We performed a comparison between Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT and VisualCron based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Managed File Transfer (MFT) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."File monitors are one of the most valuable features. We have about 400 file monitors running in GoAnywhere. They monitor the NAS locations where files arrive, and they kick off workflows. When a file arrives, GoAnywhere will identify that the file is there, move it to a consumption zone, then reach out to our enterprise scheduler through a REST API call."
"GoAnywhere stands out for its user-friendly project creation, intuitive testing and troubleshooting, and especially its notification system, which keeps me informed of any issues that need attention, a feature we lacked before."
"It enabled us to allocate staff toward other work. All the time that we would have wasted worrying about this stuff and correcting problems is put into other parts of our job. That's one of the best things about it, is that we don't waste time on these projects. We just don't have to worry about them because it lets us know if there's a problem."
"Transactions transfer in close to real time. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time because of the volume that we have, but the transactions transfer in seconds to the external platform."
"Another nice feature is that you can invoke a native program from GoAnywhere. That helps you because you don't have to get fancy with agents. If a native program runs on the server that GoAnywhere is running on, like sed or perl, you can use it,"
"All of it is valuable, but the most valuable would be the ability to release medical records without having a limitation for size and not having to deal with the fax machine."
"It is very easy to use. It is easy to create projects in a graphical environment. The configuration and the setup of the environment is very easy"
"The use of this product has helped improve our organization and its ability to send or receive. It has done this by allowing us to remove any homegrown process and centralize needed actions."
"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."
"'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."
"I love VisualCron because we previously spent a lot of time writing Power switches to connect to SQL Server. VisualCron makes it easier to execute services or connect to FileZilla by only adding the credentials to the master credentials stored in the solution."
"VisualCron is a very powerful program to automate different steps in your business processes. We use it to automate replacing files and inform departments about the replacement."
"It helped us reduce manual steps."
"It has improved our organization with more automation within the business departments and less administration and development in the IT department. Usually, as the IT department, we are the bottleneck for many requirements within the business. With this tool, the business departments are able to perform many task themselves."
"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."
"What I found most beneficial from VisualCron is that you can directly connect it with different databases, user accounts, and credentials. You can run queries from one machine to another using the credentials, unlike PowerShell, that's run by the machine itself. With VisualCron, you can directly ask other machines and run requests through user credentials. Suppose you have an AWS or Azure environment. In that case, you can maintain the connection between on-premises and cloud-based machines, which is the type of setup in the organization I'm working for. You can directly call some of the services via VisualCron on your local on-premises machine, and I found that an excellent feature of the tool."
"Its user interface can be improved. The current user interface is a little basic for some of the use cases. We have to use an external component to enhance it. When we need a more appealing user interface, we use an additional component, and that works okay."
"The process of adding a vendor is very easy. You just point and click. You create your job, schedule, and project, and off you go. You just need to know what the processes do when you add in a new job that runs daily and so on. For us, it is not a problem, but maybe the documentation on that could be a little more straightforward. We, however, have no problems figuring that out. It is pretty straightforward for us."
"Improvement in support or product relies on being ingenious, supportive, and listening to its customer base."
"At present, HelpSystems GoAnywhere MFT integrates with an antivirus solution, but it's a bit kludgy."
"The security features must be updated regularly."
"The product could be improved by being modular. There are more features in the core product than any client needs."
"The solution's support for the Unix platform and AS2 should be improved."
"When a monitor invokes a project to accomplish something, that gets logged as a job. I've had a little difficulty figuring out where to look to see the monitor's activities itself, to see if the monitor is having a problem. For instance, if an account on a secure FTP server has expired, the monitor that uses that account doesn't announce to us that it's having a problem. I want to work with them on this to get it fixed."
"The documentation is a bit weak."
"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."
"There are some conditions in the mail trigger, but you can only use them as an "AND" condition, not as an "OR" condition. This is an improvement that could be useful. For example, some people put "invoice" in the subject and others put "invoice" in the body. If I want to make a trigger for everybody whose sending invoices, I have to make two jobs for this now."
"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 want to improve the UI in VisualCron, as it's not as user-friendly, particularly when setting up the task scheduler. If you're familiar with the tool, then no problem, but if not, you'll have a problem typing text because sometimes, the cursor points to other places, so there's an issue with text box alignment in VisualCron. That was painful for me when I was just a VisualCron novice, but when you become used to it, there won't be a problem."
"I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run."
"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."
"The only problem I face when I use the tool is that it doesn't contain much documentation or it doesn't have many video tutorials on its features."
Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT is ranked 7th in Managed File Transfer (MFT) with 27 reviews while VisualCron is ranked 10th in Managed File Transfer (MFT) with 11 reviews. Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT is rated 9.2, while VisualCron is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT writes "Key to our workflow and our workload automation strategy, helping us trade and consume files". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VisualCron writes "It's user-friendly, and I didn't need long to understand the process". Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT is most compared with MOVEit, JSCAPE by Redwood, IBM Sterling File Gateway, Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct and webMethods ActiveTransfer, whereas VisualCron is most compared with Microsoft Power Automate, Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Stonebranch and MOVEit. See our Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT vs. VisualCron report.
See our list of best Managed File Transfer (MFT) vendors.
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