ActiveBatch by Redwood vs Stonebranch comparison

ActiveBatch by Redwood and Stonebranch are both solutions in the Workload Automation category. ActiveBatch by Redwood is ranked #6 with an average rating of 9.5, while Stonebranch is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.0. ActiveBatch by Redwood holds a 2.2% mindshare in WA, compared to Stonebranch’s 5.3% 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

1,993 Views
667 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Stonebranch

Read 26 Stonebranch reviews

2,998 Views
1,415 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

ActiveBatch by Redwood

Stonebranch

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

Stonebranch and ActiveBatch compete in the IT process automation category. Stonebranch seems to have the upper hand due to its strong integrations and cost-effectiveness, while ActiveBatch provides a comprehensive workflow visibility that users find valuable.

Features: Stonebranch offers robust integrations and task automation across multiple platforms. It is valued for its stability, universal templates, and agent simplicity. ActiveBatch provides end-to-end workflow visibility, a rich library of pre-built job steps, and ease of use across diverse systems.

Room for Improvement: Stonebranch could improve its graphical workflow overview, REST API accessibility, and FTP task support. Users also note the need for more intuitive documentation and technical support. ActiveBatch users suggest a more intuitive user interface and find the learning curve challenging, though they appreciate the monitoring capabilities. Both products could enhance API functions and cloud environment support.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Stonebranch offers on-premises, private, and public cloud installation options, receiving praise for its quick, knowledgeable support. ActiveBatch provides hybrid cloud versatility with similar deployment options. Both products are noted for good customer support, with Stonebranch users particularly appreciating quick response times and specialized assistance.

Pricing and ROI: Stonebranch is noted for competitive pricing and cost-effectiveness compared to alternatives like Tivoli and Control-M, with a clear, hidden-cost-free pricing structure. ActiveBatch offers reasonable pricing and a subscription model for flexible licensing. Despite being slightly more expensive, users report strong ROI and cost savings, making it a worthwhile investment.

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

Buyer's Guide

ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Stonebranch

March 2025

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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

6th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Process Automation (6th), Managed File Transfer (MFT) (5th)

Stonebranch

Ranking in Workload Automation

15th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of ActiveBatch by Redwood is 2.2%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Stonebranch is 5.3%, up from 3.9% 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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Earl Diem

Sr. Manager - Performance and Automation Engineering at PSCU Financial Services

Allowed us to develop workflows without having to train and develop very specialized skillsets

The Universal Agent is the most valuable feature. Being agent-based and being able to go across multiple technology stacks, which is what our workflows do, Stonebranch gives us the ability to bridge those disparate technologies. It enables us to remove the dependency-gap with the agent so we know the status of the workflow at each step. Workflow development in Stonebranch is straightforward. There is something of a learning curve, but it's not very steep. Being able to develop workflows without having to train and develop some very specialized skillsets to use the tool is very useful. Stonebranch absolutely helped enable digital transformation in our company and it still is. In our automation efforts, we're pushing everything to Informatica and, as we move those ETLs, we're automating the entire workflows. In phase-one and phase-two, there were 244 jobs migrated in from other ETL platforms to Informatica, and we've automated all of those. We have almost 200 jobs remaining. We're going to have something approaching 450 workflows in Stonebranch when we're done.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

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

"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."

"ActiveBatch can automate predictable, repeatable processes very well. There is no real trick to what ActiveBatch does. ActiveBatch does exactly what you would expect a scheduling piece of software to do. It does it in a timely manner and does it with very little outside interference and fanfare. It runs when it is supposed to, and I don't have to jump through a bunch of hoops to double check it."

"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."

"The automation feature is a very valuable feature as the associates do not have to worry about performing repetitive tasks (i.e. endpoint security scans on a daily basis) that would take several hours to complete on a daily basis."

"Since we are no longer waiting for an operator to see that a job is finished, we have changed our daily cycle from running in eight hours down to about five. We had a third shift-operator retire and that position was never refilled."

"The REST API adapters and native integrations for integrating and orchestrating the software stack are very flexible."

"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."

More ActiveBatch by Redwood pros

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

"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."

"I can name the aliases on the agent, so if we need a passive environment for an agent, that's one of the nice features. If our primary goes down, I can bring up the passive one and I don't have to change anything in the scheduling world. It will start running from that new server."

