ActiveBatch by Redwood vs Stonebranch comparison

ActiveBatch by Redwood and Stonebranch are both solutions in the Workload Automation category. ActiveBatch by Redwood is ranked #9 with an average rating of 9.4, while Stonebranch is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.0. ActiveBatch by Redwood holds a 2.6% mindshare in WA, compared to Stonebranch’s 4.9% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of ActiveBatch by Redwood users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Stonebranch users who would recommend it.

ActiveBatch by Redwood

Read 35 ActiveBatch by Redwood reviews

2,095 Views
1,613 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Stonebranch

Read 26 Stonebranch reviews

2,910 Views
2,881 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

ActiveBatch by Redwood

Stonebranch

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Stonebranch and ActiveBatch by Redwood compete in the automation solutions category, both known for their integration capabilities and workflow management. Stonebranch has an edge with its cost-effectiveness and secure file transfers, while ActiveBatch leads in user-friendly automation and integration features.

Features: Stonebranch stands out with its Universal Agent, offering stable performance and minimal maintenance. Its platform-agnostic design ensures seamless integration across diverse systems, including mainframes and cloud environments. Stonebranch excels in secure file transfers and effective workflow automation. ActiveBatch is notable for its comprehensive job steps, integration capabilities, and robust scheduling features, offering centralized management and seamless event-triggered workflow execution.

Room for Improvement: Stonebranch could improve its FTP task reliability, enhance REST API functionality, and offer clearer workflow dependency visibility. Users wish for smoother tool integration and better transparency in addressing customer requirements. ActiveBatch users seek improvements in its graphical user interface, scalability, and beginner usability, along with better cloud and DevOps tool integration. Enhanced documentation and training for both solutions could support new users in navigating their features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Stonebranch offers flexible deployment options and is praised for its straightforward on-premises setup, although mainframe setups can be complex. Its technical support is valued for its responsiveness and expertise. ActiveBatch provides easy setup with hybrid and cloud options and has a reputation for supportive customer service, though some users report delays. Both receive high ratings for customer service, with Stonebranch noted for technical expertise and ActiveBatch for its user-friendly support.

Pricing and ROI: Stonebranch is recognized for competitive pricing and cost-effectiveness compared to other tools, with users experiencing cost savings against legacy systems and reasonable maintenance fees. ActiveBatch, while seen as a solid investment, has had pricing changes due to evolving product features, with flexible licensing options. Users appreciate the positive ROI both solutions provide through enhanced automation and reduced manual tasks, with Stonebranch seen as more budget-friendly and ActiveBatch offering extensive features justifying its cost.

To learn more, read our detailed ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Stonebranch Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Stonebranch

July 2025

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Helped 861,524 peers since 2012

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

9th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Process Automation (9th), Managed File Transfer (MFT) (10th)

Stonebranch

Ranking in Workload Automation

14th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of ActiveBatch by Redwood is 2.6%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Stonebranch is 4.9%, up from 4.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Workload Automation

Featured Reviews

Shubham Bharti

Senior Analyst at Capgemini

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.

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Siddharth Matalia

Senior Technical Specialist at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Good GUI and has helpful support but needs a mobile app

This was a migration project where we provided our database, the previous one, and there was a tool that automatically converted the awarded job into Stonebranch. All the conversion was done from the Stonebranch side, and we got a person as well from Stonebranch during migration. There was a person who worked with us a decade back for the AutoSys install as well. He was well aware of our environment, so he helped us a lot. It was easy. It was not that complex. It is much more GUI. That said, we are looking for how the various automation can be done since, through command lines, you can create a number of jobs. While you are creating a single job, it takes 15 minutes with the GUI, however, if you go for the command line, within two or three minutes, your job gets completed. We have built our own solution for automation using some REST API and all those various integrations. It is working for our organization right now. However, we are requesting some kind of solution from Stonebranch. They should have been providing that to us already. For deployment, three or four people were engaged with the setup on their side. To manage everything, they provided us with a person who required help to manage it. Eventually, since it was a cloud platform on their side, if there is some configuration necessary, which they do it. They get a notification, and they fix it very immediately if there is an issue. The response time is very good from their side, and we don't have to worry about maintenance.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

"From a scheduling point of view, it is pretty good."

"Using this tool, if there are any huge failures, we immediately get an email notification, and the proper team will be informed, at which time they can act accordingly."

"It can connect to a number of third-party/legacy systems."

"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."

"For developers, it is easy to orchestrate the workflows and the integration has been very easy."

"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."

"Easy to configure and simple to develop new features."

More ActiveBatch by Redwood pros

"We lean a lot on the multi-tenancy that they offer within the product, the ability to get other people to self-manage their estate, versus having a central team do all the scheduling."

"The support is good from Stonebranch Universal Automation Center."

"When it comes to agent technology and compatibility with other vendors, from a platform perspective it was the one vendor that fit all the platforms that we have, from your old platforms - mainframe, NSK, IBM i - to the new ones, going into cloud and container"

"The ability to monitor tasks that are on the open-system side as well as our mainframe side gives us a one-window view of all our processes."

"Stonebranch performs well, and the graphical representation is excellent. Overall, it requires more technical effort from our teams, but the solution is intuitive, so anybody can use it."

"I like the dashboard and the various workflows."

"I have found the agents to be so much simpler, when compared to ESP."

"I love the Universal Controller. It's been great for us. We host it on-premise... It's High Availability, meaning there's failover from one server to the other if one goes down."

More Stonebranch pros

Cons

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Some improvements can be made to the user interface."

"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."

"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."

"I can't get the cleaning up of logs to work consistently. Right now, we are not setup correctly, and maybe it is something that I have not effectively communicated to them."

More ActiveBatch by Redwood cons

"It can't handle negative written codes."

