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AntWorks CMR+ vs VisualCron comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Automate
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (5th)
AntWorks CMR+
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (20th)
VisualCron
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Managed File Transfer (MFT) (15th), Workload Automation (16th), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (19th)
 

Featured Reviews

Anabel Marco - PeerSpot reviewer
Automates processes efficiently with cost-effective scaling and robust customer support
Web scraping is quite good since it offers a lot of possibilities. Another important feature for me is its compatibility with MBI, the Power that is ISEQUADO Centers. I appreciate the ability to scale and increase the number of bots or studios without additional expense. Automate's non-reliance on additional orchestrators makes it quite cost-effective.
Rick Koo - PeerSpot reviewer
Leading-edge NLP capabilities, efficient training of machine learning models, and the automation saves us significant time
The machine learning capability is good. The algorithm helps us to get the right data with less training effort. The technology seems to be a little bit ahead of the standard NLP software. They use more pattern recognition, rather than basing everything on reading static text. The problem with relying on an unchanging text is that it can depend on things such as the formatting, and where things appear within a document. This solution can process complex formats, which is helpful for us because we get a lot of PDFs and they come in many different formats. As an example, a carrier might include a list of their rates in a table, whereas a different carrier will write their rates into a paragraph, and yet another will put them into some sort of graphic. If you only capture text then you will only capture part of that data. Pattern recognition ultimately helps us to circumvent the problems in dealing with format variability in documents and allows us to capture the right data. When it comes to predicting what it is that a document needs manual intervention, CMR Plus does it pretty well. They have a QA cycle that is usually able to highlight such data. The content recognition ability, in terms of giving us only the data that we need and nothing else, is pretty good. It has a positive effect on our efficiency and by extension, it impacts our infrastructure costs.
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

"We have tried other RPA solutions like UiPath or Automation Anywhere. They are fantastic products but complex, and it's hard to understand everything. It would be best if you had a skilled developer or several. Automate is easy to implement, administer, and use. It's appropriate for us because our cases are simple and easy to automate. We don't need complicated tools with many features; We prefer to get a significant ROI quickly."
"The pricing is excellent. I would give them perfect marks in that regard."
"We use it for specific cases, mainly secure file transfers, which are vital for us. And it works for us."
"The ability to connect to websites and pull data is the solution's most valuable feature."
"I find it very user-friendly. Our IT department and other departments can seamlessly collaborate without requiring extensive training. As a business department, we particularly value this aspect, as our team doesn't consist of many IT users. However, we couldn't solely rely on a drag-and-drop approach to implement and utilize the solution within our departments."
"The best feature of Automate is its ease of use, which is a major selling point."
"The most valuable features for my client are timing and scheduling."
"The most valuable features of Fortra's Automate include its FTP functionality and file manipulation capabilities."
"Pattern recognition ultimately helps us to circumvent the problems in dealing with format variability in documents and allows us to capture the right data."
"The automation provided by this solution has saved us a lot of time."
"We don't have to do any coding. We just plug and play and it works."
"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."
"It helped us reduce manual steps."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"I believe we need to test various OCR tools that assist in evaluating, let's say, six different customer resyncs. We analyze their spending patterns and documentations, but current OCR support has limitations, requiring highly standardized documents, which isn't always the case. With a more advanced OCR system, we could improve processes related to credit risk management and legal matters. We're exploring how to integrate Fortra's Automate with our CRM platform, taking cues from instances where Salesforce seamlessly merged with Automate. However, we use a different CRM, Insight for New Enterprise, and we're seeking ways to connect the automation process within our CRM. We aim for the automation to continue smoothly, even in instances where traditional automation methods might face hurdles."
"The product also has a limited use case in some respects."
"I find that most important features are strong, however, there is a lack of good development for artificial intelligence, such as machine learning."
"The workflow for variables could be better. The input and output of task-level variables could be made a little clearer in terms of passing those around from one task to another upon success, etc. Things like that could be a little easier potentially."
"I would prefer not having to log in to update a ticket; being able to respond via email would be beneficial."
"The vendor is currently working on a solution that allows us to automatically create a process that is based on a document that we receive via email."
"The technical support could be better. We suffer from language barriers, as we are in Argentina."
"The intelligent automation feature could be improved. It's interesting because it's simple, but the automation quality isn't always good. It's easy to use, but sometimes you need to make a slight improvement to the automation, and that's not so easy."
"We would like to see the overall accuracy increase from approximately 70% to perhaps 85%."
"It would be very helpful to have a simple and extensive training guide, or training model, to help learn how to work with the product."
"I want to improve the UI in VisualCron, as it's not as user-friendly, particularly when setting up the task scheduler. If you're familiar with the tool, then no problem, but if not, you'll have a problem typing text because sometimes, the cursor points to other places, so there's an issue with text box alignment in VisualCron. That was painful for me when I was just a VisualCron novice, but when you become used to it, there won't be a problem."
"I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run."
"Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It comes with a package that costs approximately $20,000 USD per year."
"It has gone up in price. The price of Fortra's Automate has increased since we first started using it. It does a lot but also costs a lot. It was a lot more affordable before Fortra owned the software."
"From a distributor's side, one of the biggest selling points is its price point. Without going into any numbers, compared to UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism, we're significantly cheaper. The main difference is that other competitors usually charge you per process. However, in Automate's case, it's priced per bot. So, a bot can run multiple processes at the same time, but you are only priced for a single bot."
"Compared to other products, the pricing model for this solution is much more convenient, flexible, and adaptable to the Portuguese reality."
"I believe the price falls within a reasonable range, which significantly influenced our decision regarding the product. This aspect is crucial for any technological solution, especially in our country where enterprises might be hesitant to invest heavily in something untested or uncertain about its practicality and potential returns."
"I like the way this solution is priced because you can buy a license, or you can buy the software outright."
"From a distributor's perspective, one of the biggest selling points of Automate is its price point."
"Once you buy the software, you just pay for the support for backend help."
"The pricing is really good, and it's based on usage."
"ROI is 95 percent."
"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."
"The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."
"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."
"The price is a bit high."
"ROI is one month."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
9%
Computer Software Company
27%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Insurance Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about HelpSystems AutoMate?
We use it for specific cases, mainly secure file transfers, which are vital for us. And it works for us.
What is your primary use case for HelpSystems AutoMate?
I am a consultant and I am making a lot of processes in human resources, payroll, certifications, trainings, web scra...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortra Automate?
The pricing is quite good compared to its competitors. Competitors are often more expensive than Automate. I would ra...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

HelpSystems Automate, Automate
ANTstein
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Aldergrove Financial Group, Preferred Health Professionals, Mindbeam Technologies, First Credit Union in British Columbia, Vestcom International, Prime Liberty Benefits, University of Tampa, CNLBancshares, World Precision Instruments, BJ's Restaurants, Globe Pequot Press, Accudata Technologies, Norton Healthcare, Pacific Toxicology Laboratories
Information Not Available
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 AntWorks CMR+ vs. VisualCron and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
846,617 professionals have used our research since 2012.