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

"The tasks are incredibly capable, and as long as you name them with a nice, uniform naming convention, they are very useful. You can create some interesting workflows through various machines, or you can just have it kick off single tasks. All in all, I really like the Universal Task. You can do some mutually exclusive stuff, such as an "A not B" kind of thing. It has a lot of capabilities behind the scenes."

"The Universal Agent is the most valuable feature. Being agent-based and being able to go across multiple technology stacks, which is what our workflows do, Stonebranch gives us the ability to bridge those disparate technologies. It enables us to remove the dependency-gap with the agent so we know the status of the workflow at each step."

"The features are upgraded, and every six months they're releasing patches."

"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."

More Stonebranch pros

Cons

"It could be easier to provide dashboards on how many jobs are running at the same time; more monitoring."

"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."

"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."

"A nice thing to have would be the ability to comfortably pass variables from one job to another. That was one of the things that I found difficult."

"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 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."

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

More ActiveBatch by Redwood cons

"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."

"It can't handle negative written codes."

"Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics."

"There is room for improvement with its connectivity with the Microsoft SRS system. It is very weak. They keep telling us it works with it, and technically it does, but it does not provide a lot of visibility. We have lost a lot of visibility migrating to Stonebranch, compared with just running tasks on the SRS server. That's really about the only thing that is a sore point for us."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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."

"It allows for lower operational overhead."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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

22%

Computer Software Company

10%

Insurance Company

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

26%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

How would you compare Stonebranch Universal Automation Center vs Control-M?

Hi Doug, I am looking at the same, or at least a very similar issue. Have a customer who is leaving z/OS on which he is using IWS to go to Linux, and the question now is whether to pick up IWS (TWS...

See all answers

Comparisons

Control-M vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 23% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 15% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 14% of the time

Tidal by Redwood vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 11% of the time

VisualCron vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 9% of the time

More ActiveBatch by Redwood Competitors

Control-M vs Stonebranch

Compared 33% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Stonebranch

Compared 17% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Stonebranch

Compared 10% of the time

ESP Workload Automation Intelligence vs Stonebranch

Compared 9% of the time

VisualCron vs Stonebranch

Compared 3% of the time

More Stonebranch Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveBatch by Redwood

March 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Stonebranch

March 2025

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Also Known As

ActiveBatch

Stonebranch Universal Automation Center

Overview

ActiveBatch by Redwood automates and manages batch processes, data integration tasks, and workflow scheduling. It's used for file transfers, data processing, server monitoring, and report generation, supporting both on-prem and cloud environments.

Organizations implement ActiveBatch by Redwood to automate complex job scheduling and data workflows, integrating seamlessly with FTP, SQL, PowerShell, and other systems. With features like real-time monitoring, error handling, and centralized management, users can significantly boost productivity while minimizing manual intervention. Its flexibility in supporting on-premises and cloud environments makes it adaptable for diverse IT landscapes. The tool simplifies workflow orchestration with an extensive library of pre-built steps and robust API integrations, ensuring efficiency in handling various workloads.

What are ActiveBatch by Redwood's key features?

Job automation: Automates routine and complex jobs.
Real-time monitoring: Offers instant insights into job performance.
Customizable workflows: Tailors workflows to specific business needs.
PowerShell integration: Supports advanced script execution.
Job triggering: Initiates tasks based on specific conditions.
File handling: Manages file transfers and processing efficiently.
Server management: Monitors and handles server tasks consistently.
API integration: Connects with various applications for streamlined operations.
Alerting: Provides notifications for critical job events.
Flexible scheduling: Enables detailed and adaptable job scheduling.

What benefits and ROI can users expect?

Centralized management: Simplifies oversight of all processes.
Productivity boost: Reduces manual effort and errors.
Time savings: Accelerates task completion and workflow execution.
Comprehensive visibility: Enhances monitoring of all job activities.
Reliable performance: Ensures consistent task execution.
Scalability: Adapts to growing business and IT needs.

In various industries, ActiveBatch by Redwood is used to streamline operations, whether in finance handling large-scale data processing, healthcare managing patient records, or retail optimizing supply chains. It addresses specific needs by offering robust automation, efficient job scheduling, and seamless integration with existing systems, driving operational excellence and efficiency.

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

March 2025

Free Report: ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Stonebranch

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