We performed a comparison between IBM Workload Automation and Tidal Automation based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: IBM Workload Automation offers the option for clients to vote on and suggest new features, supports triggering jobs in multiple nodes, and provides a convenient way to monitor batch applications. Tidal Automation stands out with its efficient job scheduler, user-friendly interface, flexibility, and seamless integration with various systems.
IBM Workload Automation has addressed performance concerns and improved navigation, however, there are still challenges with job dependencies and daily schedule updates. The solution lacks stability, reporting visibility, and integration capabilities. Tidal Automation has a busy user interface and a complex pricing model, which may result in a steep learning curve. It needs better QA testing, enhanced job migration, and production statistics reporting. The solution does not offer AI capabilities, advanced reporting, or customization options.
Service and Support: IBM Workload Automation is praised for its technical support, particularly their lab advocacy program which provides in-depth code support. However, customers may face challenges in identifying the source of certain issues. Tidal Automation's customer service and support has a responsive and knowledgeable team. They are commended for their ability to address problems quickly and provide solutions, as well as their impressive product knowledge. However, there are occasional mentions of lower-priority items getting overlooked.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for IBM Workload Automation can be difficult, particularly for individuals who are not familiar with IBM tools or application development. The setup for Tidal Automation is described as simple and uncomplicated, only necessitating a small number of servers and a database.
Pricing: The cost of setting up IBM Workload Automation is determined by the customer's contract and can vary based on the number of agents installed. Users consider the pricing of Tidal Automation to be reasonable and consistent, without a significant increase even with increased usage.
ROI: Based on available insights, IBM Workload Automation lacks user feedback on ROI determination. Tidal Automation garners favorable reviews highlighting cost savings, enhanced efficiency, and superior risk management.
Comparison Results: Tidal Automation is favored over IBM Workload Automation because of its simple setup process, user-friendly interface, and dependable job scheduler. Users like how Tidal Automation offers a consolidated view and allows real-time monitoring, as well as the flexibility to run jobs on various servers.
"Provides a robust, full spectrum enterprise-wide WLA platform."
"The DWC, when configured correctly, is a great GUI tool to provide Self-Service Scheduling capabilities to the user community."
"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."
"I have supported this product in literally 100s of different environments and its unmatched in its ability to scale to any size."
"The initial setup is easy."
"Technical support from IBM is very good."
"The whole product is valuable because it is a tool for batch automation."
"The support from Cisco is very good. I was with them as a company for 40 years"
"The job dependency is something that you cannot have in a regular, simple cron job or simple scheduler dependency. The event-driven jobs are core for us, as we really need that. Therefore, we really need Tidal with its ability to run thousands of jobs per day."
"The most valuable feature is the job scheduler, where you can schedule thousands of jobs to execute at specific times."
"Tidal helps administrators and users to see the information that is relevant to them in that single pane of glass. They can see jobs running, they can see job history, and they can see job progression. If you look at alternatives like Airflow and clouds, you'd have to design your own UI to monitor the progress of the different jobs that you've created in Airflow. So Tidal is huge for us."
"From a management standpoint, when using the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads, I've never had a problem with the application. It's very interactive, especially with the different security levels that they offer."
"We had a number of different schedulers in this organization and we've been porting everything that was running out of these other, unrelated schedulers into this scheduler. That has afforded us the ability to set up direct dependencies between processes that couldn't talk to one another before. Over the 15 years, we've definitely gained a lot from that. What had been manual controls have become automated controls..."
"It saves times due to automation. With some files, we do hundreds a day for a particular vendor. This would be hard to do manually. Also, the speed at which we can do this is excellent."
"The best feature of Tidal Workload Automation Software is its ease of integration with other systems, including ERP, CRM, and BI tools."
"We use the solution for cross-platform and cross-application workloads. That's one of the core reasons we chose it. It's one of a few things in the industry that can be used for cross-platform integration."
"This solution does have bugs and could be improved in this regard. However, these bugs are resolved relatively quickly."
"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 schedule refreshes daily and that's a challenge for us."
"It is missing some features and can improve in areas where the competition is somewhat better like linking job dependencies."
"It would be helpful to have a mobile app that could be used to follow the job schedule."
"The performance of the previous versions could be better."
"It should support other schedulers that aren't IBM products."
"The configuration of IBM Workload Automation has some challenges. We have a difficult time customizing it, but it is similar to other solutions."
"The product’s UI is outdated. They should work on this particular area."
"The job failure alerts can be updated with more details for better troubleshooting."
"When we patch to the next version, there is often a little thing that breaks. It has rarely been a big deal, but I always seem to have to follow up on one tiny issue. It would help if they had some better QA testing of their patches."
"I'm still hoping with Explorer to be able to see end-to-end job streams. That's not really something that's easy to see today in the web client. However, I haven't worked with Explorer yet. One of the things that we have found frustrating is not being able to see an end-to-end job stream across multiple applications within Tidal. We use jobs for that right now, but I have high hopes that we'll be able to see that in Explorer."
"I know they are working on it, but there needs to be better reporting. Currently, there are only three or four reports that we can get off of the system. That needs to be improved. They already have a solution to this in the new version. I.e., a schedule of all the jobs running for one day, specifically calling out what dependencies that job relies on. It would be like a flow chart of how the day's jobs would run."
"One thing I would like to see improved is that, currently, when an action is executed and finishes in Tidal, it's marked as either "success" or "failure." I would like more options that would flag a job according to multiple options, rather than just "good" or bad"... Tidal has told us that it's possible to do so through the product or with a workaround."
"One of the weaknesses of the product is, when something happens, it's difficult to find out the root cause. There are a lot of logs you can take a look at in Tidal. Sometimes, they are useful, but other times, they're not. That is mostly relegated to the administrative team. Users for the most part don't see that and don't know anything about that. They just know they have a problem, then it's up to the administrative team to see what happened and figure out the problem."
"I don't know if Tidal wants to get into the business of monitoring long-running jobs, but that could be a feature for the future: a job launching and monitoring tool. Using Tidal for monitoring doesn't seem like a good fit, but if they could offer something that did that as an add-on or include it, it might be helpful."
IBM Workload Automation is ranked 13th in Workload Automation with 28 reviews while Tidal by Redwood is ranked 2nd in Workload Automation with 37 reviews. IBM Workload Automation is rated 8.2, while Tidal by Redwood is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of IBM Workload Automation writes "With an easy setup phase in place, agent-based installation can be done in minutes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Tidal by Redwood writes "Great visibility with a single pane of glass and a low learning curve". IBM Workload Automation is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, HCL Workload Automation, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and CA 7 Workload Automation Intelligence, whereas Tidal by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs, ActiveBatch by Redwood and Rocket Zeke. See our IBM Workload Automation vs. Tidal by Redwood report.
See our list of best Workload Automation vendors.
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