We performed a comparison between Control-M and Fortra's JAMS based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Control-M offers valuable features such as Managed File Transfer, credentials vault, integration capabilities, Role-Based Administration, file transfer integration, and forecasting. Fortra's JAMS provides job dependency tracking, automation capabilities, warnings and notifications, PowerShell integration, ease of use, centralized management, auditing capability, and extensibility through custom execution methods.
Control-M can improve in areas such as enhancing microservices and API integration, addressing bugs in the web interface, developing a lighter web version, and integrating with third-party tools. Fortra's JAMS could use improvement in terms of intuitiveness, search capability, browser version, source control features, documentation, ACL clarity, connectivity issues, notifications, and compliance with the GPG program.
Service and Support: Control-M's customer service is divisive. Some customers have praised the support team for being prompt and knowledgeable. However, others have expressed their dissatisfaction with the slow response. Fortra's JAMS customer service has been consistently well-reviewed. Customers appreciate the team's responsiveness and expertise.
Ease of Deployment: Users found it easy to install the software for Control-M. Fortra's JAMS had a relatively quick and simple setup process, with users following instructions on the webpage. Some manual conversion of jobs and scripts was required for Control-M, however, once set up, it became the heart of operations. Upgrades and migrations for Control-M were smooth. Some users of Fortra's JAMS had minor challenges during setup but were able to seek assistance from JAMS support.
Pricing: Control-M is seen as having high setup costs due to additional expenses like infrastructure and salaries. Pricing and licensing can be confusing and are important factors for users to consider. In contrast, Fortra's JAMS is praised for its fair and reasonable pricing. It offers unlimited licensing and scalability options, making it a cheaper alternative compared to products like Tivoli and Control-M.
ROI: Control-M has proven to be more cost-effective and efficient, with reduced job duration and improved data management. It also offers centralized connection profiles and automation. Fortra's JAMS has saved time, increased productivity, and provided cost-effectiveness.
Comparison Results: Control-M is the favored choice when comparing it to Fortra's JAMS. Users appreciate Control-M for its user-friendly and efficient setup process, useful integrated guides and instructional videos, seamless agent upgrades with no downtime, and valuable features like Managed File Transfer and Role-Based Administration.
"We use Control-M for maintenance on our Oracle and SQL Server databases. It automates maintenance on packages, including standard procedures on the databases themselves, snapshots, checking integrity, verifying the RDBMS of the databases, etc. It ensures they aren't clogged and that they are running smoothly and that there aren't any jobs stuck, eating up the performance of the server or any of the CPU cores."
"It has multiple features. You can plan your execution in Control-M. It provides one single window where you can define workflows regardless of geographic boundaries and platforms. A batch process can be executed from this single window. It provides insights into your processes. Your business people will know what process they are running and what is the state of the process. Instead of knowing that they're not going to meet the SLA the next morning, the business people immediately know the changes in their process. Control-M is very easy. I can tell a non-technical person that this is how it works, and he would be able to easily understand it. Business people can understand the methodology of Control-M and the intuitive features that it has. It has a fantastic graphical user interface and is easy to understand. You just have to drag and drop but in a very intuitive way. Monitoring features are also good. It has different color coding schemes, which can help you to understand the status of your workflow. An operator who is not that technical and is just monitoring the status of the application can see by color-coding the status of a process. If anything goes wrong or a process is stuck, it gives you a hint. You can just right-click and see the logs and the output. Even if the system is not right there in the data center and is located somewhere else, you can monitor it right from there and see the workflows."
"Self Service for repeatable, low impact workload automation processes."
"The most valuable feature is the reporting function. It allows us to pull up reports for specific information that the end-users are looking for."
"First of all, the shift from manual to automation has been valuable. We have a tool that can automate."
"I find it very helpful to be able to keep track of all our help desk tickets."
"The multiple scheduling options allow you to do anything you want, whenever you want, and however you want. You can easily be in control when things happen."
"It provides a unified view where you can orchestrate and monitor all your application workloads and data pipelines. That's very important because with cloud, software as a service, edge computing, traditional data center, and legacy apps, there are all these environments. If you don't have that single pane of glass or that one place to look at, you're going to invest a lot of time and resources into tracking things down when they go wrong."
"We looked at other companies, like VisualCron, that were cheaper, but one of the main sticking points was the fact that they wouldn't have provided a central location for us to monitor across all servers. That was one of the biggest selling points of JAMS."
"The interface is good, and it's very easy to define and create jobs. If a job is not running or there is an error, the solution will send an email. That's all very good and very useful."
