Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Automic Automation vs Rocket Zena comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 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

JAMS
Sponsored
Ranking in Workload Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Automic Automation
Ranking in Workload Automation
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
104
Ranking in other categories
Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (9th)
Rocket Zena
Ranking in Workload Automation
21st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of JAMS is 2.3%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Automic Automation is 7.3%, up from 7.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rocket Zena is 2.6%, down from 3.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Automic Automation7.3%
JAMS2.3%
Rocket Zena2.6%
Other87.8%
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Patrick Norton - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager of Reliability Engineering and Security Operations at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
Support has been among the most helpful and knowledgeable we've ever worked with but performance monitoring needs improvement
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 control for jobs internally, as this feature would solve several problems for me. JAMS has some quirks. It has a bit of a learning curve. Some exceptions are not intuitive, such as when a job is terminated due to exceeding its defined runaway time limit. This generates a misleading exception message that is difficult for new users to understand and requires experience to interpret correctly. Stalled jobs present a unique challenge, particularly when pushing a system like JAMS version six to its limits. While rare, these instances occur when jobs become unresponsive despite appearing in API queries but not in the monitoring console. Although workarounds exist, they highlight the need for improved native monitoring capabilities within JAMS. Currently, the system assumes flawless operation, necessitating supplemental monitoring tools to detect issues like excessive pending or stalled jobs, ensuring timely intervention by our teams.
Peter Grundler - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at Tricise
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.
JuanGonzalez6 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Solutions Manager at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees
A continuously evolving, stable solution, with responsive support
The visual whiteboard for design and execution included with the solution is very crucial to those who are new to Rocket Zena, especially so that the learning curve is minimized and they can focus on accomplishing the task. We process our system's payroll through Rocket Zena. The fact that it's a multi-process, multi-layered application, means that we can rely on the solution for kicking off processes, notifying user vendors of the steps, completions, error logging, and historic events from the previous run times. Rocket Zena's ability to automate jobs on the mainframe as a distribution workload automation solution is good. The solution continuously improves over time. We're eager to start the latest upgrade this coming year that'll put us on the cloud. Hopefully, this will improve the product even more. We can run things natively without the scheduler if needed. The solution working properly and up to date without the need for a mainframe scheduler is crucial. We use the solution to manage a few complex operational workflows end-to-end across multiple technology stacks. Rocket Zena does a great job of simplifying our cross-platform processes through automation. The solution helps speed operations up and keeps them automated allowing us to focus on other priorities. The solution helps increase our completion rates by working overnight to meet our SLAs. Rocket Zena completes 30 percent of our workload outside of our standard work hours. Rocket Zena's cross-platform job scheduling helped us save around 40 percent of programming time by automating repetitive tasks. We use the solution to transfer our current files and keep up with our infrastructure on a few automated jobs, such as refreshing our database which happens overnight. The solution helped free up around 15 percent of our engineer's time to focus on more value-added work.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"JAMS has helped save IT staff time by automating tasks previously performed with scripts, and its scheduling feature has been particularly useful."
"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."
"The planning capabilities are most valuable."
"I find the historical tracking feature of JAMS invaluable for reviewing past events."
"The most valuable feature is the easily accessible data in the database because we run a lot of SQL scripting against the database."
"The most valuable feature of JAMS is its user-friendly interface, especially after upgrading from version six to seven."
"The overall product is fantastic. I love it. It has been a fantastic, solid product. If I have one tiny bit of a problem with it, the support team gets in touch with me right away. I don't know if I've had another service that has been as fantastic as the JAMS support team."
"The scheduling and execution of jobs are the most valuable features. The scheduling is important because if there is a task we want to execute at 4:00 AM, there's no way we will have someone who can manually run the job. In addition, we execute 100 to 200 jobs per day, and manual intervention is not an option."
"It is reliable. We have never had any unplanned crashes."
"The current upgrade process is straightforward. They have made the process much simpler. After we get to version 12 and any subsequent versions going forward, it should not require any downtime at all. ​"
"It is scalable. We can grow it out."
