We performed a comparison between OpCon 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: OpCon offers flexibility, integration capabilities, and self-service features, reducing reliance on IT. It also excels in automation, graphical user interface, and database functionality. Tidal Automation has a strong job scheduler, real-time monitoring, and error handling. It also provides role-based access control and compliance controls for data security.
OpCon has areas that can be enhanced, such as its online platform, Solution Manager, and the process of upgrading to newer versions. It would be advantageous to have a mobile application and improved failover functionality. Tidal Automation requires improvements in its user interface, pricing structure, and integration capabilities. Additionally, it could benefit from advanced reporting, artificial intelligence, and machine learning features.
Service and Support: OpCon's customer service receives positive feedback for its promptness and successful resolutions, whereas Tidal Automation's support team is lauded for their expertise and willingness to assist. OpCon occasionally provides irrelevant solutions, while Tidal Automation sometimes overlooks less important matters.
Ease of Deployment: OpCon's initial setup necessitates collaboration with SMA consultants and training, making it complex. Tidal Automation offers a straightforward and easy setup with helpful documentation, resulting in a shorter deployment process.
Pricing: OpCon is recognized as having a high initial investment and being intricate to set up, however, it is regarded as a worthwhile product that offers good value for its cost. Tidal Automation is deemed to have a reasonable and predictable price, providing good value for the features and support it offers.
ROI: OpCon is a valuable investment that saves time, reduces errors, and eliminates the need for full-time operators. Tidal Automation provides cost savings, increased efficiency, and improved risk management.
Comparison Results: OpCon is the favored choice when compared to Tidal Automation. OpCon offers flexibility and integration capabilities, allowing users to automate tasks according to their specific requirements. The self-service feature improves productivity and reduces dependence on IT. Users particularly appreciate OpCon's graphical user interface and database functionality.
"The whole product is valuable to us because of the integrations that it has with the MCP and the Windows environments. You have to have the agent on each one of them that you want to monitor. The integrations that we have created are along the lines of extracting files and sending them through SFTP to another vendor. Those are the things that were taking a lot of time away from my staff."
"It allows us to have more information and more control than we previously had over the processes that are running in host systems."
"I have been pleased with the support that we can get from the European partners. I think they are very good. All the time, when we have a question, they have an answer. It is very reassuring to have that support every day. Then, you can concentrate on your job and OpCon is just there to work. For us, it's perfect."
"It allows batch work to run as smoothly and efficiently as possible."
"There are three features which are valuable: the automated calendar functions; the notification process for failed jobs or unscheduled events occurring, via email and text messaging; and the ability for the scheduling package to communicate across multiple platforms."
"It's very scalable. Right now we're barely scratching the surface of what it can do. I've looked at Symitar's instance of OpCon and they're running something like 13,000 jobs a day with all the clients that they have. So it can go from small use cases like ours to enterprise-level."
"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 features are its integration into Windows, into VM, and into AIX, as well as SQL."
"It's the most efficient tool in doing repetitive tasks and saves a lot of time with minimum possibility of error."
"With the varied features in the varied adapters provided, we use Tidal Enterprise Scheduler because we want everything to be scheduled in one place. Tidal provides that for us with its tools and varying platforms in our organization. Tidal provides all the connectors to the platforms. This is very useful because we don't want to look for another scheduler for scheduling certain jobs. We don't want to look at those schedules manually between platforms."
"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."
"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..."
"Tidal Automation’s most valuable feature is customization. It can work and connect with any app."
"The thing that I like the most is the reliability of the engine. The actual scheduling part of the product is pretty much flawless, but the stability of the product is what I find to be reassuring."
"For us, the calendaring system is very robust. Some of the teams have very specific requests for when they need jobs to run. That's been really valuable, because a lot of times, when people run scripts, if they run on a holiday, they're going to fail... A couple of times a month it probably saves us work and the necessity of logging in from home and checking to make sure everything's okay."
"It's easy to use and easy to administer, and it's very flexible."
"More functionality within self-service would be greatly appreciated."
"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."
"I would like to see them improve the Solution Manager for the web application. It's the future for us. Our customers need a lot of functionality, but there isn't that functionality within Solution Manager. So they have to develop and improve it."
"Enterprise Manager is a little clunky which I know they're addressing in the solution's manager."
"We are still in the early stages of our implementation, so at this point, I cannot see any needed improvements or features."
"I have noticed lately that [tech support's] first answers tend to be, "Let's upgrade it to the latest and greatest first," without looking into anything. The last couple of times I've logged a ticket that's been the response, which is a little frustrating. We're not big on just upgrading on a whim. We do full testing."
"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."
"A way to select multiple jobs in the UI for a quick change or to hold, release, et cetera, would be nice."
"For the most part, the drill-down and the logging are really good. But if we take an Informatica job, for example: We have the ability, and the operators have the ability, to actually drill down and see, at a session level, where the failure is. There is, unfortunately, no way to extract that into an actual output email or failure email. It's not that that information is not available, but extracting it into an email would be a nice-to-have."
"Tidal Software interface could be more intuitive and user-friendly."
"The drill-down into details using the Graphical Views feature is a bit difficult and not that helpful. If you want to go into the details, you have to go to the Job Activity. Graphical Views is not that easy for getting that kind of information."
"The user interface is the place that needs the most work. If and when we find issues with the product, they are usually in that area. If I had to choose, that's where I'd want issues, as opposed to in the engine. But the UI is average. It's a little sluggish at times and there are some bugs in it."
"Initially, it is complicated to understand the functionalities as there is limited product documentation."
"My complaint about their pricing model is that every year or every time technology changes or somebody has a new requirement, it usually means that I can schedule that with Tidal, but I would need another adapter. So, every time there is a change, I need a different adapter that I don't have. That's why it is harder to plan for Tidal growth because you have to buy a new adapter every time."
"To better fit their unique needs, the solution should give more customization options."
"From an administrative point of view, I wouldn't give really high marks to the solution. I actually entertained getting the JAWS application at one point. One of the shortcomings with the scheduler is the reporting capabilities. At least at the time, JAWS was the best that they had for a third-party integration. I think they've got things in the pipeline to help alleviate that gap."
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OpCon is ranked 9th in Workload Automation with 56 reviews while Tidal by Redwood is ranked 2nd in Workload Automation with 37 reviews. OpCon is rated 9.2, while Tidal by Redwood is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of OpCon writes "Gives us the ability to schedule dependent jobs across different mainframes". 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". OpCon is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, UiPath and VisualCron, whereas Tidal by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs and VisualCron. See our OpCon vs. Tidal by Redwood report.
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