"We also use the solution’s Interactive Agents. If we need to push something to our dealer portal, we can just drop a file in a folder and it goes. Running interactive tasks helps me users focus on business processes since I don’t have to take care of running the jobs manually."
"It has definitely drastically improved our capabilities to scale our automation. Before JAMS, there were a lot of manual processes. We had a couple of operators who spent all day doing that. A lot of the time with human intervention and human processes, it is as good as the person who may be following a procedure and human error is a big problem."
"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."
"Our company is based on data. Everything we do is data-driven, so it has been very valuable having one place where we can process all of the data and do batch schedules with chunks of data."
"While I appreciate the other features, the agent stands out for its ease of installation and configuration for JAMS monitoring."
"The most valuable feature for us is that it's DR-ready. With respect to disaster recovery, it has the built-in capability for failover to our DR site. If all of the required ports are open, it can be done seamlessly."
"But for some issues, BMC will suggest to upgrade to new version which will not be feasible to standards of the organisation. Hence some work around should be shown to run the business until new version was upgraded."
"They can improve their interface."
"The infrastructure updates could use improvement. Some of the previous updates that we have run to get to version nineteen were troublesome. So, a more seamless upgrade path for the infrastructure components would be useful. I don't know if they have replaced that in version 20 or if version 20 has an easier path, but I would like to see the upgrade from one version to the next version be a little smoother."
"With the current version update, I'm not sure why we needed a separate database upgrade. Why not put it all in one package? Previously, you could do it either via a manual upgrade or an in-place upgrade but it wasn't separate."
"The community and the networking that goes on within that community need improvement. We want to be able to reach out to an SME, and say, "Hey, we are doing it this way. Does that make sense?" Ideally, they come back. and say, "Yes, it does make sense to do it that way. However, if you want to do it this way, then it is a little more efficient." We understand that one solution framework doesn't fit everybody. Depending on the breadth of the data and how broad it is, you may have different models for one over the other."
"Its architecture is old. AutoSys gives more flexibility."
"An issue we have run into in our lower environments is that Control-M can log you out frequently."
"A Control-M on-prem license is based on the number of jobs, which is the number of tasks a particular customer wants to have. These tasks have to be run within 24 hours window. For example, if you have a license for 100 jobs, you can run a maximum of 100 jobs in a 24-hour window. If your operations could not run 10 jobs, and they ran only 90 jobs, they just carry over to the next day, but the next day, they will have 110 jobs. Control-M asks you to buy those 10 more licenses because you were out of compliance in terms of the number of licenses. This is something that needs to be indicated in Control-M GUI so that customers know the number of licenses they're going to use in this time window. Their support and documentation should be improved. I am not that satisfied with their customer support. Sometimes, they don't have the answers. Their documentation is very poor. It is not well written, and it is not in a very logical manner. You can use it on Unix, Linux, Windows, and AIX, but it needs some improvement on iSeries. It needs a built-in mechanism inside the system to give you an option to restore from the last point of failure. If a process crashes, the Control-M needs to have a mechanism in iSeries where the process can be restored from the last point of failure."
"The ACL or access permission area needs to be improved. When it comes to defining and providing security permissions, it's a bit confusing if you are new to JAMS. JAMS needs to improve the features for security access or permissions."
"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."
"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."
"It is important to receive notifications if a charged job fails and SQL is halted. JAMS does not provide halted notifications by default, which is a critical feature that needs to be added."
"The documentation is not super... It's not as quick and slick as I'd like it to be."
"With no programming experience, I find JAMS code-driven automation challenging due to the required PowerShell scripting."
"All my machines at work are Macs. JAMS client is a Windows-based thing. It is all built on .NET, which makes perfect sense. However, that means in order for me to access it, I need to connect to a VPN, then log onto one of our Azure VMs in order to access the JAMS client. This is fine, but if for some reason I am unable to do so, it would be nice to be able to have a web-based JAMS client that has all the exact same functionality in it. There are probably a whole bunch of disadvantages that you would get with that as well, but that is definitely something that would make life easier in a few cases."
"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."
Control-M is ranked 1st in Workload Automation with 110 reviews while Fortra's JAMS is ranked 5th in Workload Automation with 27 reviews. Control-M is rated 8.8, while Fortra's JAMS is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Control-M writes "We have seen quicker file transfers with more visibility and stability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Fortra's JAMS writes "We can scale up our organization's scheduling and automation without having to add staff to the department". Control-M is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Rocket Zena, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence and Automic Workload Automation, whereas Fortra's JAMS is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal by Redwood, Redwood RunMyJobs and VisualCron. See our Control-M vs. Fortra's JAMS report.
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