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AWS Step Functions vs AutoSys Workload Automation 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

JAMS
Sponsored
Ranking in Workload Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
AutoSys Workload Automation
Ranking in Workload Automation
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
84
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
AWS Step Functions
Ranking in Workload Automation
10th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of JAMS is 3.1%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AutoSys Workload Automation is 6.7%, down from 10.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Step Functions is 2.0%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
JAMS3.1%
AutoSys Workload Automation6.7%
AWS Step Functions2.0%
Other88.2%
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

LV
Principal Data Base And Infrastructure Engineer at a outsourcing company with 501-1,000 employees
Automation has replaced nightly monitoring and delivers reliable, unified job scheduling
We have really enjoyed working with JAMS in terms of notifications, alerts, and streamlining. There used to be a process with Automate, which is another product from Fortra, but even before that, the other division of the company that we were merging with had a tool that was built in-house called a file handler or file distributor. It was an in-house developed tool, but it was not as streamlined or as efficient as JAMS is. We literally had to have a dedicated nighttime person monitoring. Although we are 24/7, the divisions of the company that we were using JAMS for have been small scale. While we have automated it, we have streamlined it in such a way that notifications go out and alerts go out, but if there is anything, then we get paged and alerted, and if anything needs to happen at midnight, we can wake up. On the other hand, with the tool I mentioned, the file handler and distributor, we used to have a dedicated nighttime person that had to be sitting and monitoring it to see when a file arrived, whether it met the conditions, and then execute the next particular job. By using JAMS, we have gained a lot more efficiencies in terms of all of those to streamline it, and there is no necessary need for having an overnight engineer just keeping an eye on all of this.
PK
Assistant VP at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Experience significant automation with robust integration and user-friendly interfaces
There are areas of AutoSys Workload Automation that have room for improvement. They are implementing good enhancements in the R24 release. The web UI needs some improvement. Cloud integrations are limited to 25 or 30 configurable plugins and integrations to the cloud. They can improve in that area. They have separate tools, not AutoSys Workload Automation, such as Atomic and other SaaS-based solutions that can run inside the cloud. AutoSys Workload Automation can be configured in the cloud, but it requires a substantial number of VMs depending on the load. For on-premises deployment, it is a very good solution. They need to increase their footprint in the cloud and improve the web UI. They are making excellent progress in the R24 release.
YM
Senior Software Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Central orchestration has streamlined complex data workflows and now drives timely aviation alerts
The best features AWS Step Functions offers include the ability to deploy it via code. It helps us orchestrate anything that we want. Even if we have Glue jobs for another use case or Lambda that we are currently looking forward to, we are using Lambda to take DynamoDB data for real-time sales monitoring, then it goes to our S3 bucket. We have multiple workflows that are orchestrated by AWS Step Functions, and at the core, the main functionality is based on different frameworks. We have an Athena complete workflow, Glue job-based workflow, and a separate Lambda-based workflow. All of these are separately handled in AWS Step Functions. This is a good point and again with the inbuilt facilities of it, including how we can construct those workflows and add up a catch state or roll back or do multiple iterations using the Map state, that is very helpful for us.The Map state feature has specifically helped my team create a rollback state of the data since we were dropping some of our data assets. In case we want them back, we just wanted to do this. We took a particular layer and provided the data list, including the tables list, and using the Map state, we iterated over this list and one by one we did the backups of this data at the concurrency of five tables in a single execution. The Catch state, on the other hand, allows us to identify any error immediately. If we encounter an error, the Catch state immediately picks it up and we integrated webhooks or email notifications. That is how we are able to identify immediately if we face any error. At the core of our data engineering platform, AWS Step Functions sit at the topmost core of whatever pipelines we have. It is a main orchestration tool for us and helps us save costs. It is a key component of our engineering platform.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of JAMS is its user-friendly interface, especially after upgrading from version six to seven."
"The fact that we no longer need to use Excel spreadsheets is huge."
"I appreciate JAMS for its readily available templates that allow me to create and deliver stand-up presentations within minutes quickly."
"We also use the solution’s Interactive Agents. If we need to push something to our dealer portal, we can just drop a file in a folder and it goes. Running interactive tasks helps me users focus on business processes since I don’t have to take care of running the jobs manually."
"JAMS offers diverse scheduling capabilities for any kind of job, including Linux, PowerShell scripts, and SQL, enabling automation of jobs, which has proven beautiful after three years of usage."
"I find the historical tracking feature of JAMS invaluable for reviewing past events."
"The user-friendly and adaptable scheduler allows us to manage various scheduling scenarios."
"JAMS has been a beneficial monitoring tool for our project in terms of being able to deliver data that is essential for users."
"It has been my go-to tool for 28 something years, and it has not failed me yet."
"This solution provides us with more details on jobs failing and also gives us restorability, bridging our platforms and giving us the ability to recover as the environment has become more complex over the last 10 years."
"It is a lot more powerful and a lot more secure."
"We have not encountered any stability issues with the supported versions."
"It is very stable and we haven't had any problems."
"Automic Automation Engine provides us the ability to map logic using a scripting language, giving us an advantage where practically all automation problems can easily be implemented within the Automation Engine."
"The most valuable aspects of AutoSys Workload Automation are its performance, scalability, and ease of getting started for new users."
"AutoSys Workload Automation is a stable solution."
"One can rate all the calls and that is a good feature."
"If you want to create a workflow to call one Lambda function after another, and other serverless features, it could save you a ton of money. That's for sure."
"AWS Step Functions was stable, and there were no problems that I can recall."
"Overall, I would rate AWS Step Functions at least nine out of ten."
"It has enabled my organization to create workflows with a lot of different AWS services; it's a general solution that you can adapt to your own needs and is simple to use."
"It is a scalable solution."
"It's Amazon, it's scalable."
"The number of historical events is great."
 

