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IBM Workload Automation vs Redwood RunMyJobs comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 2025

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

JAMS
Sponsored
Ranking in Workload Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Workload Automation
Ranking in Workload Automation
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
33
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Redwood RunMyJobs
Ranking in Workload Automation
18th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of JAMS is 2.6%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Workload Automation is 4.9%, down from 8.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Redwood RunMyJobs is 7.6%, up from 4.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
JAMS2.6%
IBM Workload Automation4.9%
Redwood RunMyJobs7.6%
Other84.9%
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2770605 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Has streamlined complex job scheduling across scripting languages while reducing manual effort
JAMS could be improved with a web client that is accessible and as fast as a normal website, eliminating the need to RDP to the servers to access the JAMS client. A functionality running on the JAMS server to continuously check the JAMS agents would ensure they are working properly. If an agent is not responding, a feature to restart the service from the job server machine would be beneficial. The upgrade process, particularly when switching from V6 to V7, could be clearer in terms of documentation, ideally with screenshots showing exactly what needs to be done on each screen.
reviewer2701716 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Dynamic workload balancing facilitates efficient job scheduling and ensures continuity with a master-slave setup
One valuable feature of IBM Workload Automation is the ability to combine different applications and platforms to organize jobs together, creating dependencies. It's akin to an orchestra. Another feature is dynamic workload balancing, which I find enhances efficiency by automating job setup to run daily. Moreover, having a backup setup allows for immediate recovery if the master setup fails.
reviewer2138001 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Demantra consultant at Capgemini
Easy to organize, monitor, and control all jobs
The most valuable aspects of the solution are: 1. The ability to schedule tasks and jobs on multiple platforms (SAP and Non-SAP) and monitor the jobs. 2. Its ability to organize, monitor, control, and schedule all jobs and activities. 3. Redwood is a more powerful tool and provision to automate any tasks/jobs than any other tool in Batch scheduling (automatic and other tools). 4. It has advanced features like dashboards where users can see all statistics. 5. It has an alert mechanism feature; if any job fails, it triggers notifications. 6. Different security functionality for restricting users to certain functions (read/write). 7. Cost Reduction, complete automation, optimized resource usage, and full audit trail. 8. Vendor support. 9. Logging and statistics.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Previously, we manually managed file transfers by writing our scripts. The automated MFT feature is great for me and the company. It helps us know where the files are going and enables us to track errors if anything fails. It also makes the connection seamless for third-party vendors."
"JAMS has been a beneficial monitoring tool for our project in terms of being able to deliver data that is essential for users."
"I like how you can add new execution methods on the fly. It isn't overly complex to add Python script support to an execution method in the JAMS system. The scheduling is excellent. You can schedule a maintenance window and take that resource unit out of everything. It halts all of the jobs."
"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 ability to sequence jobs is excellent; it means we don't have to schedule them individually, and if one fails, it doesn't unwind the entire workflow."
"The most valuable feature is the easily accessible data in the database because we run a lot of SQL scripting against the database."
"Being able to create a series of chained jobs, which are basically linked jobs is valuable."
"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."
"I have supported this product in literally 100s of different environments and its unmatched in its ability to scale to any size."
"The support from Cisco is very good. I was with them as a company for 40 years"
"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."
"Provides a robust, full spectrum enterprise-wide WLA platform."
"Jobs can be triggered in multiple nodes."
"This solution has a request feature where users can request the added features they need to have developed. Based on client voting for those features, these are developed and released."
"The solution helps automate processes so that the workload can be handled on a daily basis."
"The whole product is valuable because it is a tool for batch automation."
"It saves us a lot of time and money by doing jobs automatically."
"The automated alert response is very useful for long-running and failed jobs during off-business hours."
"It is very easy and easy to use, and minimal supervision is required to run it."
"There won't be a memory outage issue, as it uses its own server/ECC memory only."
"Installing and configuring Redwood agents are easy, and scheduling jobs on Redwood helps in triggering the batches as per business requirements."
"We can achieve anything that anything that we would like to do. In SAP, it's not generally possible with just with SAP. So we have solution manager as an option, but run by job."
"Multi-platform scheduling makes it easier this way rather than accessing one platform at a time."
"Redwood is of value to our organization due to of its ease of use and the ability to automate and orchestrate any platform that we utilize today."
 