"It's not available on the cloud, so they should take that due to safety, security, and scalability."

"Occasionally, we have an agent that doesn't come back up after patching. That doesn't happen very often... It's really just a restart of the agent and it comes back up. But that might be one thing that could be improved."

"It would be ideal if they had the exact same features as the CA Workload Automation DE series. It would be helpful to have calendaring options."

"I have a request regarding our agent on the mainframe. It may time out when communicating to the Universal Controller, when the mainframe is extremely busy. That can cause a task which is running at that time to not see the results of the job that ran on the mainframe. It happens sporadically during times of really busy CPU usage. We're expecting that enhancement from them in the fourth quarter."

"The Universal Controller is decent for the money it costs... It needs some work to have full features, compared to other products that are out there, specifically IBM's Workload Scheduler."

"One hiccup we've had is due to the fact that we have other internal scheduling tools. We're able to talk to them, but we have trouble with some of the networking between them, so we're still trying to work out the kinks there."

"There is a component called the OMS, which is the message broker. We rely on infrastructure, resiliency, and availability for that piece. If that could change to be highly available just as a software component, so that we don't have to provide the high-available storage, etc. for it, that would be a plus. It would just be cheaper to run."

More Stonebranch cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Currently, we are paying approximately $7,000 yearly, which includes support."

"The price was fairly in line with other automation tools. I don't think it's exorbitantly expensive, relatively speaking."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"It allows for lower operational overhead."

"Outside of licensing fees, there aren't any other costs."

"I don't have pricing information, but I do know it's cheaper than our old legacy system. Other than the standard licensing fees there are no additional costs."

"Stonebranch is cheaper than Control-M, so many companies are using Stonebranch."

"The price of the solution is at a medium level compared to the competition."

"When we reviewed this solution against other vendors, Stonebranch blew everybody out of the water in terms of cost."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

19%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

26%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

10%

Insurance Company

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.

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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...

See all answers

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...

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Comparisons

Control-M vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 18% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 12% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 10% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 10% of the time

Automic Automation vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 7% of the time

More ActiveBatch by Redwood Competitors

Control-M vs Stonebranch

Compared 29% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Stonebranch

Compared 16% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Stonebranch

Compared 12% of the time

ESP Workload Automation Intelligence vs Stonebranch

Compared 7% of the time

IBM Workload Automation vs Stonebranch

Compared 5% of the time

More Stonebranch Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveBatch by Redwood

July 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Stonebranch

June 2025

Download Stonebranch product report

Also Known As

ActiveBatch

Stonebranch Universal Automation Center

Overview

ActiveBatch by Redwood enhances efficiency with features like job scheduling, integration, and real-time monitoring. It supports diverse platforms, automates tasks, and offers a single-pane view with robust security.

ActiveBatch streamlines automation by offering drag-and-drop functionality, pre-built job steps, and native integrations. Its customizable workflows and alert system aid in managing complex workloads like data processing and server monitoring across hybrid environments. While it effectively reduces manual errors and enhances productivity, areas like navigation and support for cloud platforms need enhancement. New users may face challenges due to its complexity and steep learning curve, and further improvements in reporting, mobile access, and training could provide additional support to users.

What important features does ActiveBatch offer?

Comprehensive Job Scheduling: Manages and automates complex workloads efficiently.
Integration Capabilities: Seamlessly connects with different platforms and applications.
Real-time Monitoring: Offers a single-pane view for quick issue identification.
Customizable Workflows: Tailors processes to specific organizational tasks.
Robust Alert System: Ensures timely notifications for critical events.
Data Protection: Incorporates strong security measures for secure operations.

What benefits should be considered when evaluating ActiveBatch?

Enhanced Efficiency: Automates repetitive tasks, reducing manual intervention.
Improved Productivity: Streamlines processes across hybrid environments.
Error Reduction: Decreases likelihood of manual errors.
Platform Support: Provides integration with diverse systems.

In finance, ActiveBatch is implemented for orchestrating batch processes and data management. The healthcare industry utilizes it for automating patient data updates and server monitoring, while the retail sector benefits from file transfers and inventory management automation.

ActiveBatch by Redwood

Stonebranch automates enterprise-level workload and task scheduling across platforms like Linux, Windows, and mainframe, managing thousands of daily tasks for improved efficiency and visibility.

Stonebranch enables organizations to streamline job scheduling by replacing older systems with a robust solution that automates complex workflows, batch processing, and secure file transfers. Its compatibility with multiple platforms and enhanced visibility aid teams in efficiently managing business processes, database interactions, and IT workflows. Equipped with a Universal Controller and Agent, it provides seamless integration across diverse systems, empowering users with greater control over their tasks. While it fosters digital transformation, there are opportunities for enhancements in areas like graphical workflow overviews and API functionality.

What features does Stonebranch offer?

User-friendly interface for intuitive navigation
Robust agents ensuring reliable task execution
Comprehensive workflow automation tools
Platform-agnostic compatibility for diverse systems
Secure file transfer capabilities
High scalability for growing needs
Effective error handling features

What benefits should users expect?

Improved efficiency in task management
Streamlined processes reducing operational complexities
Enhanced visibility and control over workflows
Seamless integration with existing systems
Support for digital transformation initiatives

Organizations in industries such as finance and healthcare implement Stonebranch for its ability to automate complex processes, manage mainframe and distributed environments, and securely transfer sensitive data. Its platform-agnostic nature caters to the demanding needs of these industries, providing a reliable backbone for essential operations.

Stonebranch

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

Nissan, Coop, United Supermarkets, Groupon, CSC, Orbitz, Johnson & Johnson, BMW, Qantas.

Buyer's Guide

ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Stonebranch

July 2025

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