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VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator vs VisualCron comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Sponsored
Ranking in Workload Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
38
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
11
Ranking in other categories
Managed File Transfer (MFT) (14th), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (14th)
VMware Aria Automation Orch...
Ranking in Workload Automation
15th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of JAMS is 2.8%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VisualCron is 1.4%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator is 1.0%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
JAMS2.8%
VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator1.0%
VisualCron1.4%
Other94.8%
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2770605 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Sourav-Dutta - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
Mayank-Goyal - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Consultant at MBCOM
Have streamlined multi-cloud provisioning and reduced virtual machine delivery time from days to hours
In terms of Orchestrator as a tool there is a lot of room for improvement, specifically in being more developer-friendly though it has come a long way. From that perspective, certain modern features are missing, especially when compared to developer tools such as Visual Studio Code or other code editors. That's essential, considering it's the primary development tool for VMware. In terms of Automation, there should be more features that align with what public cloud interfaces can provide. Not everyone is a developer; therefore, if they can offer out-of-the-box features for the most common scenarios that customers need, it would be highly beneficial for end users.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable aspect of JAMS is its robustness."
"The built-in triggers are great."
"It's a full-featured job scheduling tool. The part that I liked the best was the support team. This tool was new, and we were all learning it and setting up the different jobs that were complex in nature. Their support team was very responsive in helping us out through the setup and resolving the issues. They have been incredibly awesome."
"We have over 50 jobs running daily to manage all the integration of our systems and we don’t have to monitor these jobs; they just run, JAMS centralizes the management of jobs in our environment, has streamlined our monitoring, saves us about four hours a week in troubleshooting time, and has helped free up about eight hours a week of IT staff time."
"JAMS saves us on the order of thousands of hours per year."
"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."
"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."
"We don't have to do any coding. We just plug and play and it works."
"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."
"Support is AAA+, fast, and very detailed."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of VisualCron is its ability to schedule interactive jobs so that you can have interdependencies within the job and interdependencies of a job on another job, and so on."
"We don't have to do any coding, we just plug and play and it works."
"'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."
"It helped us reduce manual steps."
"Primarily, customers are looking for workflows and day-to-day actions, as well as advanced templates."
"Primarily, customers are looking for workflows and day-to-day actions, as well as advanced templates."
"With automation, I can provision a virtual machine in just one to two hours; this is a drastic improvement."
"The best features of VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator include peace of mind and lesser complexity; simplicity is crucial, and there is no complexity in the system."
 

Cons

"If there were a softcover book on how to really take advantage of all of JAMS' tools, I would buy it. I do better with training books than online searching, so a book would be helpful."
"If there were a softcover book on how to really take advantage of all of JAMS' tools, I would buy it."
"For scalability, I would rate it as seven because when we have a huge volume, sometimes the tool is not so responsive."
"The error messages from JAMS often need clarification, hindering our ability to resolve issues swiftly."
"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."
"The monitoring of the JAMS product and its performance is an area of concern for me."
"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."
"One thing that I know that the JAMS people said that they were working on that would be huge for us is a search capability so that you could search for tasks. It may be available in version 7 or in a future release of 7. I think that's on their roadmap. But right now, for us to do a search, we have to search through database queries."
"Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way."
"VisualCron seems to operate like an efficient machine when it comes to improvements and enhancements and new features. I always appreciate the quick response I get when bringing up an issue or coming up with suggestions. I've mentioned before that it would be great to see a move away from SQLCE and XML configuration files."
"VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve."
"I want to improve the UI in VisualCron, as it's not as user-friendly, particularly when setting up the task scheduler."
"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."
"I've mentioned before that it would be great to see a move away from SQLCE and XML configuration files."
"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."
"I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run."
"I would like to see improvements related to AI integration, which could make understanding from a language perspective easier."
"VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator is a very solid and acceptable product, but after the transition to Broadcom, prices are very high."
"There are areas of VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator that have room for improvement, specifically in being more developer-friendly."
"Some students, especially beginners, may find the learning curve to be steep due to a lack of requisite knowledge in backend languages like YAML, Python, or JavaScript."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"JAMS is relatively inexpensive, with additional costs only incurred for tags, other services, and optional support renewals."
"In the end, you'll find that it's really worth the price. There is some sticker shock, but it's worth every dime."
"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."
"The product is reasonably priced, and we don't have any add-ons."
"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."
"It's expensive, to be honest, but it does the job."
"The licensing model for JAMS is straightforward and based on the number of agents, not the number of jobs you run. It's cheap and fairly simple."
"The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."
"ROI is 95 percent."
"The price is a bit high."
"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."
"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."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Computer Software Company
28%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about JAMS?
I find the historical tracking feature of JAMS invaluable for reviewing past events.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JAMS?
My thoughts on the pricing of JAMS are that I won't say it is cheap, but it is cost-efficient, and that should be acc...
What needs improvement with JAMS?
An area that has room for improvement is related to the AWS RDS and database part, where they said that is in progres...
What do you like most about VisualCron?
The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%.
What needs improvement with VisualCron?
The documentation is a bit weak. The tool must provide a better set of documentation.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator?
Currently, I find the pricing to be on the expensive side. After the Broadcom acquisition, the licenses skyrocketed i...
What needs improvement with VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator?
In terms of Orchestrator as a tool there is a lot of room for improvement, specifically in being more developer-frien...
What is your primary use case for VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator?
My use case for VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator or now known as VCF Operations Orchestrator which is part of VCF ...
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

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)
1. VMware 2. Dell Technologies 3. Cisco Systems 4. IBM 5. Hewlett Packard Enterprise 6. Microsoft 7. Oracle 8. Amazon Web Services 9. Google Cloud 10. Intel 11. Accenture 12. Fujitsu 13. Hitachi Vantara 14. NetApp 15. Red Hat 16. SAP 17. Siemens 18. T-Systems 19. Verizon 20. AT&T 21. Vodafone 22. Orange 23. BT Group 24. Deutsche Telekom 25. Ericsson 26. Nokia 27. Samsung 28. Sony 29. Toshiba 30. Panasonic 31. LG Electronics 32. Philips
Find out what your peers are saying about VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator vs. VisualCron and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.