OpCon vs Tidal by Redwood comparison

SMA Technologies and Tidal Software by Redwood are both solutions in the Workload Automation category. SMA Technologies is ranked #10 with an average rating of 9.1, while Tidal Software by Redwood is ranked #6 with an average rating of 9.6. SMA Technologies holds a 1.9% mindshare in WA, compared to Tidal Software by Redwood’s 3.9% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of SMA Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Tidal Software by Redwood users who would recommend it.

OpCon

Read 59 OpCon reviews

1,845 Views
716 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Tidal by Redwood

Read 37 Tidal by Redwood reviews

2,585 Views
1,090 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

OpCon

Tidal by Redwood

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

Tidal by Redwood and OpCon compete in the enterprise job scheduling and automation space. Tidal excels with robust calendaring and cross-platform capabilities, while OpCon shines in self-service and user accessibility.

Features: Tidal by Redwood is known for its robust calendaring, complex dependency management, and flexible security settings. Users can efficiently monitor processes, manage workloads, and integrate with diverse systems. OpCon stands out with its self-service capabilities, allowing end-users to initiate tasks independently. It supports complex scheduling and automation across platforms, enhancing productivity and reliability in batch-processing tasks.

Room for Improvement: Tidal could improve by enhancing its reporting features and simplifying the promotion of changes between environments. Users note the dual client interface causes inconsistencies, suggesting a unified interface would enhance usability. For OpCon, improvements in Solution Manager and expanded integration capabilities are suggested, particularly with modern UI features and visualization. Non-technical staff would benefit from enhanced ease of use.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tidal by Redwood is predominantly deployed on-premises, occasionally in hybrid and public clouds. Support has improved since transitioning from Cisco to STA, with consistent and knowledgeable service. OpCon also prefers on-premises deployment, providing robust support in North America. There is noted variability in support quality by region, but improvements are ongoing.

Pricing and ROI: Tidal offers a flexible licensing model appreciated for cost predictability and efficient scaling. Users find pricing reasonable for the functionality, reporting satisfactory ROI through automation efficiencies. OpCon is noted for cost-effectiveness compared to hiring additional personnel. Though initially expensive, its productivity and risk reduction benefits justify the investment, leading to solid ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed OpCon vs. Tidal by Redwood Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

OpCon vs. Tidal by Redwood

April 2025

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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

OpCon

Ranking in Workload Automation

10th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Tidal by Redwood

Ranking in Workload Automation

6th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of OpCon is 1.9%, down from 2.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tidal by Redwood is 3.9%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Workload Automation

Featured Reviews

Jose Rivera Hernandez

Senior VP of Technology at Triangle Credit Union

Helps automate all kinds of jobs and it's worth the price because it saves a lot of time and money

One problem that I had with them when we got SMA Technologies is that sometimes the jobs fail, but they automatically restart. SMA Technologies automatically gets a notification that the job has failed, and they restart it on their end, so now, we have the job restarting twice. There were times when we came into the office in the morning, and we had two files because the job ran twice. I do not know if the system can prevent a job from running the second time. If a job has run successfully, or it is running, it should not run again.

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Steve Mikula

IT Scheduling Manager at Paychex, Inc.

Very reliable processing engine, and scheduling is flawless—crucial elements in our financial transaction processing

Because we've been on it for 20 years, it's pretty easy for us to automate jobs with Tidal at this point. It has become second nature. It's pretty simplistic to set up and get going, although there are different levels of complexity you can have within the product. It depends on how simple you want to keep it. If you just keep it: Job A, Job B, Job C, Job D, that becomes pretty simple. But when you start integrating some complex calendars that use sub-calendars—and you can go three, four, or five deep to set up schedules—it becomes more complicated. The beauty of it is you can go as deep as you need to. We can get really complex or we can keep it simple. We have some use cases for both scenarios. 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. We are a financial company, we move billions of dollars a day, and if we don't have our transactions processed in a timely manner we can be penalized and our clients can be penalized. It can have a serious financial impact.

