We performed a comparison between Fortra's JAMS and Rocket Zena 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 job dependency tracking and visualization, while Rocket Zena is praised for its user-friendly interface. JAMS offers robust automation features, while Zena excels in cross-platform job scheduling and FTP file transfer.
Fortra's JAMS client interface can be more user-friendly and efficient in terms of options retrieval. Rocket Zena lacks clarity in displaying connections between applications/components. Fortra's JAMS could enhance its accessibility by introducing a browser version and providing more comprehensive documentation. Rocket Zena would benefit from a more intuitive user interface and the availability of RPM packages for installation.
Service and Support: Fortra's JAMS customer service is commended for being quick, knowledgeable, and helpful, offering prompt solutions and comprehensive resources. Rocket Zena receives positive feedback, with responsive and knowledgeable support, although obtaining higher-level assistance may be more time-consuming.
Ease of Deployment: Fortra's JAMS initial setup is described as straightforward and easy, with users quickly deploying tasks by following webpage instructions. Rocket Zena's setup varied among users, with some finding it easier as new users but others finding it complex and requiring an understanding of different components. Integration with SAP posed a particular challenge for Zena.
Pricing: Fortra's JAMS has a setup cost in the first year, along with a yearly maintenance cost. Users see this pricing as reasonable and budget-friendly when compared to other options. Rocket Zena is recognized as a cost-effective and affordable choice, particularly suitable for small businesses.
ROI: Fortra's JAMS and Rocket Zena have both delivered positive results in terms of saving time, increasing productivity, and offering cost-effectiveness. Fortra's JAMS also provides ease of use and visibility into job failures, while Rocket Zena has improved accuracy and alleviated stress for engineers and administrators.
Comparison Results: Fortra's JAMS is the preferred choice when compared to Rocket Zena. Users appreciate JAMS for its easy setup, ability to handle job dependencies, extensive automation features, user-friendly interface, and excellent customer support. JAMS is favored due to its overall functionality and ease of use.
"The interface is good, and it's very easy to define and create jobs. If a job is not running or there is an error, the solution will send an email. That's all very good and very useful."
"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."
"One of the things I like the most, as a SQL DBA, is the fact that we can manipulate tables in the background. Also, the fact that you can have your own views and work with the product the way it fits best is a very helpful feature."
"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."
"Our company is based on data. Everything we do is data-driven, so it has been very valuable having one place where we can process all of the data and do batch schedules with chunks of data."
"The most valuable feature is the easily accessible data in the database because we run a lot of SQL scripting against the database."
"The alerting in it is really targeted... you can set specific alerting so that if jobs in a given folder fail, certain people are alerted. You can also set security at the folder level, so that only people in those areas can go set them. That means that the alerting and security can be set at a very granular level."
"It's a full-featured job scheduling tool. The part that I liked the best was the support team. This tool was new, and we were all learning it and setting up the different jobs that were complex in nature. Their support team was very responsive in helping us out through the setup and resolving the issues. They have been incredibly awesome."
"I have used other tools with similar capabilities; it's the ease of use."
"You can click Ctrl-G and bring a diagram view. You're able to view in a diagram format. The view that it provides is easy, and you can move to the left, up, or down. You can double-click on a certain process. It'll drill into that process and all of its underlying components. You can double-click on an arrow or a component, and it'll bring up a screen that'll have all the variables that are assigned to that particular piece, as well as the values at run time. So, the diagram feature of it, at least for me, is pretty valuable."
"I like the whole product, but specifically, I like the license part. It's very easy to acquire a license for this product."
"Its FTP feature is very good, as is scheduling any process or task with the Zena client. I have found it to be very helpful. If a task fails, it gives you a prompt."
"From a Linux configuration point of view, Rocket Zena is straightforward. It's fairly easy to set up the server and agents once you know how to do it."
"The most valuable feature is the FTP file transfer."
"In the latest upgrade, Zena added a web-based client. The more I use it, the more I like it. It's an excellent interface. They do a good job of steadily improving the solution to make it more useful."
"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."
"I'm not sure if they have fixed it in a newer version, but there is no global search in the version I have. If I have multiple sub-folders that are named for business units, like HR or IT, and I have to search for a job, I cannot search from the top. I have to go to the HR folder to search for a particular job, or to the IT folder."
"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 documentation is not super... It's not as quick and slick as I'd like it to be."
"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."
"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."
"If there were a softcover book on how to really take advantage of all of JAMS' tools, I would buy it. I do better with training books than online searching, so a book would be helpful."
"Sometimes the UI is not the most responsive I've ever used. But because it does its job, I don't complain."
"Another one that is probably a little bit bigger for me is that when there is an issue or there's an error, it writes on a different screen. I have to find the actual process name and go to a different screen to view the alert that got generated. On that screen, everyone's processes, not just the processes of the folks in my department, are thrown. It takes me a while to find the actual error so that I could go in there and look at the alert. It could be because of the way it was set up, but at least for me, it isn't too intuitive."
"In the next release, I would like to have an alert feature to indicate when an agent is down. Rocket Zena is not capable of sending alerts that the agent is down. As of now, you have manually monitor to see when the agent is down."
"One area where it could be improved is communication between the different servers. Sometimes there are processes that have already been completed but we get a status notification that they're still active."
"In the web interface, it stacks the tasks across the top, and they accumulate until you close or clean those out. That seems a little cumbersome. You must right-click and close all tabs constantly to keep the console clean and manage your views."
"The UI is not intuitive, and it would be nice if there was a web interface."
"Rocket Zena is a mainframe-based job scheduler. I would like it to be more open so that we can use it on a distributed platform."
"The documentation has room for improvement."
Fortra's JAMS is ranked 5th in Workload Automation with 21 reviews while Rocket Zena is ranked 10th in Workload Automation with 7 reviews. Fortra's JAMS is rated 9.2, while Rocket Zena is rated 8.2. 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 Rocket Zena writes "Scheduling tasks saves me a lot of time and they run in seconds, improving my productivity". Fortra's JAMS is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal Automation, ActiveBatch Workload Automation and VisualCron, whereas Rocket Zena is most compared with Control-M, Rocket Zeke, AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation and ActiveBatch Workload Automation. See our Fortra's JAMS vs. Rocket Zena report.
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