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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

"We can see all the batch execution status within the tool itself, which saves money, time, and cost, allowing us to handle everything in one single tool."
"The most valuable feature of JAMS is its user-friendly interface, especially after upgrading from version six to seven."
"The most valuable aspect of JAMS is its robustness."
"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."
"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."
"I find the historical tracking feature of JAMS invaluable for reviewing past events."
"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."
"The planning capabilities are most valuable."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Workload Automation is its holistic view, which helps me find technical solutions quickly. For instance, if a customer has an issue completing their workload within a specific time frame, the tool provides enough information to identify and resolve the issue. One of the main challenges is dealing with data infrastructure problems and pending updates. Workload Automation helps me leverage current AI capabilities to recommend architectural updates to avoid these issues. It also allows me to balance CPU usage effectively, ensuring service level agreements are met. The interface is user-friendly and facilitates this process smoothly."
"IBM Workload Automation provides good performance and monitoring."
"Jobs can be triggered in multiple nodes."
"Provides a robust, full spectrum enterprise-wide WLA platform."
"The whole product is valuable because it is a tool for batch automation."
"The most important feature is the creation of folders. It's a really great feature because you can organize the process with naming conventions."
"I recommend IBM Workload Automation as it's a well-established and stable product."
"There won't be a memory outage issue, as it uses its own server/ECC memory only."
"This program works with every browser."
"Installing and configuring Redwood agents are easy, and scheduling jobs on Redwood helps in triggering the batches as per business requirements."
"It's a very powerful tool. It has a lot of flexibility for how you can define jobs and build them. There are different ways in which you can construct jobs depending on your specific needs and requirements."
"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."
"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 has advanced features like dashboards where users can see all statistics."
"In Redwood Automation, we can easily fetch the daily reports from the system as per the client's requirement and track the status of every job which is running, aborted, or canceled."
 

Cons

"Sometimes the UI is not the most responsive I've ever used. But because it does its job, I don't complain."
"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."
"The product does not allow the users to cut and paste the job names from the screen."
"Fortra is getting much better with documentation and examples, but there is still room for improvement."
"The error messages from JAMS often need clarification, hindering our ability to resolve issues swiftly."
"JAMS has built-in reporting. I've never really used it. I tried using it a few years ago and I couldn't figure it out. It was wonky. It could be improved upon."
"The search capability needs to be improved because when we try to search for a job, it's hard to do."
"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."
"It would be helpful to have a mobile app that could be used to follow the job schedule."
"Scalability-wise, it can be a little bit challenging."
"The performance of the previous versions could be better."
"IBM Workload Automation could be improved by reducing its cost. The maintenance charges have increased significantly, and a lower cost would be beneficial."
"Slow down on the releases a bit. I fully understand that IWA functionality is increasing at an amazing rate, but trying to keep up with the upgrades is rough."
"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."
"IBM needs to move away from its native terminology and adopt a more cloud-centric approach."
"It is missing some features and can improve in areas where the competition is somewhat better like linking job dependencies."
"The documentation for this product is limited, which can be improved in the future."
"We need the ability to pull data into an Excel format."
"The user interface of Redwood can be improved a bit to make it more user-friendly and interesting."
"They should be made more cost-effective in comparison to similar software services."
"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."
"The job log has a size limit."
"I have not noted any downsides."
"It would be nice if Redwood RunMyJobs could work on different systems."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing model for JAMS is straightforward and based on the number of agents, not the number of jobs you run. It's cheap and fairly simple."
"Fortra's JAMS pricing structure has deteriorated significantly since its acquisition by Fortra."
"Our licensing is pretty cheap because we have a state solution. So, we pay only $1,000 a 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."
"It's expensive, to be honest, but it does the job."
"I haven't been involved in the financial side for several years, but we buy one host and unlimited agents, and we get a reasonable price for that. We're happy with the amount we pay and the scalability it provides."
"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."
"Pricing depends on the number of agents that you install."
"The solution's pricing is affordable."
"To my knowledge, IWA is the only WLA product that will provide "parallel tracking" capability to assist in upgrading from one platform to IWA."
"It is about one-third of the cost of a controller."
"We transitioned from a server license to per job license, and that saved us a lot money."
"The solution is a little bit expensive."
"The contract is with the customer with whom we are working, so IBM is not directly involved in this."
"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
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
27%
Retailer
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
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?
My thoughts on the pricing of JAMS are that I won't say it is cheap, but it is cost-efficient, and that should be acc...
What needs improvement with JAMS?
An area that has room for improvement is related to the AWS RDS and database part, where they said that is in progres...
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.
882,886 professionals have used our research since 2012.