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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

"We're also starting to use its Self Service and Solution Manager. My team in the data center and some of the development team use the Self Service. Developers are using the Self Service for upon-request jobs for their testing. They used to have to go through us to schedule testing and now they can just go on and kick it off all they want. They have also really appreciated that they have access to view and/or submit jobs."

"Where I see it working best is when we are trying to automate jobs."

"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."

"We have found it scales very well. We run thousands of thousands of jobs every day, and sometimes thousands of jobs in a few hours."

"Often times there are criteria that cannot be determined by the system, which allows a human to make the determination and use the Self-Service Solution Manager to trigger a job."

"There are a lot of valuable features. The version that we're currently casting, Self Service, is going to be the most valuable to us. It is going to allow us to open up the doors, broaden our automation capability and help other business units to be able to automate a lot of the little things that they do from day to day. I'm really looking forward to being able to help other areas with their automation needs. Self Service is really key."

"Last year, we added a second environment and the OpCon Deploy product. This has allowed us to build a testing environment. This has been a great addition for us as we can work through our workflows without disrupting our production environment."

"It is so simplistic that it gives us peace of mind. Before, we had all these processes that were run manually, such as different file transfers and jobs running for our core at certain times. Now, all that stuff is done automatically."

More OpCon pros

"Especially in the newer versions of Tidal, the segmentation of user permissions enables us to give people operator permissions for their jobs, to rerun jobs, but view-only for other groups' jobs. We're able to keep people from hurting themselves or other groups accidentally. The permissioning is really good."

"Tidal Workload Automation Software provides the ability to quickly adapt to changing business requirements."

"Tidal Automation allows organizations to automate complex workflows and processes, reducing the need for manual intervention and improving operational efficiency."

"The first, big thing that we got out of using Tidal Workload Automation was having a centralized view of the status of all of our batch processes across all these systems... We can look into the schedule at any given time and see if things are running on track or if they are falling behind. We can also see if something failed."

"I like the fact that I have control, and I am able to monitor. If there is an issue, I would be able to respond to any jobs that may fail. With any other scheduler that I know of, a lot of times, when I have a very complex script, if there is an issue in the middle of it, I have to let the whole process fail and then figure out a way to recover from it, whereas Tidal will stop the process, and I can resolve that issue. Once I resolve the issue, I can continue the process. This is very important for invoicing, accounts payable, accounts receivable, or any kind of financial reporting. It allows you to recover from an issue much more effectively than anything else that I have seen."

"We have to run about 12,000 jobs every day and the majority of them need to be launched from our ERP, JD Edwards. The native compatibility of the Tidal platform with JD Edwards dovetails with our greatest need. It's directly connected to the heart of our IT system. We couldn't work without it."

"We use the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads. The solution’s ability to manage and monitor these workloads is very easy and accurate. We have file dependencies for running jobs. The job does not start until a file exists on a completely different server, then where the job will run. So, it is cross systems."

"The best feature is that it allows task scheduling based on particular occurrences, like the receipt of files, database updates, or system notifications."

More Tidal by Redwood pros

Cons

"Of course they have a RESTful API within OpCon, but they have that new web services agent that we installed because we have some SOAP APIs and we had to interact with SMA to get things running. Our developers did do some tweaks, but we have now been able to get some test jobs running, and understand how the workflow goes back and forth."

"The GUI is very old-fashioned compared to Control-M, for example. They should prioritize the GUI."

"There is a learning curve. We had to go to class, learn, and take their training classes, then come back. We got assistance from OpCon as well to convert our processes on the Unisys machine over to the IBM. Now, when we add new products, it's pretty straightforward to write a new process and schedule it, then run it at a set time of day."

"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."

