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FireMon Asset Manager vs IFS Cloud Platform comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

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

Automation Anywhere
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
666
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (2nd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (1st), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (1st), Agentic Automation (1st), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (2nd), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (2nd), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
FireMon Asset Manager
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (14th), IT Asset Management (11th), Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) (6th)
IFS Cloud Platform
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
CRM (28th), Customer Experience Management (12th), Field Service Management (2nd), Help Desk Software (19th), ERP (20th), Activity Based Costing Software (10th), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) (4th), Local Government CRM (12th), IT Asset Management (13th), IT Service Management (ITSM) (15th), License Management (2nd)
 

Featured Reviews

Venkat Sivaprakash - PeerSpot reviewer
Management Consultant at Accenture
Has significantly improved document-driven workflows and reduced processing time across finance and HR functions
Automation Anywhere has evolved significantly and upgraded itself to provide agentic AI and AI-based automation solutions for document automation. The product has matured considerably over time. We can create workflows that can call an API. We can include prompts in particular workflows for ChatGPT-related functions, connecting to an LLM and RAG to perform tasks. For document automation, modern features are available to train documents, ensuring high accuracy and repeatability over time. The system is very easy to use. I recently completed a course in document automation, typically designed for people involved in coding and technical aspects. Though I understand coding comprehensively, I don't do actual coding. The course was very accessible. Currently, extensive coding isn't necessary due to the hybrid model incorporating GenAI aspects, low-code, no-code capabilities, APIs, and numerous pre-built objects in Automation Anywhere. The features include GenAI-driven prompting methods and workflow creation capabilities. In these workflows, we can create decision boxes and call APIs without coding. We simply pull objects, drop them, connect them, and add minimal coding when needed. The most crucial aspect isn't coding but rather sizing the automation and fleshing out the details. Automation Co-pilot takes notes and performs automated analysis. It can extract details from videos, summarize conversations, and provide detailed information. During calls, it identifies instructions and performs tasks such as preparing reports and reconciliation. Automation Anywhere can also connect with Microsoft Co-pilot. Through Co-pilot, real-time operations can be executed, allowing direct interaction between vendors and automation through this component.
MC
Business Continuity And Disaster Recovery Manager at Cadence Bank
Continuous asset discovery has strengthened audits and BCDR planning but reporting needs improvement
FireMon Asset Manager supports my disaster recovery and business continuity planning through continuous real-time discovery, which is the foundation of everything. The fact that it's not a point-in-time scan, but ongoing, passive and active discovery, means my inventory is always current. That's what makes it useful for BCDR, where stale data is dangerous. The best features FireMon Asset Manager offers include leak path detection, which is genuinely valuable. It identifies rogue internet connectivity, unauthorized connections, and paths in and out of the network that shouldn't exist. In a bank, that's both a security concern and a BCDR concern because undocumented network paths create recovery risks I don't know I have. The topology mapping is also excellent. Being able to visualize how assets connect to each other and to the network helps my BCDR team understand dependencies between systems, which is critical for sequencing recovery procedures correctly. If I'm recovering a system, I need to know what it depends on and what depends on it. FireMon Asset Manager has positively impacted my organization primarily on our audit and examination posture. Before FireMon Asset Manager, when examiners asked about our asset inventory, I was presenting data I knew had gaps and hoping nobody looked too closely. Now I can walk into an examination with a continuously updated, discovery-validated asset inventory and answer those questions with confidence. That's a qualitative shift, but it has real consequences. Examination findings in banking are not trivial. This shift has led to measurable outcomes, such as reducing the time to compile our annual BIA asset inventory from roughly three weeks of manual effort down to essentially a report pull. That's significant staff time saved. I've also seen our CMDB accuracy improve. FireMon Asset Manager's continuous discovery keeps finding things that manual processes miss. And from a regulatory standpoint, I've had two examinations since deploying FireMon Asset Manager, and in both cases, the asset inventory questions that were previously a weakness in our program were answered cleanly. That's the metric that matters most in a regulated banking environment.
