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ActiveBatch by Redwood vs Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Aspera Managed File Transfer
Sponsored
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
13th
Average Rating
7.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
ActiveBatch by Redwood
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
6th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
8.3
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (6th), Workload Automation (6th)
Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
3rd
Average Rating
9.2
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Managed File Transfer (MFT) category, the mindshare of Aspera Managed File Transfer is 3.5%, up from 2.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ActiveBatch by Redwood is 1.8%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT is 7.4%, up from 5.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed File Transfer (MFT)
 

Featured Reviews

Michele Illiano - PeerSpot reviewer
Beneficial quick protocol, powerful, but limited use cases
Aspera Managed File Transfer should be packaged into another solution. Explaining to customers you need to have multiple solutions from multiple vendors for their use cases can get complicated for them to understand. The best way to propose a suite is to have an integrated suite where the customer could choose to license part of it. This solution could be one solution not two choices between 10 or 12 different solutions. The main feature of Aspera Managed File Transfer is the communication protocol, which is fast. There are a lot of different clients that are offering features related to these fast protocols. It's possible to create one unique suite that can handle this base protocol. It will be quite easy to propose to the customers.
Shubham Bharti - PeerSpot reviewer
Flexible, easy to use, and offers good automation
Occasionally, I find myself contemplating if there is room for improvement in the user interface (UI), and envisioning that with certain enhancements. The UI could potentially offer a more refined and user-friendly experience, fostering smoother interactions and facilitating easier navigation for users engaging with the application. New users might encounter a minor setback due to the absence of readily accessible training videos, which could have otherwise proven to be an invaluable resource in aiding their initial familiarization with the platform, potentially hindering their seamless onboarding process and delaying their ability to harness the software's full range of capabilities to its utmost potential.
Joel Vinas - PeerSpot reviewer
Created a much better working relationship with our partners and saved a lot of time
While I was happy with the training and support, more of it could be beneficial. We had some basic training and support. I talked with Fortra recently, and they said that they revamped and changed their training support. I have not used it since December. I got support in February and May of last year, and it was not bad. I was just not sure which questions to ask. Trying to learn this stuff on the fly as you are handed a project is always stressful. I like that you can tweak the interface so much, but it would be nice to be able to tweak it some more. The ability to further tweak the interface would be advantageous, as our end users had some questions about modifications that we could not address. Other than that, GoAnywhere seemed to fulfill its role as a simple solution for secure file transfer.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Aspera Managed File Transfer is an optimal solution for customers who want to transfer large files to remote sites with lower bandwidth and in less time."
"The main feature of Aspera Managed File Transfer is that it's an incredibly fast protocol, you can use all the bandwidth available. If I need to send large amounts of data this is the fastest protocol on the market. I have been using it for some minor projects and it is very powerful."
"Good user interface and ability to set up multiple file transfer jobs."
"It can connect to a number of third-party/legacy systems."
"We use the main job-scheduling feature. It's the only thing we use in the tool. That's the reason we are using the tool: to reduce costs by replacing manual tasks with automated tasks and to perform regular, repetitive tasks in a more reliable way."
"The user interface is really incredible."
"The nice thing about ActiveBatch is once we have created a specific job that can be easily be replicated to another job, then minimal changes will have to be made. This makes things nice. Reduction of coding is substantial in a lot of cases. The replication of one job to another is just doing a few minor tweaks and rolling it into production. This decreases our development costs substantially."
"ActiveBatch has reduced work by providing automated workflows across several different applications."
"From a scheduling point of view, it is pretty good."
"We are able to integrate it into multiple third-party tools like email, backup, tracking systems, SharePoint, Slack alerts, etc."
"By implementing a sophisticated scheduling mechanism, the system allows for the precise triggering of jobs at user-selected frequencies, enabling a seamless and automated execution of tasks according to specified time intervals."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to call a workflow from another workflow. That really gives you an edge by increasing reusability and speeding up development time. You can create a workflow which is a type of template and then call that workflow from any other workflow... It has sped up development time by 80 to 90 percent."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is customer data transfers for traditional SFTP. Some of our biggest customers are on the platform, and it works out very well for us as a big selling point."
"The solution is easy to use, easy to set up, and the support is good."
"GoDrive eliminates the need to use the exchange server for file sharing."
"The usability is valuable because I am self-taught and have not had any formal training in the product. The help feature is quite handy."
"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."
"If I have a job that I need to run on the system and I want the data transferred, I can use GoAnywhere and schedule it on a daily basis, a weekly basis, or whatever, and it does the job for me to transfer the files over to the other systems, or back and forth."
 

