JAMS vs VisualCron comparison

JAMS Software and SMA Technologies are both solutions in the Workload Automation category. JAMS Software is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.2, while SMA Technologies is ranked #17 with an average rating of 9.0. JAMS Software holds a 2.8% mindshare in WA, compared to SMA Technologies’s 1.4% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of JAMS Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of SMA Technologies users who would recommend it.

JAMS

Read 37 JAMS reviews

2,293 Views
2,293 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

VisualCron

Read 11 VisualCron reviews

1,955 Views
782 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

JAMS

VisualCron

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 21, 2025

VisualCron and JAMS are competitors in the automated job scheduling software market. VisualCron has an edge in deployment versatility, while JAMS stands out for its platform execution method support and resource management.

Features: VisualCron is known for its user-friendly visual interface, extensive task configuration plugins, and ability to manage dependencies without programming skills. It is also appreciated for database integration. JAMS excels in job dependency management, supports batch scheduling, comprehensive notifications, and provides strong multi-platform support, making it suitable for diverse environments.

Room for Improvement: VisualCron could enhance its documentation, user community resources, and interface usability. Users suggest expanding audit logs and adding CI/CD support. Improving response times for technical support is also recommended. JAMS can improve its global search function and web client experience. Error message clarity and enhanced monitoring tools are also areas to consider.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VisualCron supports deployment in Public Cloud, Private Cloud, On-premises, and Hybrid Cloud, with highly praised responsive customer service. Some users note occasional slow support response. JAMS primarily supports On-premises and offers reliable support, with users highlighting the quick and helpful assistance in problem-solving.

Pricing and ROI: VisualCron offers cost-effective licensing with multiple instance options, noted for its affordability and high ROI by enhancing operational efficiency. JAMS, while competitively priced, has faced some user concerns over increased costs due to a shift to subscription-based pricing. Both tools deliver high ROI through automation, reducing manual tasks and adding business value. VisualCron's straightforward licensing is attractive for budget-conscious buyers.

To learn more, read our detailed JAMS vs. VisualCron Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

JAMS vs. VisualCron

January 2026

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Helped 881,707 peers since 2012

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

Ranking in Workload Automation

3rd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VisualCron

Ranking in Workload Automation

17th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Managed File Transfer (MFT) (15th), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (15th)

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 VisualCron is 1.4%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Workload Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
JAMS	2.8%
VisualCron	1.4%
Other	95.8%

Workload Automation

Featured Reviews

reviewer2770605

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.

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Sourav-Dutta

Technical Lead - Database Administrator at SMART ENERGY SYSTEMS LLC

It's user-friendly, and I didn't need long to understand the process

We use VisualCron for all our automation needs, like connecting to FileZilla, calling APIs, generating PGP keys, creating encryption files with the PGP key login to Azure, etc. It can automatically log in to SQL Server and execute SQL script jobs in bulk. We had 2,000-3,000 users at my previous…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

"The most valuable aspect of JAMS is its robustness."

"JAMS offers diverse scheduling capabilities for any kind of job, including Linux, PowerShell scripts, and SQL, enabling automation of jobs, which has proven beautiful after three years of usage."

"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."

"The overall product is fantastic. I love it. It has been a fantastic, solid product. If I have one tiny bit of a problem with it, the support team gets in touch with me right away. I don't know if I've had another service that has been as fantastic as the JAMS support team."

"JAMS has helped save IT staff time by automating tasks previously performed with scripts, and its scheduling feature has been particularly useful."

"I find the historical tracking feature of JAMS invaluable for reviewing past events."

"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."

More JAMS pros

"What I like about VisualCron is that like its name, it's a very visual tool. In my previous company, there were a lot of scripts for all kinds of services, and through VisualCron, you get to group all flows and get a nice visual overview. VisualCron also has an alerting feature, so you receive alerts from it. VisualCron makes everything clearer and easier to maintain. Every other solution that I was looking for almost always needed a programmer, but with VisualCron, you can do what you need to do without programming skills, so this is another valuable feature of the tool."

"The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%."

"We don't have to do any coding. We just plug and play and it works."