reviewer2268153 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Operations Engineer
Integrated planning has improved production scheduling and now reduces downtime and costs
The biggest friction point I have run into with IFS Cloud Platform is user adoption, which has been the biggest challenge, as different users in the organization need to get accustomed to the new processes after years of using spreadsheets and legacy systems, requiring training and a mindset shift, along with challenging data migration and process standardization. My advice to someone considering IFS Cloud Platform with a similar workflow is to spend sufficient time understanding and standardizing their business processes before implementing it, as the technology is very powerful, but the real value comes when processes, data, and teams are all aligned. I would rate my overall experience with IFS Cloud Platform as a 9 out of 10.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"A project that we automated: A person used to spend about eight to twelve hours every week to finish the process. The bot finishes it in half an hour. Now, the person just reviews it, then passes along the information. This has helped our organization because originally EMEA and APAC would not receive the files the same day that they were processed. But because the bot only takes a half an hour, everyone can now receive the files on the same day."
"Automation Anywhere has helped us save on both time and cost."
"Excel automation is one of the best features in Automation Anywhere. If we have to work with multiple excel sheets with lots of rows and columns, it gets really difficult to keep track of this is done manually. But Automation Anywhere makes it really simple and error-free."
"Before the automation, it used to take about two to three hours, now, with automation, it takes about 40 minutes."
"The cloud implementation is easy, you do not have to install anything, and when we use it in the Automation Anywhere Cloud, it becomes even easier."
"We have found that the automation bots we have developed give great savings in terms of higher productivity and efficiency."
"The OCR is the most valuable feature, though this is a third party feature that we have integrated. It is quite easy to integrate with other solutions."
"Its ability to integrate with other solutions is awesome."
"The most valuable aspects of FireMon Asset Manager are its integrations and its ability to passively monitor the network for unknown assets."
"It offers a single platform for managing firewalls of different brands and simplifies policy deployment and auditing. It helps push policies to different firewalls, and it also helps with policy auditing."
"Now I can walk into an examination with a continuously updated, discovery-validated asset inventory, and I can answer those questions with confidence."
"FireMon Asset Manager fills a genuine gap in network security visibility that many organizations underestimate."
"The most valuable feature is the change modules. Whenever there is a change in the firewall, it automatically reflects on FireMon."
"FireMon Asset Manager supports my disaster recovery and business continuity planning through continuous real-time discovery, which is the foundation of everything."
"Having a young talented programmer, during the six years of use, we were able to save around 75 000 EUR preparing simple modifications using customization rather than ordering them in IFS / Partner."
"IFS Applications is very user-friendly and easy to deploy, and it's suitable for small and medium enterprises."
"There are fewer fields on the user screen compared to other products. This makes the UI a little bit easier to understand."
"The most valuable feature is the distribution module."
"IFS Cloud Platform has impacted my organization by allowing our team to spend less time reconciling data and more time executing business operations, as resources are utilized more effectively, reducing waste and improving productivity, while also resulting in reduced downtime and lowered maintenance costs, allowing management to make informed decisions based on actual data rather than historical reports."
"The solution overall is very versatile and flexible, especially compared to other products."
"All the modules are valuable in their own right, but everything has to go through the ERP. IFS has done an excellent job integrating the various modules to complete these processes. My expertise is in the finance module, but I have used the other verticals. It's an all-around good product."
"When it comes to financing, the solution has helped us to concentrate finance functions like accounting processes in one system. This includes about 70 internal entities around the world."
 

