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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
6.9
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Workload Automation
Ranking in Workload Automation
9th
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
16th
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 February 2026, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of JAMS is 2.8%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Workload Automation is 4.7%, down from 8.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Redwood RunMyJobs is 7.1%, up from 4.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
JAMS2.8%
IBM Workload Automation4.7%
Redwood RunMyJobs7.1%
Other85.4%
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

"The planning capabilities are most valuable."
"We looked at other companies, like VisualCron, that were cheaper, but one of the main sticking points was the fact that they wouldn't have provided a central location for us to monitor across all servers. That was one of the biggest selling points of JAMS."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Fortra's JAMS helped us centralize job management across our platforms and applications. This is critical because we schedule tasks across multiple applications and operating systems, using triggers and start dates to coordinate their execution."
"JAMS has improved my organization by taking a myriad of manual processes and allowing us to automate them. It enables our folks to focus more on tasks that require their human intelligence and their creativity and less on just mundane tasks. It increases efficiency, accuracy, and consistency."
"The DWC, when configured correctly, is a great GUI tool to provide Self-Service Scheduling capabilities to the user community."
"Provides a robust, full spectrum enterprise-wide WLA platform."
"I have supported this product in literally 100s of different environments and its unmatched in its ability to scale to any size."
"IBM Workload Automation provides good performance and monitoring."
"Jobs can be triggered in multiple nodes."
"The support from Cisco is very good. I was with them as a company for 40 years"
"Jobs can be triggered in multiple nodes."
"The solution helps automate processes so that the workload can be handled on a daily basis."
"We can create and test micro-workflows to find defects sooner."
"There are various ways in which you can construct jobs depending on your business needs and requirements."
"REL expressions are quite helpful for setting up the preconditions."
"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."
"It is very easy and easy to use, and minimal supervision is required to run it."
"This tool helps us to monitor the job related to SAP modules."
"With automation in place, employees can focus on more strategic tasks that require human expertise, increasing overall productivity."
"One of Redwood Software's features that I liked was its event-driven automation, which allows IT teams to respond to real-time events, alerts, and notifications from numerous systems."
 

Cons

"The only thing that they could improve on is the fact that they don't have a browser version of JAMS. They've got all the bits and pieces there if you want to build your own web version of it. It does come with a web client, but it's pretty clunky. They could improve on that."
"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."
"We have had a lot of people working from home who can't always connect to the JAMS server. We use VPN, as most companies do, and we have it set up so that everybody can access the JAMS server. But many times, our people cannot access it... JAMS could do a better job of telling you what the problem is when you try to log in to the server."
"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."
"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."
"The tabs in the JAMS file transfer could be clearer. It would help us demonstrate to our client that JAMS not only automates jobs but also does fast transfers, and it's an alternative that supports and filters different kinds of platforms. Filtering file transfers will be highly beneficial to them."
"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."
"IBM Workload Automation could be improved by reducing its cost. The maintenance charges have increased significantly, and a lower cost would be beneficial."
"The solution's installation could be improved because the customers have to do it all the time."
"IBM needs to move away from its native terminology and adopt a more cloud-centric approach."
"This solution does have bugs and could be improved in this regard. However, these bugs are resolved relatively quickly."
"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."
"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."
"It would be helpful to have a mobile app that could be used to follow the job schedule."
"It should support other schedulers that aren't IBM products."
"Redwood Software has a high price tag, especially for small and medium-sized businesses that might not have the funds to engage in a complete automation system."
"The documentation for this product is limited, which can be improved in the future."
"Enhancing the user interface would make it more appealing and accessible to a wide range of users."
"Customer support should be enhanced so that we can automatically raise tickets and incidents in customer service."
"The job log has a size limit."
"We need the automatic creation of incidents for failed jobs."
"Redwood RunMyJobs should add more good features."
"We'd like to see an integration with ServiceNow to raise the tickets/incidents in ServiceNow."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing of JAMS has not been an issue for us, as it has allowed us to save time."
"Our licensing is pretty cheap because we have a state solution. So, we pay only $1,000 a year."
"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."
"JAMS is relatively inexpensive, with additional costs only incurred for tags, other services, and optional support renewals."
"The product is reasonably priced, and we don't have any add-ons."
"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."
"Take advantage of its scalability. You can start small. The initial cost is very reasonable. Once you have started picking up the tool and adopting it, then you can scale up from there and buy more agents."
"JAMS is priced competitively compared to similar solutions and offers flexible licensing options to cater to user needs."
"The contract is with the customer with whom we are working, so IBM is not directly involved in this."
"The solution is a little bit expensive."
"We transitioned from a server license to per job license, and that saved us a lot money."
"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's pricing is affordable."
"Pricing depends on the number of agents that you install."
"It is about one-third of the cost of a controller."
"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%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Retailer
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
7%
Performing Arts
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise19
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.
882,103 professionals have used our research since 2012.