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Automic Automation 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

Automic Automation
Ranking in Workload Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
101
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
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 March 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of Automic Automation is 7.5%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of JAMS is 1.8%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Peter Grundler - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps to move away from manual tasks and offers wide platform support and web-based interface
Customers want to move away from manual monitoring and checking processes. Automating these processes helps in time-saving and reduces human error. When you automate business processes, it reduces mistakes. It eliminates the risk of manual errors such as typos. There is a 20% to 30% reduction in human error. It fulfills all the needs when it comes to visibility and control across various operating platforms. It is the perfect product for managing processes that span multiple operating platforms. Automic Automation has the widest platform support compared to other products, such as Control-M, Tivoli from IBM, or Stonebranch. It definitely helps with compliance processes. We have had a lot of customers for two years with a focus on compliance, and it works. They were successful. Due to the fact that our customers can automate a lot of things, it reduces operating costs. It is hard to give a number because the savings are different for each customer. If a customer never had any automation, there could be about 80% savings after implementing Automic Automation, whereas for a customer who already has automated tasks, the difference will be less by adding Automic Automation. They might see 5% to 10% more savings. Automic Automation helps improve our ability to meet SLAs. In the recent versions, SLA management has been integrated, which previously was an external component. Because a lot of customers used it and asked Broadcom to implement SLA management into the workload engine, Broadcom included it. We see more and more customers running their SLA management via the Automic Automation product.
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

"It saves my customers time, money, resources, and efficiency."
"The Zero Upgrade feature is the most valuable."
"The most valuable feature is that I do not have to wait for one job to finish, then manually click on the next one to start. Automation is the best feature."
"The solution is usually pretty easy for non-technical people to pick it up as long as they have basic experience with scripting."
"It's easy to train other people. A new developer could come in and learn it very quickly."
"It is scalable. We can grow it out."
"It's super easy—drag and drop to manage complex workloads."
"It improves the visibility of what is going on on the system. If I have a problem, it is easy to identify, understand dependencies, and identifying the root causes than just running through scripts and searching through applications or servers."
"I didn't know about JAMS because I don't have a person with any challenges with the purchase administration. The feature or the user interface is user-friendly because of the readable icons or very descriptive icons. Though I'm a beginning user of JAMS, I had no issues using it."
"I like how you can add new execution methods on the fly. It isn't overly complex to add Python script support to an execution method in the JAMS system. The scheduling is excellent. You can schedule a maintenance window and take that resource unit out of everything. It halts all of the jobs."
"The interface is good, and it's very easy to define and create jobs. If a job is not running or there is an error, the solution will send an email. That's all very good and very useful."
"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."
"Being able to create a series of chained jobs, which are basically linked jobs is valuable."
"It makes everything that we want to do so much easier. We have had a number of instances in the past where we have had developers who have been working on a project, and even though we have had JAMS for all these years, they will create some SQL Server Agent job, or something like that, to run a task. When it is in code review and development is complete, the question always comes around, "Can JAMS do this?" The answer has always been, "Yes." Pretty much anything we have ever developed could be run by JAMS."
"The fact that we no longer need to use Excel spreadsheets is huge. Before JAMS, every group was keeping track of their own batch jobs. Nobody really knew what the other jobs were. So, if jobs failed, other groups wouldn't necessarily know. With JAMS, everything is done through a single scheduler. You can choose who to notify."
"Our company is based on data. Everything we do is data-driven, so it has been very valuable having one place where we can process all of the data and do batch schedules with chunks of data."
 

Cons

"With every new version, things that would previously work, Automic breaks them. So, we have to report the new bugs. Therefore, every time when we patch the system, there is usually a new bug or a feature that was working, then it stops working."
"The frustration that we have probably had in the past is where CA tools run for a period of time, then they get deprecated, and you have to build a new one."
"It would be better if it was easier to view the automated processes."
"There are pain points, like anything else. Sometimes, things they say work, and sometimes, they don't work. You need to find out why they don't work and then go back and have them fixed."
"I should be able to grant a user access to execute a job without having to directly list every include, prompt set, output scan, script, login, etc. An inherited read for execution purposes would accomplish the same results without making the admin list every single object every time, as well as deny the user the ability to edit."
"Every time we have an upgrade for a new version, we have stability problems, because the versions are not as good as they should be."
"There are some scripting elements that could be added."
"The pricing has the potential to be high."
"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."
"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."
"I want JAMS to implement a global search function."
"If there were a softcover book on how to really take advantage of all of JAMS' tools, I would buy it. I do better with training books than online searching, so a book would be helpful."
"All my machines at work are Macs. JAMS client is a Windows-based thing. It is all built on .NET, which makes perfect sense. However, that means in order for me to access it, I need to connect to a VPN, then log onto one of our Azure VMs in order to access the JAMS client. This is fine, but if for some reason I am unable to do so, it would be nice to be able to have a web-based JAMS client that has all the exact same functionality in it. There are probably a whole bunch of disadvantages that you would get with that as well, but that is definitely something that would make life easier in a few cases."
"The monitoring of the JAMS product and its performance is an area of concern for me."
"The JAMS automation code isn't so clean."
"Sometimes the UI is not the most responsive I've ever used. But because it does its job, I don't complain."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We cannot use all the functions because they are too expensive."
"Every time there is a task which must be repeated, the solution can reduce costs."
"Before I joined this company, Automic had a contract with its parent company, and their pricing was very competitive. However, when we split into multiple businesses, the contract increased significantly, becoming an expensive tool."
"Pricing is competitive compared to other major vendors."
"Automic Automation's pricing is excellent, especially in comparison to similar solutions."
"The cost of the solution depends on the number of systems that are being orchestrated."
"They have changed the pricing on their licensing, and it's cheaper than before."
"This solution is pretty well-priced."
"The pricing is very fair. We have seen very minimal to no price increases over the years. We are not banging down the door of support all the time either. I would imagine if we were a company that submitted a dozen support tickets a week for the last nine years, then it might be a little different because we would be eating up everybody's time. However, for what we get out of it, the pricing is extremely fair. Back when we were originally looking and brought in JAMS, we were looking at a couple of the other competitive products that were in this space, but the pricing from JAMS was far and away better than what the other competitors could offer for the same functionality."
"There are no additional costs other than the license for Fortra's JAMS which is affordable."
"In the end, you'll find that it's really worth the price. There is some sticker shock, but it's worth every dime."
"This is a good product at a fair price."
"The pricing of JAMS has not been an issue for us, as it has allowed us to save time."
"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."
"Definitely check how many single processes you want to run and count them as jobs. That is how you would work out your pricing on JAMS. For example, if you're running a number of commands and you can put them all into one script and run that script, you can count that as one 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
19%
Manufacturing Company
17%
Computer Software Company
12%
Insurance Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
15%
Healthcare Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Automic Workload Automation?
It is easy to manage complex workloads and use electronic workflow automation.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Automic Workload Automation?
The pricing model for Automic has changed from a host-based licensing model to one based on successful execution. I still prefer the earlier licensing model, but I understand that it was likely cha...
What needs improvement with Automic Workload Automation?
There are certain areas in Automic that need improvement, such as the complexity of workflow dependencies. When you have workflows within workflows, it can become complicated. The existing options ...
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

Automic Dollar Universe
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Adidas, 84.51, ESB
Teradata, Arconic, General Dynamics, Yum!, CVS Health, Comcast, Ghiradelli, & Boston’s Children’s Hospital
Find out what your peers are saying about Automic Automation vs. JAMS and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
839,422 professionals have used our research since 2012.