"VisualCron is a very powerful program to automate different steps in your business processes. We use it to automate replacing files and inform departments about the replacement."

"The ability to clone jobs to shorten the time it takes to implement a process has been invaluable, but its flexibility also gives us the ability to create a job that can handle a multifaceted process with a complex workflow."

"It has improved our organization with more automation within the business departments and less administration and development in the IT department. Usually, as the IT department, we are the bottleneck for many requirements within the business. With this tool, the business departments are able to perform many task themselves."

"It helped us reduce manual steps."

"'ve only had a few cases where I've had to request support in the past 12 years of use, but the support response time and resolution were was extremely quick."

More VisualCron pros

Cons

"JAMS doesn't allow us to implement SOC controls. We are a company that trades stocks on the New York Stock Exchange, so all our transactions are audited. It has a feature that saves the file for only a month but doesn't segregate the data between finance and SOC-related compliance."

"When looking at a folder in JAMS with many jobs, it would be good to have better information in the list display of what's inside those jobs. We get some information, but other important details are missing."

"The biggest area with room for improvement is the area that my organization benefits the most from using JAMS, and that is in custom execution methods. I happen to have a very good C# developer. Ever since we got JAMS, he has spent a lot of time talking to JAMS developers, researching the JAMS libraries, and creating custom execution methods. He's gotten very good at it. He is now able to create them and maintain them very easily, but that knowledge was hard-won knowledge. It was difficult to come by, and if I should ever lose this developer, then I would be hard-pressed to find anyone who could create JAMS custom execution methods quite as well as he can since there really isn't all that much help, such as documentation or information, available on how to create custom execution methods."

"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."

"I want JAMS to implement a global search function."

"It does validations when you try to delete an object and if there are any dependencies in place, the deletion process will not proceed... there is no information provided as to what it was that caused the validation to fail... it's quite a tedious process to find which object is getting in the way."

"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."

"The monitoring of the JAMS product and its performance is an area of concern for me."

More JAMS cons

"There are some conditions in the mail trigger, but you can only use them as an "AND" condition, not as an "OR" condition. This is an improvement that could be useful. For example, some people put "invoice" in the subject and others put "invoice" in the body. If I want to make a trigger for everybody whose sending invoices, I have to make two jobs for this now."

"The error timeout and info could be better. When making web request calls, it will time out sometimes and we won't get any useful info out of the error response."

"Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way."

"I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run."

"The documentation is a bit weak."

"VisualCron is software, and you will experience performance degradation when you scale up. VisualCron takes too much memory or CPU power. We have to increase the hardware resources of a specific server or system."

"The only problem I face when I use the tool is that it doesn't contain much documentation or it doesn't have many video tutorials on its features."

"VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve."

More VisualCron cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our licensing is pretty cheap because we have a state solution. So, we pay only $1,000 a year."

"There are no additional costs other than the license for Fortra's JAMS which is affordable."

"The pricing of JAMS has not been an issue for us, as it has allowed us to save time."

"All licensing models are a little overpriced, but JAMS offers a good value, especially given their support response times and ability to handle unforeseen issues like the SFTP transfers. I hope to find more use cases to get a better bang for our buck."

"For what it does, the product is priced very well."

"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."

"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's expensive, to be honest, but it does the job."

More JAMS pricing and cost advice

"ROI is 95 percent."

"VisualCron is correctly priced because it wasn't very cheap, and it wasn't overly expensive, so the price for it was set correctly. When my previous company bought VisualCron, it was €800 per server per year. On a scale of one to five, I would rate the pricing for VisualCron a five because it was just right. The tool was affordable, and it has one of the most competitive pricing in the market."

"ROI is one month."

"The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."

"We are fine with a rather cheap setup. Licensing with VisualCron is fair. You have a simple one-year licence in different sizes. There isn't a licensing jungle with hundreds of options and opt-ins."

"The price is a bit high."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

28%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	18

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	5

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about JAMS?

I find the historical tracking feature of JAMS invaluable for reviewing past events.

See all answers

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 functionality and importance of the tool, although the increase did unsettle our management.