Cons

"The inclusion of word packages would help us to extract data from Word and automate word-related activities easily."
"In order to score nine or ten, they still need to provide more flexibility and integration with other tools and options."
"One of the things that the product should have is to add more advanced level developer capabilities into the platform. I know it is easy for business, non-technical people. However, for the developers, there should be some more features within the product so they can build advanced level use cases much faster."
"Working with the Automation Anywhere servers and domains have proven to be difficult. We are trying to get more licenses and servers set up, so we can run multiple scenarios simultaneously."
"The setup and deployment processes for this product also need to be improved, e.g. made easier."
"Regarding my experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing of Automation Anywhere, I have some concerns about the product licensing model."
"The biggest issue was that the new license required upgraded hardware infrastructure so we were getting all new tech stuff procured which meant that we were getting updated RAMs and things like that. Getting the licenses was easier but building the infrastructure which was required to support the new version was difficult."
"Had we had access to the RPA bots in advance, we would have practiced before fully implementing."
"It is not very good at monitoring the Check Point firewall, but it works very well with other firewalls such as Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Cisco ASA."
"FireMon Asset Manager can be improved in reporting customization, which is more limited than I'd prefer."
"The biggest friction point or frustration I have encountered with FireMon Asset Manager is the support experience being inconsistent."
"While passive discovery remains important, active retrieval of asset details would be valuable, and this functionality is starting to be implemented, as I've observed in recent updates but it is not fully there yet."
"The discovery process could be improved. If incorrect credentials are entered, it should give an error message. That would make our work easy rather than having to troubleshoot why the issue is occurring."
"I find that FireMon Asset Manager's reporting customization is more limited than I would like."
"Documentation-wise, they need more."
"The initial setup or implementation was a little more complex than I expected."
"There should be some improvements in the predefined templates in IFS Applications."
"Sometimes from the sales perspective, clients don't always fully understand how large a task or a project they're getting involved in when they decide, "We're going to switch across to IFS." They could probably do a little bit more, maybe around preparing people for these projects."
"We have had an issue that we don't get proper after-sale service when we get technical glitches."
"We would like to see AI-driven CSI functions built into the tool that would allow us to quickly tie our improvement goals to metrics and activities, so Assyst will suggest the next steps to help us get closer to our goals."
"I'm a business analyst, so I do a lot of customer-facing work. I take calls from businesses I have to troubleshoot. One thing that bugs me is the error messages you get from IFS. If I get an error message, I have to dig to find the cause because, often, the error message doesn't precisely describe the problem. It'll hint about where the problem lies, but you have to work to find the root cause. It doesn't help in my situation. You expect an error message to point to the field or what is causing the issue."
"The customer service is not good as expected but we can say its fair."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Overall, the pricing of Automation Anywhere is good."
"I feel the cost of licensing is very high for the A2019 version."
"We are interested in saving manual engineer man-hours. So far, we have saved $100,000."
"IQ Bots are very costly. It's not a sustainable bot for us as of now. We will look for better, alternate options for that."
"Automation Anywhere is affordable."
"Time and monetary savings can range from 20 to 90 percent."
"We only deal in annual licenses. There are no pay-as-you-go licenses."
"The starting price, which is a one-off fee is a bit high and this may deter mid and small-sized companies from acquiring and decide to shun the platform."
"FireMon is more expensive than other brands but justified by its comprehensive feature set. It includes several functions that might require additional subscriptions in other solutions."
"FireMon Asset Manager's pricing has been reasonable and has worked well for us from a licensing standpoint."
"There are varying license levels that you can purchase."
"Compared to SAP, the pricing for IFS Applications was very affordable. People using the solution would find that it's worth the money."
"The product is reasonably priced."
"We pay for a license to use the solution, which is not very expensive."
"Licensing is on an annual basis, with no additional costs."
"The additional cost that comes with the solution includes the overhead of the people who are trying to fix the tool issues. These people are trying to reproduce the issue and report it to the technical support and testing with them which is huge. It is the cost of quality in the end."
"IFS Applications is expensive software, but it's on par with SAP and Oracle. It's for large enterprises and government entities and not for small and medium-sized enterprises. They have one licensing model, but if you want to have a module-specific license, they provide component-based licenses. Unlike SAP and Oracle, it doesn't have different levels of licensing. It's one level of licensing."
"Pricing is an area that could be improved. They could be more competitive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Outsourcing Company
23%
Comms Service Provider
16%
Media Company
10%
Insurance Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Construction Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business161
Midsize Enterprise85
Large Enterprise561
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is ver...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applic...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FireMon Asset Manager?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing reveals that it's not inexpensive. The license cost is manageab...
What needs improvement with FireMon Asset Manager?
The biggest friction point or frustration I have encountered with FireMon Asset Manager is the support experience bei...
What is your primary use case for FireMon Asset Manager?
My main use case for FireMon Asset Manager is continuous network asset discovery and visibility. We have a complex hy...
What needs improvement with IFS Applications?
There are features that came up during implementation that we are not actually using today, such as field service man...
What is your primary use case for IFS Applications?
My main use case for IFS Cloud Platform is for production planning, where I typically use it for production schedulin...
What advice do you have for others considering IFS Applications?
The biggest friction point I have run into with IFS Cloud Platform is user adoption, which has been the biggest chall...
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
No data available
IFS Applications, Assyst, IFS Cloud
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Information Not Available
China Airlines, Electrolux Group, Babcock, Cimcorp, Sky, Multiplex, Veolia. 
Find out what your peers are saying about FireMon Asset Manager vs. IFS Cloud Platform and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
915,287 professionals have used our research since 2012.