibility and control features are somewhat limited. This is a recognized weakness, but thee vendor is currently revamping the user interface to address it. While the current UI is a bit outdated, it's undergoing improvement. AutoSys Workload Automation has some areas for improvement, particularly in housekeeping and product maintenance. These tasks are currently quite manual and labor-intensive for our team. Additionally, the reporting and forecasting functionalities could be more robust. One area for improvement with AutoSys Workload Automation is that it comprises several distinct tools configured to work together. This necessitates familiarity with multiple tools for effective solution management. Consequently, it can sometimes lack a sense of cohesiveness as a unified solution.
Ilhami Arikan - PeerSpot reviewer
With an easy setup phase in place, agent-based installation can be done in minutes
Sometimes we have issues with the solution's stability. So, stability can be improved. Reporting and visibility of the solution need improvement. These days, we need more visibility. We need to access the logs and databases easily. You need to keep track of the running number of logs, like which ones are executed, completed, etc. So if there would be a good reporting dashboard, then it would be good. There's room for improvement in the solution since it is a challenging thing when we want to use the solution's technology with our new technologies. For example, if we need to use TWS on our OpenShift platform, the solution's API is not capable enough. So the product itself needs to be aligned with new technologies.
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

"Without this product we would have to manually submit jobs and it would take longer. There would also be a much greater possibility of jobs running wrong and/or not at the right time."
"We need to have things run in a very sequential order, so it is very useful that we can schedule the work flows."
"We use technical support all the time. We would be lost without them. They're fantastic. Really good job. We're able to reach the right person to help us out right away."
"To me, what's most valuable in AutoSys Workload Automation is its robustness and quickness. The tool can trigger jobs within a few milliseconds, and it can handle large volumes of jobs."
"The benefits I have seen from AutoSys Workload Automation are significant; I would say it is about ease of administration."
"The most valuable aspects of AutoSys Workload Automation are its performance, scalability, and ease of getting started for new users."
"I find that it provides better agility in regards to job execution features."
"It is stable, it works, and it does what it is supposed to."
"The most important feature is the creation of folders. It's a really great feature because you can organize the process with naming conventions."
"Provides a robust, full spectrum enterprise-wide WLA platform."
"The project we worked on involved the running of nearly 24,000 job instances in a single day, so I would say that the solution is stable."
"Jobs can be triggered in multiple nodes."
"The whole product is valuable because it is a tool for batch automation."
"The support from Cisco is very good. I was with them as a company for 40 years"
"IBM Workload Automation provides good performance and monitoring."
"The solution helps automate processes so that the workload can be handled on a daily basis."
"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."
"The job dependency is something that you cannot have in a regular, simple cron job or simple scheduler dependency. The event-driven jobs are core for us, as we really need that. Therefore, we really need Tidal with its ability to run thousands of jobs per day."
"It has been super stable. There are no complaints on stability. We would not be using it if Tidal wasn't stable."
"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."
"The Graphical Views feature is also very good for helping us to understand a job stream. It's great for providing a visual overview of the status of a workflow, especially the Critical Path view. That is one of our favorites."
"Tidal Automation software provides real-time monitoring and alerts, allowing users to track job progress and identify potential issues before they cause delays or errors."
"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."
"It's the most efficient tool in doing repetitive tasks and saves a lot of time with minimum possibility of error."
 