"There are some limitations in the actual jobs that are created and how you're able to rename files. Suppose you're bringing in, say, 10, 15, or 20 reports from a core system, and you're using an "asterisk character" to identify files. For example, if you're grabbing files that start with this, end with this, but the characters in between could be different, it has to retain that same name in the destination. It won't allow you to rename them with a date stamp or the like."

"I would like to see OpCon being accessible using a mobile app."

"I'd like to see the product include a view where you can see everything about a specific job on a single screen."

"It's not something you can just quickly grab, try, run, and play with. You have to get the knowledge and train yourself. It was easy for me, but I also took the time to throw myself into it. There is a learning curve to a certain extent. You have to learn the rules."

More OpCon cons

"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."

"With the client, we have had certain issues. The user interface for Tidal is a little slow. A lot of people would love this tool if they had a faster user interface. The drill-down functionality should be much quicker than what it is pulling out now. If I fill out some data, then it takes awhile to get that data back onto the screen. It's not as fast as we were expecting."

"The UI might have the potential to provide a more polished and user-centric encounter, promoting seamless engagements and simplifying the navigation process for individuals interacting with the software."

"We've had some quirky stuff happen on an occasional basis where a job does not take off. For example, a job we expected to be finished by 3:00 a.m. is sitting there and not executing when we come in in the morning. We have to go all the way back to the dependencies and then we can see that one of the dependencies has become unscheduled, for some reason. No changes were made to the schedule but this prerequisite job has, all of a sudden, become unscheduled. I have brought this up with Tidal's support but they have never had an answer for it."

"Initially, it is complicated to understand the functionalities as there is limited product documentation."

"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."

"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."

"The GUI, the graphical user interface, gets a little bit busy."

More Tidal by Redwood cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The total cost of ownership is about the same to our previous product. The costs are relatively similar."

"The pricing is very reasonable."

"Scaling is pricey."

"It was substantially less expensive than ASG-Zeke... I would suggest that someone who is only looking at price when evaluating workload automation tools take a very hard look at OpCon because it is well-priced."

"Compared to AutoSys and ISE, OpCon was a lot cheaper to put in. AutoSys is hundreds of thousands of dollars to just install it because they don't have an interface into our system. You have to teach them what your system does."

"While the base pricing is reasonable, the à la carte options are making the overall cost more complicated and potentially problematic."

"Yearly, it's around $30,000."

"On a yearly basis our cost is between $25,000 and $30,000."

More OpCon pricing and cost advice

"We think the pricing is very fair. We have been happy with the pricing compared to some of the other solutions in the space."

"The solution enables admins and users to see the information relevant to them, but this is bundled as an add-on that we would have to pay for."

"The solution has no hidden costs. It helps me to plan forward into the future. I know that I can add another 100 or a thousand jobs, and that's how much it will cost me today."

"There have been pricing increases, but with the reduction that our company obtained from Tidal this year, the pricing has become very acceptable for this type of product."

"We pay maintenance annually through Blue House of about $9,000. That's for our two environments: production and test."

"They work with you on licensing. So, it has been great. Everybody has different licensing, but I've had good luck with the licensing. They've been very accommodating. You basically need to buy a license for each physical server, but then you're allowed an unlimited number of virtual servers."

"There are project, system, and server costs. Some of the things that they are doing is introducing new products. They are introducing what they call their Repository, which is a way for you to move a job. That doesn't cost anything to us, because it is reusing a tool called Transporter. The repository is the successor to Transporter, so we already own it and are sort of grandfathered in. But that new product requires a server and database, so now we have to go out and get a server and database. So, there is a cost there."

"I have had no issues with the licensing."

More Tidal by Redwood pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

45%

Financial Services Firm

21%

Government

Real Estate/Law Firm

Financial Services Firm

21%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Computer Software Company

10%

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about OpCon?

My favorite feature is the dashboard feature, which shows jobs that are running, and completed, any failures, and provides dashboard reporting.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OpCon?