"It has its own object-oriented scripting language and you can reload your object in many different places."
"Automic Automation's primary advantage over competitors lies in its robust SAP integration."
"Automic Automation allows us to serve the service without interruptions."
"The scalability is very good. We can scale it however we want."
"Unlike other Orchestration or Workload Automation tools, Automic Workload Automation stands out as a versatile single solution capable of handling various use cases such as business process automation, workload automation, service orchestration, and PR automation. There's no need for additional tools to make it compatible with your specific use case. Automic Workload Automation can handle it all without requiring any sideline tools to be installed."
"From a Linux configuration point of view, Rocket Zena is straightforward. It's fairly easy to set up the server and agents once you know how to do it."
"Its FTP feature is very good, as is scheduling any process or task with the Zena client. I have found it to be very helpful. If a task fails, it gives you a prompt."
"We haven't had any problems since we installed it. It runs as expected, we haven't had any critical problems. It helps keeps the business running 24/7."
"I have found the scheduling feature the most valuable. I can map dependencies by using ASG-Zena. It gives a nice, quick visualization as to where things are."
"You can click Ctrl-G and bring a diagram view. You're able to view in a diagram format. The view that it provides is easy, and you can move to the left, up, or down. You can double-click on a certain process. It'll drill into that process and all of its underlying components. You can double-click on an arrow or a component, and it'll bring up a screen that'll have all the variables that are assigned to that particular piece, as well as the values at run time. So, the diagram feature of it, at least for me, is pretty valuable."
"I like the whole product, but specifically, I like the license part. It's very easy to acquire a license for this product."
"The most valuable feature is the FTP file transfer."
"In the latest upgrade, Zena added a web-based client. The more I use it, the more I like it. It's an excellent interface. They do a good job of steadily improving the solution to make it more useful."
 

Cons

"The only thing that they could improve on is the fact that they don't have a browser version of JAMS. They've got all the bits and pieces there if you want to build your own web version of it. It does come with a web client, but it's pretty clunky. They could improve on that."
"Sometimes the UI is not the most responsive I've ever used. But because it does its job, I don't complain."
"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."
"The error messages from JAMS often need clarification, hindering our ability to resolve issues swiftly."
"The monitoring of the JAMS product and its performance is an area of concern for me."
"The monitoring of the JAMS product and its performance is an area of concern for me."
"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 UI could be better. There were some things that were not quite intuitive, such as the search tool. When we tried to search for jobs, we had to clear the entire search and then go in and enter the new search query. That's something that wasn't intuitive for a new user."
"If you're getting deep into some of these workflows, you may have 20 different windows open and, if you didn't already have that deep understanding of how enterprise orchestration works, it would be very overwhelming to get up to speed on something like that... It needs some way to minimize the amount of windows and get it to where you could have all the information you need available on the screen."
"It seems still very technical to get the full features out... Once you get to some of the leadership levels, such as myself, you don't have time to go digging into it. It would be nice to have some additional performance features such as reporting, analytics."
"After the merger, it is getting more American. Now, they do not have support in French and have limited German documentation. This is a critical problem for companies who have older generations who did not have English in school."
"My biggest complaint is that there is no list price. We work with Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, etc., and all of them have list pricing. Automic, right up until today, has never had list pricing. This makes things difficult, because we need to plan budgets for the next year and can't."
"Content of file transfers cannot be searched by the system, but has to be done by the user interface. This is not good, as it has been erased often."
"They need to handle cross datacenter failover. They have a really good High Availability solution that works well within a single sysplex, but in our environment, since we have two main datacenter locations, we have two separate sysplex."
"From my point of view, the current product needs more stability."
"The direction in which the UI is going is concerning to me. It does not offer the security context we would need to implement future versions. While I see benefit in the Web UI, the security it would lack in separating a user's experience from an administrator's experience is an issue for us. MFA functionality is required since we're dealing with connectivity to the POS and for PCI/SOX compliance."
