We performed a comparison between Fortra's JAMS and Redwood Software - Workload Automation Edition based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Fortra's JAMS is highly regarded for its impressive job dependency tracking and visualization, as well as its automation features such as File Watchers. Redwood Software is praised for its robust job definition capabilities and user authority restrictions. It also excels in error handling and integration with multiple systems.
Fortra's JAMS product has room for improvement in various areas such as its client interface, search capability, handling of exceptions, ACL area, troubleshooting, encryption code, and PGP engine. Redwood Software could enhance its reporting features, monitoring and alert service, user interface, cloud-native features, documentation, customer support, value-added features, security standards, UI, application integration, data pulling, and graphical user interface.
Service and Support: Fortra's JAMS product has excellent customer service. The team is responsive, knowledgeable, and helpful, providing quick solutions. Customers appreciate the documentation and training. Redwood Software's customer service is generally positive but can be improved. The support team delivers good service, but Fortra's JAMS stands out for its responsiveness and comprehensive support.
Ease of Deployment: Users found the initial setup for Fortra's JAMS to be simple and efficient, with clear instructions provided on the webpage. Tasks were deployed quickly. Redwood's setup was described as complicated and time-consuming. Some users struggled due to the large number of jobs and the complexity of the existing system.
Pricing: Fortra's JAMS has a setup cost for the first year, with an additional annual maintenance cost. Users find this pricing fair and reasonable compared to other solutions. Redwood offers a unique pricing model based on the number of job executions. While the setup cost may be slightly expensive, users believe it is worthwhile due to the product's value and user framework.
ROI: Fortra's JAMS has been shown to be a budget-friendly solution that enhances efficiency and saves time. Evaluating Redwood Software's ROI is challenging, but users have noticed favorable outcomes and given it high ratings.
Comparison Results: Fortra's JAMS is the preferred option when comparing it to Redwood Software - Workload Automation Edition. JAMS is praised for its ease of setup, ability to handle job dependencies, automation capabilities, extensive troubleshooting logs, and user-friendly interface. Users also appreciate the reasonable pricing, positive return on investment, and highly rated customer service.
"It has definitely drastically improved our capabilities to scale our automation. Before JAMS, there were a lot of manual processes. We had a couple of operators who spent all day doing that. A lot of the time with human intervention and human processes, it is as good as the person who may be following a procedure and human error is a big problem."
"The product is easy to use."
"I find the historical tracking feature of JAMS invaluable for reviewing past events."
"The feature or capability to import a job is most valuable. We can import an existing job from different platforms, and all the configurations get migrated as well without modifying the code, job schedule, etc."
"The planning capabilities are most valuable."
"The code-driven automation for more complex scheduling requirements frees up time because it's really easy to use... It's almost like a stand-alone software that we can't live without."
"The overall product is fantastic. I love it. It has been a fantastic, solid product. If I have one tiny bit of a problem with it, the support team gets in touch with me right away. I don't know if I've had another service that has been as fantastic as the JAMS support team."
"I didn't know about JAMS because I don't have a person with any challenges with the purchase administration. The feature or the user interface is user-friendly because of the readable icons or very descriptive icons. Though I'm a beginning user of JAMS, I had no issues using it."
"Installing and configuring Redwood agents are easy, and scheduling jobs on Redwood helps in triggering the batches as per business requirements."
"It can centralize and support on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments seamlessly."
"The automated alert response is very useful for long-running and failed jobs during off-business hours."
"REL expressions are quite helpful for setting up the preconditions."
"This program works with every browser."
"Our team was able to integrate it with the ITSM tool as well as security monitoring tools to make the incident creation process automatically feasible."
"Redwood is more flexible and we can schedule the tasks based on different time zones."
"Redwood helps us to schedule batch jobs on a daily, weekly, and yearly basis to keep the business running smoothly."
"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."
"The documentation is not super... It's not as quick and slick as I'd like it to be."
"Fortra is getting much better with documentation and examples, but there is still room for improvement."
"The ACL or access permission area needs to be improved. When it comes to defining and providing security permissions, it's a bit confusing if you are new to JAMS. JAMS needs to improve the features for security access or permissions."
"I would like a simple web interface that I could give to my team to go in and kill jobs or see why jobs died so that we don't have to drill down deeper into the application and know everything about it. It would be good to have a really clean web engine that would say here are the jobs running. We can then click to see the time running and whether any of them fails and other similar things. I know they have one, but it's not very simplistic."
"There could be a better simulation for banning the termination. You have to simulate every one of the processes in order to have an idea for better planning. This kind of simulation is broken and needs improvement."
"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."
"It does validations when you try to delete an object and if there are any dependencies in place, the deletion process will not proceed... there is no information provided as to what it was that caused the validation to fail... it's quite a tedious process to find which object is getting in the way."
"Currently, our developers aren't able to access their own objects in the user acceptance testing server and production system server as they are assigned the developer access role, which is kind of a solid role, and no changes or additions can be made to it."
"Enhancing the user interface would make it more appealing to new users with limited technical knowledge."
"I have not noted any downsides."
"The addition of machine learning capabilities could help Redwood Workload Automation Software better predict job and workflow performance, detect anomalies, and optimize operations based on historical data."
"Redwood automation software could be made more user-friendly and intuitive, making chores and automation processes easier for users to complete."
"The only issue at first was that we had to manually delete or raise the event in order to run some of the events and wait for jobs, even if the file was kept at the correct AL11 position."
"There is a lack of resources and product documentation which, if included, would help to gain more knowledge about the application."
"We need the automatic creation of incidents for failed jobs."
Fortra's JAMS is ranked 5th in Workload Automation with 27 reviews while Redwood RunMyJobs is ranked 3rd in Workload Automation with 30 reviews. Fortra's JAMS is rated 9.0, while Redwood RunMyJobs is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Fortra's JAMS writes "We can scale up our organization's scheduling and automation without having to add staff to the department". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Redwood RunMyJobs writes "Simple to use, increases CPU speed, and reduces the cost of machine time". Fortra's JAMS is most compared with Control-M, Tidal by Redwood, AutoSys Workload Automation and VisualCron, whereas Redwood RunMyJobs is most compared with Control-M, Stonebranch, Tidal by Redwood and AutoSys Workload Automation. See our Fortra's JAMS vs. Redwood RunMyJobs report.
See our list of best Workload Automation vendors.
We monitor all Workload Automation reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