I am the one who signs the contract. In the beginning, when I started working here, it seemed very expensive, but after I learned everything that it does, I found it worth the price. I would recomm...

See all answers

What needs improvement with OpCon?

See all answers

What do you like most about Tidal Automation?

Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Tidal Automation?

The price is reasonable in terms of the product’s functionality.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Tidal Automation?

Initially, it is complicated to understand the functionalities as there is limited product documentation. The setup and configuration of the software is a bit complicated. Providing the training vi...

See all answers

Comparisons

Control-M vs OpCon

Compared 34% of the time

VisualCron vs OpCon

Compared 13% of the time

Automic Automation vs OpCon

Compared 12% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs OpCon

Compared 10% of the time

JAMS vs OpCon

Compared 5% of the time

More OpCon Competitors

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 44% of the time

Control-M vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 23% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 7% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 7% of the time

Automic Automation vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 2% of the time

More Tidal by Redwood Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

OpCon

April 2025

Download OpCon product report

Buyer's Guide

Tidal by Redwood

April 2025

Download Tidal by Redwood product report

Also Known As

No data available

Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler

Overview

OpCon automates batch processing, core system operations, file transfers, and daily processing. Integrated across Unisys, Windows, and cloud systems, OpCon is used in financial institutions, credit unions, and multi-platform environments for job scheduling, report generation, SQL queries, scripting, and FTP processes, handling thousands of jobs daily.

Users value OpCon for comprehensive automation capabilities, particularly the scheduling feature that allows advance planning and streamlined workflows. The self-service functionality enables non-IT staff to manage tasks efficiently. OpCon's integration with core banking systems, robust job management, and error notification system significantly improve operational efficiency. Features like Solution Manager enhance accessibility and control, ensuring process continuity and ease of use.

What are the Key Features of OpCon?

Advanced Scheduling: Allows users to plan and automate workflows efficiently.
Self-Service Functionality: Empowers non-IT staff to manage tasks independently.
Integration with Core Systems: Works seamlessly with core banking systems and other platforms.
Error Notifications: Provides robust error management and notifications for quick resolution.
Solution Manager: Enhances control and accessibility for managing automated processes.

What Benefits Should You Look for in Reviews?

Operational Efficiency: Users often report improved operational performance and reduced manual effort.
Time Savings: Automation of repetitive tasks leads to significant time savings.
Improved Accuracy: Automated systems minimize human error, leading to higher accuracy in processes.
Cost Reduction: Optimized resource usage results in cost savings.
Enhanced Flexibility: Customizable workflows meet unique business requirements.

Users find OpCon complex with a steep learning curve. Desired improvements include better separation of environments, enhanced graphical display, finer user authorization, simpler notification and alerts, more templates, increased web functionality, seamless interface, integration tools, online training, smoother scheduling, better reporting, mobile accessibility, smarter self-service, improved mainframe support, and integration with third-party systems. Pricing model and licensing could be more streamlined.

In financial institutions and credit unions, OpCon is implemented to handle thousands of daily jobs, automate internal processes, and integrate workflows across various platforms. It ensures secure file transfers, generates detailed reports, executes SQL queries, and supports seamless third-party integrations.

SMA Technologies

Tidal Software is a leading provider of enterprise workload automation solutions that orchestrate the execution of complex workflows across systems, applications and IT environments. With a comprehensive portfolio of products and services, Tidal optimizes mission-critical business processes, increases IT cost efficiencies and satisfies legal and regulatory compliance requirements. Hundreds of customers around the world count on Tidal for modernizing their workload automation and driving their digital transformation. Tidal Software is headquartered in Chicago with offices in Houston, London, Minsk, Belarus and Chennai, India. For more information, visit tidalsoftware.com.

Tidal Software by Redwood

Sample Customers

LOHR, Carnival Cruise Lines, Herbalife, Digital Federal Credit Union, Synergent, Frandsen Bank & Trust

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

OpCon vs. Tidal by Redwood

April 2025

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