See all answers

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 functioning properly. From the past three years, it has remained the same, but sometim...

See all answers

What do you like most about VisualCron?

The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VisualCron?

The price is a bit high. However, it is okay.

See all answers

What needs improvement with VisualCron?

The documentation is a bit weak. The tool must provide a better set of documentation.

See all answers

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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 13% of the time

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Compared 12% of the time

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Compared 10% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

JAMS

January 2026

Download JAMS product report

Buyer's Guide

VisualCron

January 2026

Download VisualCron product report

Interactive Demo

JAMS Software

Demo not available

SMA Technologies

Overview

JAMS is an automation and job scheduling solution designed for workflow optimization, catering to businesses large and small with flexible licensing and integration options.

Offering both Core and Advanced packages, JAMS supports a range of environments from small teams to large-scale operations. Its standout features include integration with platforms like PowerShell, SQL, and SAP, coupled with capabilities such as dependency management and natural language scheduling. JAMS simplifies job management, centralizes workflows, and boosts productivity with its robust automation features. Customizable workflows and insightful logging make it adaptable for diverse needs, supported by responsive customer service ensuring seamless operations.

What are JAMS's key features?

Automation & Scheduling: Flexible automation helps manage complex job schedules efficiently.
Integration: Connects seamlessly with platforms like SQL Server, SAP, and Python for diverse applications.
Centralized Job Management: A unified interface for handling thousands of jobs daily.
Dependency Management: Supports complex workflows with efficient dependency tracking.
Insightful Logging: Provides detailed logs and notifications for precise task execution.

What benefits should users look for in JAMS reviews?

Enhanced Productivity: Automates repetitive tasks, freeing up resources for strategic initiatives.
Scalability: Flexible licensing models grow with business size and needs.
Efficient Workflow Automation: Streamlines job orchestration across environments.
Responsive Support: Helps ensure smooth operations with quick troubleshooting.

In industries, JAMS is employed for automating workflows and managing batch jobs. Organizations utilize it for SSIS, SQL Server tasks, file transfers, and integrating with vendor systems, achieving efficient file automation and data management. Scheduler enables precise execution of thousands of tasks daily, enhancing operational efficiency.

JAMS Software

VisualCron offers task automation through a visual interface, eliminating the need for programming skills. With capabilities like alerting and variable usage, users benefit from integration with databases, timely task execution, and cross-platform operations.

VisualCron empowers users by simplifying complex workflows. It allows seamless task automation through features like interactive scheduling and role-based operations. Users appreciate its integration capabilities, replacing multiple tools with a comprehensive automation solution. The support system ensures quick assistance, making it a reliable choice for workflow visualization and task execution. However, areas like error handling and interface design require enhancements for improved user experience.

What are the key features of VisualCron?

Visual Interface: Users automate tasks without needing programming skills.
Integration: Connects with databases and multiple systems to streamline operations.
Alerting: Notifies users about tasks and system statuses.
Task Scheduling: Allows interactive management of automated tasks.
Credentials Management: Enables cross-platform operations securely.

What benefits can users expect when evaluating VisualCron?

Increased Efficiency: Reduces the time spent on manual processes.
Cost Reduction: Eliminates the need for multiple tools by consolidating functionalities.
Enhanced Support: Offers robust post-sales support for quicker assistance.
Streamlined Workflows: Simplifies complex task automation.

Organizations leverage VisualCron in industries like finance and logistics to automate tasks such as encryption and secure file transfers. It's also integral in managing data operations, facilitating communications between systems, and executing SQL jobs, enhancing operational efficiency across sectors.

SMA Technologies

Sample Customers

Teradata, Arconic, General Dynamics, Yum!, CVS Health, Comcast, Ghiradelli, & Boston’s Children’s Hospital

7 Eleven, ABB Sécheron SA, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Amazon Europe Core, Apple, Assa Abloy, Aston Martin, Banco Santander, BMW (Australia)

Buyer's Guide

JAMS vs. VisualCron

January 2026

Free Report: JAMS vs. VisualCron

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