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ActiveBatch by Redwood vs JAMS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 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

ActiveBatch by Redwood
Ranking in Workload Automation
4th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (5th), Managed File Transfer (MFT) (6th)
JAMS
Ranking in Workload Automation
5th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of ActiveBatch by Redwood is 2.4%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of JAMS is 1.7%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Rob Grafrath - PeerSpot reviewer
We can scale up our organization's scheduling and automation without having to add staff to the department
The biggest area with room for improvement is the area that my organization benefits the most from using JAMS, and that is in custom execution methods. I happen to have a very good C# developer. Ever since we got JAMS, he has spent a lot of time talking to JAMS developers, researching the JAMS libraries, and creating custom execution methods. He's gotten very good at it. He is now able to create them and maintain them very easily, but that was hard-won knowledge. If I ever lose this developer, I would be hard-pressed to find anyone who could create JAMS custom execution methods as well as he can since there really isn't all that much help, such as documentation or information, available on how to create custom execution methods. I really think that they could benefit greatly by being much more transparent about C# development, maybe by making a JAMS cookbook or a developer portal where they could throw ideas at each other. One of my complaints with the marketing around JAMS is that it says things like, "It integrates with Teams". They talk about integrating with a lot of things, but marketing doesn't tell you that they are talking about JAMS running PowerShell jobs. Since PowerShell can automate things like SharePoint and Teams, that is how marketing gets away with saying it has so many integrations. JAMS doesn't have as many built-in integrations as they advertise. I think they should build more of them, and improve on the ones they have built.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"What ActiveBatch allows you to do is develop a more efficient process. It gave me visibility into all my jobs so I could choose which jobs to run in parallel. This is much easier than when I have to try to do it through cron for Windows XP, where you really can't do things in parallel and know what is going on."
"It is very useful in sending confidential files through FPP servers."
"The REST API adapters and native integrations for integrating and orchestrating the software stack are very flexible."
"The Jobs Library has been a tremendous asset. For the most, that's what we use. There are some outliers, but we pretty much integrate those Jobs Library steps throughout the process, whether it's REST calls, FTP processes, or file copies and moves... That has helped us to build end-to-end workflows."
"The software offers real-time monitoring and reporting features that let IT teams keep tabs on the progress of their batch operations and workflows."
"The most valuable feature is its stability. We've only had very minor issues and generally they have happened because someone has applied a patch on a Windows operating system and it has caused some grief. We've actually been able to resolve those issues quite quickly with ActiveBatch. In all the time that I've had use of ActiveBatch, it hasn't failed completely once. Uptime is almost 100 percent."
"Easy to configure and simple to develop new features."
"ActiveBatch helped us automate and schedule routine tasks such as data backups, file transfers, database updates, and report generation, which frees IT staff to focus on other studies."
"JAMS has improved our productivity immensely because everything flows. I don't think we could operate at our current staffing levels without it."
"JAMS has improved my organization by taking a myriad of manual processes and allowing us to automate them. It enables our folks to focus more on tasks that require their human intelligence and their creativity and less on just mundane tasks. It increases efficiency, accuracy, and consistency."
"JAMS is easier to use and cheaper than our previous solution. The installation is more straightforward, and JAMS has a graphical user interface, so it's more accessible."
"The alerting in it is really targeted... you can set specific alerting so that if jobs in a given folder fail, certain people are alerted. You can also set security at the folder level, so that only people in those areas can go set them. That means that the alerting and security can be set at a very granular level."
"The overall product is fantastic. I love it. It has been a fantastic, solid product. If I have one tiny bit of a problem with it, the support team gets in touch with me right away. I don't know if I've had another service that has been as fantastic as the JAMS support team."
"One of the things I like the most, as a SQL DBA, is the fact that we can manipulate tables in the background. Also, the fact that you can have your own views and work with the product the way it fits best is a very helpful feature."
"The built-in triggers are great."
"The most valuable aspect of JAMS is its robustness."
 