Cons

"The client is horrible. Every time JAMS puts out a survey on what they can improve, I always say, "The client: When you are setting up jobs, it is quite horrible." The response has been, "Well, we are just using the Windows foundation," and I am like, "Why isn't it only your product?" We can get around it now that we know its quirks, but it is not the most user-friendly of tools out there. The UI is completely unintuitive. We had to go and open up a support ticket with JAMS just to get something back. It is not user-friendly at all."
"One thing that I know that the JAMS people said that they were working on that would be huge for us is a search capability so that you could search for tasks. It may be available in version 7 or in a future release of 7. I think that's on their roadmap. But right now, for us to do a search, we have to search through database queries."
"The monitoring of the JAMS product and its performance is an area of concern for me."
"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."
"Fortra is getting much better with documentation and examples, but there is still room for improvement."
"As an admin, I would like to have a web-based GUI instead of a client application that we have to install on our PCs."
"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."
"JAMS lacks source control features. Our previous solution had job control language, but JAMS doesn't. When migrating between versions, JAMS doesn't migrate all the data, like job change history, etc. Also, the scheduler doesn't have a way to make jobs invisible, so you can temporarily turn a job off if you decide not to run it today."
"Scalability-wise, it can be a little bit challenging."
"The configuration of IBM Workload Automation has some challenges. We have a difficult time customizing it, but it is similar to other solutions."
"There should be more custom documentation, specifically around Java APIs. There should also be more training. In terms of features, we are currently using only 50% of its features. We don't use all features that are available, but there is always room for improvement in all of the tools."
"The performance of the previous versions could be better."
"It should support other schedulers that aren't IBM products."
"IBM needs to move away from its native terminology and adopt a more cloud-centric approach."
"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 would be nice if Redwood RunMyJobs could work on different systems."
"Due to the abundance of competing automation technologies available on the market, connectivity with any cloud platform can be improved."
"The job log has a size limit."
"We need the ability to pull data into an Excel format."
"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."
"Enhancing the user interface would make it more appealing to new users with limited technical knowledge."
"The price wise, it is not affordable. When we compare with other industry leading softwares and even the same scale, there are certain softwares that can compete with Redwood, but Redwood is very highly paced.So it is more SAP friendly, I would say, at this point. Since it was owned by SAP for very long time, they have made it SAP friendly. But if you look at the tool as a enterprise tool. Like, in general, it is not really that great as a tool. So you can you have better options when you couple it with SAP. But if you would like to control your enterprise level applications, anything after that, like, Azure AWS and things like that Oracle."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"JAMS is relatively inexpensive, with additional costs only incurred for tags, other services, and optional support renewals."
"It's expensive, to be honest, but it does the job."
"Fortra's JAMS pricing structure has deteriorated significantly since its acquisition by Fortra."
"The pricing is very fair. We have seen very minimal to no price increases over the years. We are not banging down the door of support all the time either. I would imagine if we were a company that submitted a dozen support tickets a week for the last nine years, then it might be a little different because we would be eating up everybody's time. However, for what we get out of it, the pricing is extremely fair. Back when we were originally looking and brought in JAMS, we were looking at a couple of the other competitive products that were in this space, but the pricing from JAMS was far and away better than what the other competitors could offer for the same functionality."
"The product is reasonably priced, and we don't have any add-ons."
"For what it does, the product is priced very well."
"JAMS is priced competitively compared to similar solutions and offers flexible licensing options to cater to user needs."
"It was $10,000 for the first year. Then, there is a maintenance cost for licensing every year that we get billed $5,000 for every year."
"It is about one-third of the cost of a controller."
"The solution's pricing is affordable."
"We transitioned from a server license to per job license, and that saved us a lot money."
"The contract is with the customer with whom we are working, so IBM is not directly involved in this."
"Pricing depends on the number of agents that you install."
"To my knowledge, IWA is the only WLA product that will provide "parallel tracking" capability to assist in upgrading from one platform to IWA."
"The solution is a little bit expensive."
"It initially surprised me because we went from an application that was priced by connection to agents/the number of agents to an application that was priced based on the number of job executions. At that time, many of the products we looked at were also priced on job execution. That seems to be more common in the business or in the vendors that provide solutions out there, but that was probably our biggest difference."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
6%
Performing Arts
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise18
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise29
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise55
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about JAMS?
I find the historical tracking feature of JAMS invaluable for reviewing past events.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JAMS?
They recently switched to subscription-based pricing, which increased. The price is fair considering the functionalit...
What needs improvement with JAMS?
As far as we are using JAMS version 6, it looks good and there is nothing major to add about it. Everything is functi...
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...
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Also Known As

No data available
IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler, IBM TWS
Redwood Software - Workload Automation Edition, Redwood Business Process Automation - Workload Edition, RunMyJobs, Redwood RunMyJobs
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Teradata, Arconic, General Dynamics, Yum!, CVS Health, Comcast, Ghiradelli, & Boston’s Children’s Hospital
Standard Life Group, Banca Popolare di Milano, A*STAR, ArcelorMittal Gent
AMD, American Home Shield, Avaya, Burberry, Centrica, City of Dallas, The Container Store, Core & Main, Daikin, Dart Containers, Deere, Energizer, Epson, Halliburton, Keen Foodware, National Gypsum, Rockport Group, Ryder, Technicolor, The University of Michigan, Virgin Money, Whitbread
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Workload Automation vs. Redwood RunMyJobs and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.
880,844 professionals have used our research since 2012.