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ActiveBatch by Redwood vs VisualCron 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 (7th), Workload Automation (6th)
VisualCron
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
15th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Workload Automation (17th), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (20th)
 

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.
Sourav-Dutta - PeerSpot reviewer
It's user-friendly, and I didn't need long to understand the process
We use VisualCron for all our automation needs, like connecting to FileZilla, calling APIs, generating PGP keys, creating encryption files with the PGP key login to Azure, etc. It can automatically log in to SQL Server and execute SQL script jobs in bulk. We had 2,000-3,000 users at my previous…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Good user interface and ability to set up multiple file transfer jobs."
"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."
"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."
"For developers, it is easy to orchestrate the workflows and the integration has been very easy."
"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."
"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."
"It can connect to a number of third-party/legacy systems."
"The user interface is really incredible."
"ActiveBatch provides summary reports and logs for further analysis and improvements in monitoring servers, which is very handy."
"The most valuable feature of VisualCron is its ability to schedule interactive jobs so that you can have interdependencies within the job and interdependencies of a job on another job, and so on."
"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."
"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."
"We don't have to do any coding. We just plug and play and it works."
"The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"The solution's pricing is high and should be reduced."
"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."
"Deployment is complex and it was difficult to get support."
"Some improvements can be made to the user interface."
"The product should be improved by providing a customization option."
"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."
"Except for the GUI, everything looks good."
"There are very few documents that provide us with detailed information on the troubleshooting of errors that occur during integration with the existing environment."
"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."
"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."
"Some of the advanced features in the user interface are a bit confusing even after referring to the documents."
"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."
"Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way."
"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 documentation is a bit weak."
"An area for improvement in VisualCron is its cluttered interface. It isn't always easy to find all functionalities, so what VisualCron needs is a user interface expert who can improve the interface. There's a learning curve in terms of finding what you need from the interface of VisualCron. The technical support for VisualCron also needs improvement in terms of response time. Currently, there's no live support or hotline you can call to get quick answers, so this is what I'd like to see in the next version of VisualCron. A less cluttered and more streamlined interface, where you don't need to hunt for some of the features, is also what I'd like to see in the next VisualCron update."
"VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve."
"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."
"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."
 

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."
"The price was fairly in line with other automation tools. I don't think it's exorbitantly expensive, relatively speaking."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"ROI is 95 percent."
"VisualCron is correctly priced because it wasn't very cheap, and it wasn't overly expensive, so the price for it was set correctly. When my previous company bought VisualCron, it was €800 per server per year. On a scale of one to five, I would rate the pricing for VisualCron a five because it was just right. The tool was affordable, and it has one of the most competitive pricing in the market."
"We are fine with a rather cheap setup. Licensing with VisualCron is fair. You have a simple one-year licence in different sizes. There isn't a licensing jungle with hundreds of options and opt-ins."
"ROI is one month."
"The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."
"The price is a bit high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Insurance Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
8%
Computer Software Company
27%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Healthcare Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
 

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 VisualCron?
The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%.
What needs improvement with VisualCron?
The documentation is a bit weak. The tool must provide a better set of documentation.
 

Also Known As

No data available
ActiveBatch
No data available
 

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
7 Eleven, ABB Sécheron SA, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Amazon Europe Core, Apple, Assa Abloy, Aston Martin, Banco Santander, BMW (Australia)
Find out what your peers are saying about ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. VisualCron and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
816,636 professionals have used our research since 2012.