Cons

"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."
"One issue which can prevent jobs from running is when a script gets into a loop."
"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."
"The JAMS automation code isn't so clean."
"For scalability, I would rate it as seven because when we have a huge volume, sometimes the tool is not so responsive."
"JAMS handles exceptions fairly well but there are some areas where it might improve a little bit. It has to do with being able to automatically handle exceptions, out-of-the-box, rather than having to code them."
"We have had a lot of people working from home who can't always connect to the JAMS server. We use VPN, as most companies do, and we have it set up so that everybody can access the JAMS server. But many times, our people cannot access it... JAMS could do a better job of telling you what the problem is when you try to log in to the server."
"One thing that I know that the JAMS people said that they were working on that would be huge for us is a search capability so that you could search for tasks. It may be available in version 7 or in a future release of 7. I think that's on their roadmap. But right now, for us to do a search, we have to search through database queries."
"The graphical interface can be improved."
"It's hard to tell what needs to be improved."
"Since Broadcom acquired it, the prices have increased. Many companies feel the same way and are looking for alternate solutions to replace AutoSys Workload Automation."
"Upgrades to the GUI interface would be probably one of the biggest things they could do to improve."
"AutoSys Workload Automation could improve in the Linux environment."
"I've used this product for a long time, but the GUI to me feels outdated."
"The most important thing is that duration is not displayed in the actual WCC GUI."
"To make it a lot more user-friendly, in order to make it so other people can use it without having to do much training with it; the more user-friendly it is, the easier it is to work with."
"Increasing the payload size would be beneficial."
"The solution's pricing could be cheaper. It is cheaper than Airflow."
"It is difficult to suggest improvements at the moment."
"I think AWS Step Functions is good, but the UI in the console can be much more user-friendly."
"There is room for improvement in terms of integration with other products. It would benefit from more integration with different applications or services."
"If AWS Step Functions keeps adding more integrations, it would be even better."
"Setup took about one day. We had some errors to understand in the beginning, but now everything is working good."
"The interface can sometimes feel limited, as we're unable to see what AWS is running behind the scenes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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's expensive, to be honest, but it does the job."
"For what it does, the product is priced very well."
"In the end, you'll find that it's really worth the price. There is some sticker shock, but it's worth every dime."
"There are no additional costs other than the license for Fortra's JAMS which is affordable."
"All licensing models are a little overpriced, but JAMS offers a good value, especially given their support response times and ability to handle unforeseen issues like the SFTP transfers. I hope to find more use cases to get a better bang for our buck."
"It's certainly a lot cheaper than Tivoli and Control-M. In comparison to them, you get a lot more bang for your buck. You get pretty much the whole functionality and more, in some cases, when compared to Control-M, but at a fraction of the price."
"Fortra's JAMS pricing structure has deteriorated significantly since its acquisition by Fortra."
"We paid to use the solution monthly."
"People need to pay attention to how they use their ESP agents on the distributed platform. That's where some of the cost comes in, based on how many you need or how many you use."
"The return on investment would be very high because doing things manually without this product would be extremely expensive."
"It is overpriced."
"The pricing needs to be improved. Some of my client's complained that it was too expensive."
"There is an annual license to use AutoSys Workload Automation."
"The price of this solution is reasonable and there is an annual license required."
"CA pricing has been a problem, and not looked upon favorably here at all."
"The solution is expensive."
"The solution's price is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
36%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
5%
Retailer
5%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise20
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise79
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JAMS?
I was not really involved in the pricing, setup cost, and licensing at that level. I am more involved in the technica...
What needs improvement with JAMS?
To improve JAMS, it should resolve the issues with the JD Edwards application and the need for the SSH client connect...
What is your primary use case for JAMS?
My main use case for JAMS is to install, set up, and configure for customers working with JD Edwards application. A s...
How does Control-M compare with AutoSys Workload Automation?
Control-M acts as a single, centralized interface for monitoring and managing all batch processes, which is helpful b...
What needs improvement with AutoSys Workload Automation?
There are areas of AutoSys Workload Automation that have room for improvement. They are implementing good enhancement...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Step Functions?
My customer's usual use cases for AWS Step Functions that I've been working with include orchestration, flows, diagra...
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon Step Functions?
I use the Visual Workflow Editor feature of AWS Step Functions. I mainly work through code and then improve it throug...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Step Functions?
I am not familiar with the pricing as most of my projects have environments from the customer side, and the contract-...
 

Also Known As

No data available
CA Workload Automation, CA Workload Automation AE
Amazon Step Functions, Step Functions
 

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
Gaumont, Mercantil do Brasil, CCEE, Hanwha Life
Alpha Apps, The Guardian, SGK, Bigfinite
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Step Functions vs. AutoSys Workload Automation and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
905,601 professionals have used our research since 2012.