"One area where it could be improved is communication between the different servers. Sometimes there are processes that have already been completed but we get a status notification that they're still active."
"In the web interface, it stacks the tasks across the top, and they accumulate until you close or clean those out. That seems a little cumbersome. You must right-click and close all tabs constantly to keep the console clean and manage your views."
"The documentation has room for improvement."
"Rocket Zena is a mainframe-based job scheduler. I would like it to be more open so that we can use it on a distributed platform."
"In the next release, I would like the user experience to be improved. The user interface should be more appealing to gen-z."
"The scheduling mapping is a little disjointed. There is no wizard-type approach. There are a lot of different things that you have to do in completely different areas. They could probably add the functionality for creating all components of a mapping or an OPA schedule. The component creation could be done collectively rather than through individual components."
"Another one that is probably a little bit bigger for me is that when there is an issue or there's an error, it writes on a different screen. I have to find the actual process name and go to a different screen to view the alert that got generated. On that screen, everyone's processes, not just the processes of the folks in my department, are thrown. It takes me a while to find the actual error so that I could go in there and look at the alert. It could be because of the way it was set up, but at least for me, it isn't too intuitive."
"The UI is not intuitive, and it would be nice if there was a web interface."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In the end, you'll find that it's really worth the price. There is some sticker shock, but it's worth every dime."
"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."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"I haven't been involved in the financial side for several years, but we buy one host and unlimited agents, and we get a reasonable price for that. We're happy with the amount we pay and the scalability it provides."
"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."
"It was $10,000 for the first year. Then, there is a maintenance cost for licensing every year that we get billed $5,000 for every year."
"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."
"Pricing is a big issue for some of them because Broadcom changed the way of calculating the price. People have been their customers for the last five or ten years, but Broadcom decided to change the way of licensing by moving to the number of jobs runs and then they say that clients have to pay three million because they run one million jobs per day. The clients are quite surprised to see that the contract is not the same as before, and then they are afraid of paying more."
"Initially, the pricing was competitive but consistently, year over year, its pricing has become more erratic. It increases to the point where even with the positives, it starts to become a longer-term question about how it will fit into the environment."
"Our company had paid around 5,000 to 6,000 USD per license for a month."
"We cannot use all the functions because they are too expensive."
"The pricing of Automic Automation varies depending on the specific contract terms."
"The pricing keeps going up, which is concerning."
"You do not need any humans to start jobs, so you can save a lot of money."
"Automatic is heavily integrated in our organization. The cost to change would be a huge factor for us, and we have not found any other product that is better out there."
"The pricing and the licensing are good. It is affordable and can be used to improve and optimize productivity."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Workload Automation solutions are best for your needs.
879,310 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Computer Software Company
10%
Insurance Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
31%
Computer Software Company
9%
Insurance Company
8%
Non Profit
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise18
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise67
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

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?
They recently switched to subscription-based pricing, which increased. The price is fair considering the functionalit...
What needs improvement with JAMS?
As far as we are using JAMS version 6, it looks good and there is nothing major to add about it. Everything is functi...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Automic Workload Automation?
The pricing was client-wise, but they are changing it to execution-wise pricing. So, we are in negotiation.
What needs improvement with Automic Workload Automation?
Automic Automation has some disadvantages; it is more simplified, and sometimes it can be complicated. The technical ...
What is your primary use case for Automic Workload Automation?
I have been dealing with Automic Automation for probably around ten years. I have been both a partner with Automic, w...
Do you have any tips for managing my company's modernization, without any disruptions?
Today, we will look at the legacy systems, the red flags that point at the system getting old and rusty, and the ways...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Automic Dollar Universe
ASG-Zena
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Teradata, Arconic, General Dynamics, Yum!, CVS Health, Comcast, Ghiradelli, & Boston’s Children’s Hospital
ING, Adidas, 84.51, ESB
Fraternidad Muprespa
Find out what your peers are saying about Automic Automation vs. Rocket Zena and other solutions. Updated: November 2025.
879,310 professionals have used our research since 2012.