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Stonebranch vs Tidal by Redwood comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 2025

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

Stonebranch
Ranking in Workload Automation
14th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Tidal by Redwood
Ranking in Workload Automation
12th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of Stonebranch is 4.9%, up from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tidal by Redwood is 4.6%, up from 3.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Siddharth Matalia - PeerSpot reviewer
Good GUI and has helpful support but needs a mobile app
This was a migration project where we provided our database, the previous one, and there was a tool that automatically converted the awarded job into Stonebranch. All the conversion was done from the Stonebranch side, and we got a person as well from Stonebranch during migration. There was a person who worked with us a decade back for the AutoSys install as well. He was well aware of our environment, so he helped us a lot. It was easy. It was not that complex. It is much more GUI. That said, we are looking for how the various automation can be done since, through command lines, you can create a number of jobs. While you are creating a single job, it takes 15 minutes with the GUI, however, if you go for the command line, within two or three minutes, your job gets completed. We have built our own solution for automation using some REST API and all those various integrations. It is working for our organization right now. However, we are requesting some kind of solution from Stonebranch. They should have been providing that to us already. For deployment, three or four people were engaged with the setup on their side. To manage everything, they provided us with a person who required help to manage it. Eventually, since it was a cloud platform on their side, if there is some configuration necessary, which they do it. They get a notification, and they fix it very immediately if there is an issue. The response time is very good from their side, and we don't have to worry about maintenance.
Steve Mikula - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I have found the agents to be so much simpler, when compared to ESP."
"When it comes to agent technology and compatibility with other vendors, from a platform perspective it was the one vendor that fit all the platforms that we have, from your old platforms - mainframe, NSK, IBM i - to the new ones, going into cloud and container"
"I love the Universal Controller. It's been great for us. We host it on-premise... It's High Availability, meaning there's failover from one server to the other if one goes down."
"We lean a lot on the multi-tenancy that they offer within the product, the ability to get other people to self-manage their estate, versus having a central team do all the scheduling."
"The tasks are incredibly capable, and as long as you name them with a nice, uniform naming convention, they are very useful. You can create some interesting workflows through various machines, or you can just have it kick off single tasks. All in all, I really like the Universal Task. You can do some mutually exclusive stuff, such as an "A not B" kind of thing. It has a lot of capabilities behind the scenes."
"The most valuable feature is the reliability of the agents, because we need them accessible and we need to run stuff. The agent technology and compatibility are top-notch."
"I can name the aliases on the agent, so if we need a passive environment for an agent, that's one of the nice features. If our primary goes down, I can bring up the passive one and I don't have to change anything in the scheduling world. It will start running from that new server."
"I like the dashboard and the various workflows."
"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."
"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."
"By leveraging machine learning algorithms, Tidal Automation can use this data to optimize turbine settings and improve overall efficiency and performance."
"We wouldn't be able to do many of the complex scheduling that we do today without it. For us, it is a mission-critical app. Because if it doesn't work or has a problem, then SAP doesn't function. It is that critical. So, it's an essential tool for us to manage and run SAP jobs."
"The feature that I find to be valuable, as I'm working with other folks, is the ability to cross-schedule across platforms, and the flexibility that comes with that."
"It is intended to enable large-scale automation environments, making it appropriate for companies with complicated processes and big data volumes."
"The most valuable feature is the job scheduler, where you can schedule thousands of jobs to execute at specific times."
"With other tools, you do not have the ability to schedule jobs on their own. You need to create a group and then assign everything to that group. Only then will the job be able to execute. In Tidal, you can schedule a single job and there is no need to create a group. That's what I like the most."
 

Cons

"There is room for improvement with its connectivity with the Microsoft SRS system. It is very weak. They keep telling us it works with it, and technically it does, but it does not provide a lot of visibility. We have lost a lot of visibility migrating to Stonebranch, compared with just running tasks on the SRS server. That's really about the only thing that is a sore point for us."
"It can't handle negative written codes."
"I would rate Stonebranch somewhere in the middle for ease of setup. It wasn't too straightforward for us because our infrastructure is complex."
"Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics."
"There is a component called the OMS, which is the message broker. We rely on infrastructure, resiliency, and availability for that piece. If that could change to be highly available just as a software component, so that we don't have to provide the high-available storage, etc. for it, that would be a plus. It would just be cheaper to run."
"One hiccup we've had is due to the fact that we have other internal scheduling tools. We're able to talk to them, but we have trouble with some of the networking between them, so we're still trying to work out the kinks there."
"Occasionally, we have an agent that doesn't come back up after patching. That doesn't happen very often... It's really just a restart of the agent and it comes back up. But that might be one thing that could be improved."
"It would be ideal if they had the exact same features as the CA Workload Automation DE series. It would be helpful to have calendaring options."
"Their software installation and update process could use some improvements. I'm pretty sure they're working on that, but that's definitely an area where it could be streamlined a lot. There's still a lot of manual work that you have to do with the schedule when you deploy masters or do the agents."
"Tidal's adaptability and user-friendliness could be increased by integrating it with additional programmes and platforms."
"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 solution needs more advanced reporting and data visualization capabilities to enable deeper analysis of job performance and trends."
"The software's performance and scalability could be improved, particularly when dealing with large-scale workloads or complex business processes."
"Setting up the initial product was a little hard."
"One area for improvement is the command-line interface and the API to bulk-load jobs. It's a little bit kludgy, but we still manage without it. They're working on it and it's getting better all the time. In addition, the documentation for their API for creating jobs needs to be updated. It's a bit of a learning curve."
"They can do better reporting in terms of production statistics reporting."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When we reviewed this solution against other vendors, Stonebranch blew everybody out of the water in terms of cost."
"Stonebranch is cheaper than Control-M, so many companies are using Stonebranch."
"I don't have pricing information, but I do know it's cheaper than our old legacy system. Other than the standard licensing fees there are no additional costs."
"Outside of licensing fees, there aren't any other costs."
"The price of the solution is at a medium level compared to the competition."
"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."
"The licensing model's flexibility is awesome. The way it's licensed for us is that it's licensed per master and then per agent. We have an enterprise agreement, so we have unlimited agents, and we have it on 500 devices."
"Tidal is a low-cost tool and not expensive in comparison to other tools."
"Our licensing model for Tidal is on an annual basis. It is very good and works well for us. Tidal's licensing is very transparent and simple. It lets you know, for the amount you use, that's the price that you pay. So, we buy X number of licenses, and we know that this is where we are. I'm very happy with that. I saw the licensing modules on other platforms, and I didn't like them. Other companies and solutions would calculate the connections, adapters, and instances. I think that's the reason that BMC was pretty expensive: They just didn't understand what our needs are."
"This solution is a bit expensive in the current world where everybody is trying to cut down on certain things."
"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."
"We are satisfied with the pricing of Tidal. It's in the moderate range and it feels very achievable for us."
"Our annual maintenance cost is competitive for what we have and what they do."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
25%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Insurance Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Insurance Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about Tidal Automation?
Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Tidal Automation?
The price is reasonable in terms of the product’s functionality.
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...
 

Also Known As

Stonebranch Universal Automation Center
Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nissan, Coop, United Supermarkets, Groupon, CSC, Orbitz, Johnson & Johnson, BMW, Qantas.
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Find out what your peers are saying about Stonebranch vs. Tidal by Redwood and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
864,155 professionals have used our research since 2012.