We performed a comparison between Fortra's Automate and VisualCron based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The best feature of Automate is its ease of use, which is a major selling point."
"The interface is simple, user-friendly, and very intuitive."
"We have tried other RPA solutions like UiPath or Automation Anywhere. They are fantastic products but complex, and it's hard to understand everything. It would be best if you had a skilled developer or several. Automate is easy to implement, administer, and use. It's appropriate for us because our cases are simple and easy to automate. We don't need complicated tools with many features; We prefer to get a significant ROI quickly."
"The licensing of the product is very good. You only need to license it once and then you have it forever."
"We have found the pricing to be very reasonable."
"The most valuable features for my client are timing and scheduling."
"The solution is continuously adding more integrations to help with workflows and bot and task creation."
"A great feature that you seldom see in these kind of systems is the ability to use a database as trigger to launch a task. This is something I asked for a few years ago and that was added."
"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 ability to clone jobs to shorten the time it takes to implement a process has been invaluable, but its flexibility also gives us the ability to create a job that can handle a multifaceted process with a complex workflow."
"We don't have to do any coding. We just plug and play and it works."
"What I like about VisualCron is that like its name, it's a very visual tool. In my previous company, there were a lot of scripts for all kinds of services, and through VisualCron, you get to group all flows and get a nice visual overview. VisualCron also has an alerting feature, so you receive alerts from it. VisualCron makes everything clearer and easier to maintain. Every other solution that I was looking for almost always needed a programmer, but with VisualCron, you can do what you need to do without programming skills, so this is another valuable feature of the tool."
"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."
"It has improved our organization with more automation within the business departments and less administration and development in the IT department. Usually, as the IT department, we are the bottleneck for many requirements within the business. With this tool, the business departments are able to perform many task themselves."
"It helped us reduce manual steps."
"VisualCron is a very powerful program to automate different steps in your business processes. We use it to automate replacing files and inform departments about the replacement."
"The workflow for variables could be better. The input and output of task-level variables could be made a little clearer in terms of passing those around from one task to another upon success, etc. Things like that could be a little easier potentially."
"The documentation for errors needs improvement as many of the error messages we receive are very vague."
"Error messages should be better. For error status, there should be better documentation because a lot of times, error messages that you get are quite vague. For example, you get a message saying that the workflow has run into an unknown status, which is vague. It just tells you that it failed, but you don't know how or why it failed. It makes debugging difficult."
"I would like to see some better web automation, a wizard like the one in the product WinAutomation would be very nice."
"The vendor is currently working on a solution that allows us to automatically create a process that is based on a document that we receive via email."
"It would be an improvement if Automate had better stability tools, whether by recommending a certain amount of memory because it can be a memory hog at times."
"The solution has a very weak knowledge base."
"While this solution is continually improving, as it is now, the user interface could use improvement when I compare it to a product like UiPath."
"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."
"I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run."
"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."
"Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way."
"An area for improvement in VisualCron is its cluttered interface. It isn't always easy to find all functionalities, so what VisualCron needs is a user interface expert who can improve the interface. There's a learning curve in terms of finding what you need from the interface of VisualCron. The technical support for VisualCron also needs improvement in terms of response time. Currently, there's no live support or hotline you can call to get quick answers, so this is what I'd like to see in the next version of VisualCron. A less cluttered and more streamlined interface, where you don't need to hunt for some of the features, is also what I'd like to see in the next VisualCron update."
"The only problem I face when I use the tool is that it doesn't contain much documentation or it doesn't have many video tutorials on its features."
"I want to improve the UI in VisualCron, as it's not as user-friendly, particularly when setting up the task scheduler. If you're familiar with the tool, then no problem, but if not, you'll have a problem typing text because sometimes, the cursor points to other places, so there's an issue with text box alignment in VisualCron. That was painful for me when I was just a VisualCron novice, but when you become used to it, there won't be a problem."
Fortra's Automate is ranked 5th in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with 21 reviews while VisualCron is ranked 14th in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with 10 reviews. Fortra's Automate is rated 8.2, while VisualCron is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Fortra's Automate writes "Can automate several processes with only one bot and is easy to implement, administer, and use". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VisualCron writes "It's user-friendly, and I didn't need long to understand the process". Fortra's Automate is most compared with Microsoft Power Automate, UiPath, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, MOVEit and Automation Anywhere (AA), whereas VisualCron is most compared with Microsoft Power Automate, Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, ActiveBatch by Redwood and Stonebranch. See our Fortra's Automate vs. VisualCron report.
See our list of best Robotic Process Automation (RPA) vendors.
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