We performed a comparison between Fortra's JAMS and OpCon 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 effective job dependency tracking, visual representation of dependencies, warning and notification system, management of intricate scheduling needs, and comprehensive logging functionality. OpCon is praised for its adaptability, integration capabilities, self-service functionality, and automation capabilities.
Fortra's JAMS client interface lacks intuitiveness and options retrieval, while OpCon's web-based interface, Solution Manager, lacks functionality. Fortra's JAMS would benefit from a comprehensive training resource, whereas OpCon needs better documentation for upgrading.
Service and Support: Fortra's JAMS customer service receives high praise for being responsive, knowledgeable, and helpful. Customers appreciate the promptness of their responses and the availability of documentation and training resources. OpCon's customer service is also well-regarded, with customers praising the technical support team's ability to provide timely solutions and prevent disruptions. However, there have been occasional delays in issue resolution.
Ease of Deployment: Users find the initial setup for Fortra's JAMS to be simple and clear. The setup process for OpCon can be intricate and necessitates close collaboration with SMA consultants to achieve success.
Pricing: The cost of setting up Fortra's JAMS product is not specified, while OpCon is recognized as a pricey and intricate solution that demands a learning curve.
ROI: Fortra's JAMS saves time, boosts productivity, and is cost-effective. OpCon also delivers a high ROI by automating tasks, reducing the need for additional staff, and saving man-hours. OpCon also delivers a high ROI by automating tasks, reducing the need for additional staff, and saving man-hours.
Comparison Results: Fortra's JAMS receives positive user feedback compared to OpCon. Users appreciate JAMS for its simple setup, ability to handle job dependencies, automation capabilities, support and interactive agents, code-driven automation, flexible scheduling, and detailed logging for troubleshooting. JAMS is also seen as a valuable investment with a good return and earns high ratings for its responsive and knowledgeable customer service.
"We also use the solution’s Interactive Agents. If we need to push something to our dealer portal, we can just drop a file in a folder and it goes. Running interactive tasks helps me users focus on business processes since I don’t have to take care of running the jobs manually."
"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."
"I didn't know about JAMS because I don't have a person with any challenges with the purchase administration. The feature or the user interface is user-friendly because of the readable icons or very descriptive icons. Though I'm a beginning user of JAMS, I had no issues using it."
"While I appreciate the other features, the agent stands out for its ease of installation and configuration for JAMS monitoring."
"The fact that we no longer need to use Excel spreadsheets is huge. Before JAMS, every group was keeping track of their own batch jobs. Nobody really knew what the other jobs were. So, if jobs failed, other groups wouldn't necessarily know. With JAMS, everything is done through a single scheduler. You can choose who to notify."
"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 code-driven automation for more complex scheduling requirements frees up time because it's really easy to use... It's almost like a stand-alone software that we can't live without."
"It has definitely drastically improved our capabilities to scale our automation. Before JAMS, there were a lot of manual processes. We had a couple of operators who spent all day doing that. A lot of the time with human intervention and human processes, it is as good as the person who may be following a procedure and human error is a big problem."
"The most valuable feature of OpCon is its scheduling capability, particularly for automating file transfers with vendors."
"It has also helped to streamline our operations. We contract out our collection department so they are no longer housed on our system. They're housed on another platform. OpCon is able to not only pull in our data, but it also, on a daily basis, updates that third-party."
"It allows us to organize everything into a process flow throughout the day for our different tasks that we have to run. So, it keeps everything organized. It is easy to monitor and adjust, if we need to."
"The most valuable feature is being able to schedule tasks so that they reliably occur each day, each week, each month, or sometimes several times a day... The scheduler works as it should."
"I rate OpCon support 10 out of 10. I've never had a problem with them. I've always been able to get answers quickly and always seem to find a knowledgeable person to assist with any questions."
"Among the numerous valuable features, one standout capability is the implementation of self-service buttons."
"When a lot of jobs are scheduled on different platforms, without any interaction possible between them, it's very difficult to manage things. With OpCon we avoid this difficulty. It's very visual."
"It allows batch work to run as smoothly and efficiently as possible."
"Sometimes the UI is not the most responsive I've ever used. But because it does its job, I don't complain."
"The product does not allow the users to cut and paste the job names from the screen."
"It is important to receive notifications if a charged job fails and SQL is halted. JAMS does not provide halted notifications by default, which is a critical feature that needs to be added."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The documentation is not super... It's not as quick and slick as I'd like it to be."
"With no programming experience, I find JAMS code-driven automation challenging due to the required PowerShell scripting."
"The learning curve could be shorter. The problem is that it's difficult to simplify a product without taking away functionality. I would love to see OpCon become a little easier to grasp. However, my concern is that making things easier isn't always better for the product. If they can keep the integrity of the product while making it easier to learn, that would be an area of improvement."
"Do your first install, your first upgrade, with SMA. It's simple, it's as per the manual, as per the training, but you need that little bit of confidence."
"Stability is an area for improvement. There are FTP agents that run on the MCP and they are there so that we can transfer a file from the MCP to the Windows environment or vice versa. Sometimes, and nobody has been able to figure out why, it just goes down, and all of my jobs that need it are hanging or failing... It would be very helpful if they could figure out what in the world is happening with that FTP client that's on the MCP."
"We have not explored the possibility, but one of the areas for improvement would be more integration into Active Directory, to where it could do the creation of user accounts and the additional work to integrate third-party systems into payroll systems."
"I would like OpCon to implement a reporting feature on the dashboard that displays historical data for specific jobs. Ideally, this feature would allow us to view the past seven days or the next seven days, but with a specific focus on highlighting instances where a particular job has historically failed, particularly on Saturdays over the past year."
"More functionality within self-service would be greatly appreciated."
"The one area it needs some help in is the mainframe area because that is not its strength. They support the mainframe but it's not something that they are good at."
"The initial setup is very complex, but that's not necessarily something that needs to be improved. I'm told that in the next version they're improving the upgrade process. So that's in the works already."
Fortra's JAMS is ranked 5th in Workload Automation with 27 reviews while OpCon is ranked 9th in Workload Automation with 56 reviews. Fortra's JAMS is rated 9.0, while OpCon is rated 9.2. 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 OpCon writes "Gives us the ability to schedule dependent jobs across different mainframes". Fortra's JAMS is most compared with Control-M, Tidal by Redwood, AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs and VisualCron, whereas OpCon is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Automic Workload Automation and UiPath. See our Fortra's JAMS vs. OpCon report.
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