Cons

"In terms of what should be in the next release, I want integration and AI and so on. I'd like easy reporting where you can compare information, for example, "that job normally takes three minutes and last time it took six minutes or 10 minutes." Then you can get the information to the engineer of which job is taking more time than normal - understanding strange behavior compared to the baseline."
"It would be helpful to be able to monitor and manage workload windows so we could minimize downstream applications. This would allow us easier access to the applications."
"CA Workload Automation is not part of CA's strategic vision going forward."
"​The cross-platform arena, where you can run work on multiple platforms, needs improvement."
"Some of the reports are either a bit hard to understand or don’t give you what you might expect to see."
"Pricing model for distributed should have an Enterprise option."
"AutoSys Workload Automation could improve in the Linux environment. The previous versions of the AutoSys Workload Automation let you take the profile of the user that you were using to run the tasks that you're going to automate, but in the latest versions, you can't do that, you need to make more definitions and it's a little bit difficult. It was easier in the previous versions."
"We had a few issues, however, the issues were more on the infrastructure rather than with the application itself."
"The solution should offer more free technical sessions to customers so that they can gain more experience or learn more about how to use it."
"This solution does have bugs and could be improved in this regard. However, these bugs are resolved relatively quickly."
"The configuration of IBM Workload Automation has some challenges. We have a difficult time customizing it, but it is similar to other solutions."
"The solution's installation could be improved because the customers have to do it all the time."
"To improve IBM Workload Automation, I suggest enhancing automation features further, as more automation would be beneficial. The product is good enough for my current customers, but improving technical support and pricing would be welcome. We often need quicker responses and better solutions than we can manage manually. These improvements would make the product even better."
"The schedule refreshes daily and that's a challenge for us."
"It should support other schedulers that aren't IBM products."
"The performance of the previous versions could be better."
"I would like more involvement with the cloud."
"The user interface is the place that needs the most work. If and when we find issues with the product, they are usually in that area. If I had to choose, that's where I'd want issues, as opposed to in the engine. But the UI is average. It's a little sluggish at times and there are some bugs in it."
"Understanding and using Tidal Automation could be overwhelming for someone with minimal programming language."
"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."
"With the client, we have had certain issues. The user interface for Tidal is a little slow. A lot of people would love this tool if they had a faster user interface. The drill-down functionality should be much quicker than what it is pulling out now. If I fill out some data, then it takes awhile to get that data back onto the screen. It's not as fast as we were expecting."
"For the most part, the drill-down and the logging are really good. But if we take an Informatica job, for example: We have the ability, and the operators have the ability, to actually drill down and see, at a session level, where the failure is. There is, unfortunately, no way to extract that into an actual output email or failure email. It's not that that information is not available, but extracting it into an email would be a nice-to-have."
"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."
"The product’s UI is outdated. They should work on this particular area."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is overpriced."
"Validate how many agents you need beforehand."
"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."
"The return on investment would be very high because doing things manually without this product would be extremely expensive."
"I certainly think the pricing is worth the value."
"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."
"We paid to use the solution monthly."
"There is an annual license to use AutoSys Workload Automation."
"To my knowledge, IWA is the only WLA product that will provide "parallel tracking" capability to assist in upgrading from one platform to IWA."
"Pricing depends on the number of agents that you install."
"It is about one-third of the cost of a controller."
"The solution is a little bit expensive."
"The contract is with the customer with whom we are working, so IBM is not directly involved in this."
"We transitioned from a server license to per job license, and that saved us a lot money."
"The solution's pricing is affordable."
"We think the pricing is very fair. We have been happy with the pricing compared to some of the other solutions in the space."
"...it is a pretty affordable scheduler tool that lets us do a lot. You get a lot of bang for the buck... The licensing model is hugely flexible."
"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."
"If you are willing to shop around to other vendors, you can possibly get a good price on your support license."
"The solution’s licensing model in terms of its flexibility and transparency regarding costs is pretty good. A person can buy the license, and if you decide to stop support, you can do that but still have the product. So, it's not like you're paying constantly to keep that license alive. Certainly, you want to keep support going too. Once you buy it, you own it. It's not like I have to keep paying somebody to keep using it."
"The solution has no hidden costs. It helps me to plan forward into the future. I know that I can add another 100 or a thousand jobs, and that's how much it will cost me today."
"BMC is really expensive. The other solutions are about the same price. I think Tidal is even cheaper than the others, such as CA, Stonebranch, and JAMS."
"Right now, we are in a good position with the licensing model that we have with the Tidal vendor. So, we won't have any issues. even if we double in our current production. Initially, Tidal provided us some specs where if you have these number of jobs, then you come under this category. They usually provide a range of jobs from 2,000 to 10,000. You can use these specs for your infrastructure. Whether you have 2,000 or 8,000 jobs, Tidal should support it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
48%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
6%
Insurance Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
32%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Computer Software Company
11%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 do you like most about AutoSys Workload Automation?
The most valuable aspects of AutoSys Workload Automation are its performance, scalability, and ease of getting starte...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AutoSys Workload Automation?
The solution is costly. The pricing is based on the number of users, which for me, translates to approximately $120,0...
What needs improvement with IBM Workload Automation?
IBM Workload Automation could be improved by reducing its cost. The maintenance charges have increased significantly,...
What is your primary use case for IBM Workload Automation?
We use IBM Workload Automation ( /products/ibm-workload-automation-reviews ) as a scheduler. We install agents on the...
What advice do you have for others considering IBM Workload Automation?
I recommend IBM Workload Automation as it's a well-established and stable product. However, the cost is a concern. Th...
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

CA Workload Automation, CA Workload Automation AE
IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler, IBM TWS
Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Gaumont, Mercantil do Brasil, CCEE, Hanwha Life
Standard Life Group, Banca Popolare di Milano, A*STAR, ArcelorMittal Gent
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC, Broadcom, Redwood Software and others in Workload Automation. Updated: May 2025.
858,435 professionals have used our research since 2012.