Cons

"The solution's pricing is high and should be reduced."
"Deployment is complex and it was difficult to get support."
"Aspera Managed File Transfer should be packaged into another solution. Explaining to customers you need to have multiple solutions from multiple vendors for their use cases can get complicated for them to understand."
"Any product is going to have some room for improvement, no matter what. I see the company has already ventured into AWS and they're constantly trying to improve the managed file transfer which they have recently improvised. I think they bought a software called JSCAPE and they're trying to improve it, which is good. I am not sure if JSCAPE would be part of the base product but currently, you have to buy a separate license for it, which doesn't make sense. If it was Microsoft, ServiceNow, or integrating with other software vendors, I would understand but JSCAPE is now in-house and I'm not sure if they can justify having a separate license for JSCAPE. I would probably expect them to be packaging JSCAPE into the base product. They did switch over from a perpetual license model to a subscription model, which hurt the company a little bit. Nobody is offering the perpetual model anymore. As long as the transition is fair for both the companies, I think it should be fine and not burn us out."
"As more organizations are moving towards a cloud-based infrastructure, ActiveBatch could incorporate more capabilities that support popular cloud platforms, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud."
"They could provide an easier installation guide or technical support to the organizations during the installation process."
"The reporting needs improvement. There is a real need for the ability to generate audit reports on the fly. It needs to be a lot easier than what I can do right now. This is a major item for me."
"It could be easier to provide dashboards on how many jobs are running at the same time; more monitoring."
"The user interface can be improved so that it is more appealing and accessible to new users."
"One thing I've noticed is that navigation can be difficult unless you are familiar with the structure that we have in place. If someone else had to look at our ActiveBatch console and find a job, they might not know where to find it."
"The product should be improved by providing a customization option."
"There is a function referred to as write CSV, to write a general text file. In this scenario of creating a simple text file, I ran into a situation where, if the product saw a quote or a double-quote in the data, it started wrapping all the text fields in double-quotes. The request I put in asks them to provide a feature that leaves my data alone and does not interpret anything."
"Improvement in support or product relies on being ingenious, supportive, and listening to its customer base."
"There's one persnickety issue about NAS permissions. That is a problem we have run into with GoAnywhere. I would like to see more focus on compatibility with/enforcement of user roles and access permissions across NAS, among other things. We have filed a couple of tickets on that in the past."
"Fortra needs to offer more use cases for GoAnywhere MFT during training."
"There are a number of built-in tasks in GoAnywhere. One, in particular, the write to CSV task, is slow. If you have, say, 100,000 records in your row set and you want to write them to a CSV file, it takes a long time. That definitely requires performance improvement."
"In some scenarios, when you are in a cluster environment, the load-balancing capabilities of the gateway need to be improved a little. This functionality needs some improvement."
"The biggest weakness I have seen in the product is scheduling. It is very limited in that aspect. It needs more flexibility and more ways to schedule."
"On the platform side, I would like to see some improvements in the dashboarding and telemetry data."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Aspera Managed File Transfer is not an inexpensive solution. I am not aware of many competitors to determine how affordable the price is overall."
"ActiveBatch is currently redesigning themselves. In the past, they were a low cost solution for automation. They had a nice tool that was very inexpensive. With their five-year plan, they will be more enhancement-driven, so they're trying to improve their software, customer service, and the way that their customers get information from them. In doing that, they're raising the price of their base system. They changed from one pricing model to another, which has caused some friction between ActiveBatch and us. We're working through that right now with them. That's one of the reasons why we're why we were evaluating other software packages."
"I don't think we've ever had a problem with the pricing or licensing. Even the maintenance fees are very much in line. They are not excessive. I think for the support that you get, you get a good value for your money. It's the best value on the market."
"If you compare ActiveBatch licensing to Control-M, you're looking at $50,000 as opposed to millions."
"Currently, we are paying approximately $7,000 yearly, which includes support."
"I like ActiveBatch Workload Automation's licensing model because they're not holding you down on an agentless model or agent model, where every server needs to have an agent. That's the main selling point of the solution and I hope they stay that way."
"It allows for lower operational overhead."
"The price was fairly in line with other automation tools. I don't think it's exorbitantly expensive, relatively speaking."
"The pricing was fair. There are additional costs for the plugins. We have the standard licensing fees for different pieces, then we have the plugins which were add-ons. However, we expected that."
"To have a solution like this for the price we're paying makes it cheap. Considering the time that it has saved us, and considering the development that we don't need to do, such as connectors and handling servers, the price is really affordable."
"The cost was definitely within reason and it has definitely been worth the cost, based on how much we can automate. It has exceeded my expectations."
"The product is not cheap, but it is not expensive."
"Licensing can be expensive and it depends upon which features you want to buy."
"Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT is an inexpensive solution."
"The product's pricing is reasonable."
"Compared to other tools it's less expensive."
"The cost of GoAnywhere versus the value it brings to our data transfer operations is reasonable... The cost is relatively expensive but, back to the car analogy, that's to be expected with a Ferrari."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
9%
Insurance Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Aspera Managed File Transfer?
Aspera Managed File Transfer is an optimal solution for customers who want to transfer large files to remote sites wi...
What needs improvement with Aspera Managed File Transfer?
The solution's pricing calculation needs revision to be more competitive
What advice do you have for others considering Aspera Managed File Transfer?
Aspera Managed File Transfer has superior technology. Overall, I rate Aspera Managed File Transfer a nine out of ten.
What do you like most about ActiveBatch Workload Automation?
Managing the workload and monitoring the tasks were very difficult with manual interventions. Now, by using ActiveBat...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ActiveBatch Workload Automation?
I'd advise users to start by knowing what the actual requirement is and thoroughly assess the automation needs. New u...
What needs improvement with ActiveBatch Workload Automation?
After upgrades we are facing a few issues and errors triggered, so focusing on this would be appreciated. Some of the...
What do you like most about Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT?
GoDrive eliminates the need to use the exchange server for file sharing.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT?
The pricing is too expensive for what we need. If we could cut it by 50%, that would be great.
What needs improvement with Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT?
I am not able to go in and say 'forgot password.' I need to access the admin portal to change the password from there...
 

Also Known As

No data available
ActiveBatch
HelpSystems GoAnywhere MFT, GoAnywhere MFT, GoAnywhere Managed File Transfer,
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Gwinnett County Public Schools, Evonik, Voith, BITMARCK, Oracle
Informatica, D&H, ACES, PrimeSource, Sub-Zero Group, SThree, Lamar Advertising, Subway, Xcel Energy, Ignite Technologies, Whataburger, Jyske Bank, Omaha Children's Hospital
McKesson City of Modesto, California Kwik Trip Northwestern University Charter Communications
Find out what your peers are saying about ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
817,354 professionals have used our research since 2012.