Cons

"The documentation is very limited, and it can be improved."
"The thing I've noticed the most is the Help function. It's very difficult, at times, to find examples of how to do something. The Help function will explain what the tool does, but we're not a Windows shop at the data warehouse. Our data warehouse jobs actually run on Linux servers. Finding things for Linux-based solutions is not as easy as it is for Windows-based solutions. I would like to see more examples, and more non-Windows examples as well, in the Help."
"They have some crucial design flaws within the console that still need to be worked out because it is not working exactly how we hoped to see it, e.g., just some minor things where when you hit the save button, then all of a sudden all your job's library items collapse. Then, in order to continue on with your testing, you have to open those back up. I have taken that to them, and they are like, "Yep. We know about it. We know we have some enhancements that need to be taken care of. We have more developers now." They are working towards taking the minor things that annoy us, resolving them, and getting them fixed."
"ActiveBatch UI could use a little more help, and video tutorials would be greatly appreciated for user guides."
"We have faced a couple of issues where we were supposed to log a defect with ActiveBatch. That said, the Active batch Vendor Support is very responsive and reliable."
"They could provide an easier installation guide or technical support to the organizations during the installation process."
"There are very few documents that provide us with detailed information on the troubleshooting of errors that occur during integration with the existing environment."
"A cloud option is not provided as a free feature, making it a costly solution for smaller organizations."
"The error messages from JAMS often need clarification, hindering our ability to resolve issues swiftly."
"Fortra is getting much better with documentation and examples, but there is still room for improvement."
"I would like a simple web interface that I could give to my team to go in and kill jobs or see why jobs died so that we don't have to drill down deeper into the application and know everything about it. It would be good to have a really clean web engine that would say here are the jobs running. We can then click to see the time running and whether any of them fails and other similar things. I know they have one, but it's not very simplistic."
"The UI could be better. There were some things that were not quite intuitive, such as the search tool. When we tried to search for jobs, we had to clear the entire search and then go in and enter the new search query. That's something that wasn't intuitive for a new user."
"JAMS doesn't allow us to implement SOC controls. We are a company that trades stocks on the New York Stock Exchange, so all our transactions are audited. It has a feature that saves the file for only a month but doesn't segregate the data between finance and SOC-related compliance."
"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."
"With no programming experience, I find JAMS code-driven automation challenging due to the required PowerShell scripting."
"The biggest area with room for improvement is the area that my organization benefits the most from using JAMS, and that is in custom execution methods. I happen to have a very good C# developer. Ever since we got JAMS, he has spent a lot of time talking to JAMS developers, researching the JAMS libraries, and creating custom execution methods. He's gotten very good at it. He is now able to create them and maintain them very easily, but that knowledge was hard-won knowledge. It was difficult to come by, and if I should ever lose this developer, then I would be hard-pressed to find anyone who could create JAMS custom execution methods quite as well as he can since there really isn't all that much help, such as documentation or information, available on how to create custom execution methods."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price was fairly in line with other automation tools. I don't think it's exorbitantly expensive, relatively speaking."
"It allows for lower operational overhead."
"Currently, we are paying approximately $7,000 yearly, which includes support."
"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."
"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."
"If you compare ActiveBatch licensing to Control-M, you're looking at $50,000 as opposed to millions."
"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."
"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."
"JAMS is close to the lower end of the pricing models for enterprise scheduling solutions. They are much cheaper than Control-M, as well as some other products that I've used. I also don't know of another solution where you can actually get true, unlimited licensing, where you can have as many instances and as many agents as you want."
"This is a good product at a fair price."
"The product is reasonably priced, and we don't have any add-ons."
"It was $10,000 for the first year. Then, there is a maintenance cost for licensing every year that we get billed $5,000 for every year."
"Our licensing is pretty cheap because we have a state solution. So, we pay only $1,000 a year."
"Take advantage of its scalability. You can start small. The initial cost is very reasonable. Once you have started picking up the tool and adopting it, then you can scale up from there and buy more agents."
"It's expensive, to be honest, but it does the job."
"JAMS is priced competitively compared to similar solutions and offers flexible licensing options to cater to user needs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
9%
Insurance Company
8%
Retailer
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Healthcare Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 ActiveBatch, the process is automated and it runs tasks on a scheduled basis.
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 users should take advantage of the demos and trial versions so they get an idea o...
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 advanced features in the user interface are a bit confusing even after referrin...
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?
Fortra's JAMS pricing structure has deteriorated significantly since its acquisition by Fortra. Previously, both Help Systems and MVP offered more favorable pricing and licensing terms. However, Fo...
What needs improvement with JAMS?
The monitoring of the JAMS product and its performance is an area of concern for me. I also need better tools to adopt version seven. Another area for improvement would be the addition of source co...
 

Also Known As

ActiveBatch
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Informatica, D&H, ACES, PrimeSource, Sub-Zero Group, SThree, Lamar Advertising, Subway, Xcel Energy, Ignite Technologies, Whataburger, Jyske Bank, Omaha Children's Hospital
Teradata, Arconic, General Dynamics, Yum!, CVS Health, Comcast, Ghiradelli, & Boston’s Children’s Hospital
Find out what your peers are saying about ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. JAMS and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.