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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
41
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
6.7
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of JAMS is 2.7%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AutoSys Workload Automation is 7.1%, down from 12.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Step Functions is 1.7%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
JAMS2.7%
AutoSys Workload Automation7.1%
AWS Step Functions1.7%
Other88.5%
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.
reviewer2706945 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Orchestration and integration simplify processes with seamless stability and reliability
I use the Visual Workflow Editor feature of AWS Step Functions. I mainly work through code and then improve it through the visual aspect. There are two ways to do orchestration: through code and through visual. My main task is to develop flows. I have only implemented AWS Step Functions with AWS services, not with any third-party tools. The integration between AWS Step Functions and other AWS services is excellent, working seamlessly with EventBridge, Glue jobs, and databases. I have not encountered any challenges with customers regarding AWS Step Functions that needed me to find a workaround. The pricing of AWS Step Functions is moderate and not particularly costly. AWS Step Functions is affordable for small, medium, and enterprise businesses as an orchestration tool. I have not used any documentation, manuals, or guides for AWS Step Functions as it's very simple to implement. When help is needed, I consult Stack Overflow or AI for commands. Overall rating for AWS Step Functions: 9 out of 10.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Because we have gone from a lot of manual processes to automated processes with JAMS, we have been able to free up IT staff time, and for just the Technical Operations Center team that I manage, it has saved about 20 hours a week."
"We have over 50 jobs running daily to manage all the integration of our systems and we don’t have to monitor these jobs; they just run, JAMS centralizes the management of jobs in our environment, has streamlined our monitoring, saves us about four hours a week in troubleshooting time, and has helped free up about eight hours a week of IT staff time."
"The most valuable feature for us is that it's DR-ready. With respect to disaster recovery, it has the built-in capability for failover to our DR site. If all of the required ports are open, it can be done seamlessly."
"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."
"We looked at other companies, like VisualCron, that were cheaper, but one of the main sticking points was the fact that they wouldn't have provided a central location for us to monitor across all servers. That was one of the biggest selling points of JAMS."
"The fact that we no longer need to use Excel spreadsheets is huge."
"JAMS saves us on the order of thousands of hours per year."
"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."
"Automic Automation Engine provides us the ability to map logic using a scripting language."
"It has helped to simplify cross-dependency between MVS and Open systems jobs."
"It's very stable, it's highly redundant, it's very recoverable within the batch work, and it's easy to use."
"It is a fairly stable solution."
"The flexibility in solving job scheduling challenges allows us to successfully integrate an acquired business’ fiscal close with our own, even though there is a lot of variance as to when they run in the calendar month."
"We did not have the visibility of the distributed jobs until we used ESP Workload automation and we can now schedule them together with our mainframe jobs."
"It gives a real-time view of all the batch processing that we have, monitoring-wise it is really good, and it also gives us the ability to connect different software processes."
"We have gotten great support from CA; they are there whenever we need them, and whenever we open a case, they are very receptive to the issues that we have and resolve them in a timely manner."
"Overall, I would rate AWS Step Functions at least nine out of ten."
"It's a general solution that you can adapt to your own needs and is simple to use. We like that it can be integrated with everything in the AWS suite, and that the creation of the pipeline can be done using the graphical user interface."
"One can rate all the calls and that is a good feature."
"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."
"AWS Step Functions offers advanced workflows that save time and enhance efficiency by reducing delays and ensuring consistent orchestration among various services."
"The integration capability is easy, whereas building state machines is tricky."
"The solution is stable...The solution is easy to scale."
"It's Amazon, it's scalable."
 

Cons

"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."
"The only thing that they could improve on is the fact that they don't have a browser version of JAMS. It does come with a web client, but it's pretty clunky."
"The search capability needs to be improved because when we try to search for a job, it's hard to do."
"The cost has definitely gone up tremendously. That is where I do know, as much as the feature sets are there, and if the newly acquired company is going to be doing a pushback, they might just say, 'Do we still need to pay this much? Or at that point, should we look into an alternative?'"
"For scalability, I would rate it as seven because when we have a huge volume, sometimes the tool is not so responsive."
"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."
"JAMS could be improved with a web client that is accessible and as fast as a normal website, eliminating the need to RDP to the servers to access the JAMS client."
"Some of the reports are either a bit hard to understand or don’t give you what you might expect to see."
"Most AutoSys Workload Automation customers are moving because of cost; it is more cost intrusive."
"The GUI/Workstation is weak and needs to be improved."
"The main push is the web UI, to be able to give it to our business users."
"The visibility and control features are somewhat limited."
"Note that this product is now a legacy product with a dwindling user base and support."
"AutoSys Workload Automation could improve in the Linux environment. The previous versions of the AutoSys Workload Automation let you take the profile of the user that you were using to run the tasks that you're going to automate, but in the latest versions, you can't do that, you need to make more definitions and it's a little bit difficult. It was easier in the previous versions."
"The way that it was brought to us, in our initial setup, we had a lot of initial questions and they replied, "Well, set it up the way you want it." It was kind of confusing from an end-user support aspect, asking them what are the best practices."
"The pricing of the solution can be improved."
"Increasing the payload size would be beneficial."
"If AWS Step Functions keeps adding more integrations, it would be even better."
"One area for improvement is the payload size. Currently, I sometimes have to save data as a file since I cannot pass it within Step Functions, necessitating caching in processes."
"It wasn't easy to understand the licensing model. It's like if you use just a little, it's cheap, but it becomes more expensive as you use more. It's like a hook that ties you inside the Amazon ecosystem. So, it creates a dependency."
"The price and support are areas with shortcomings where the solution needs to improve."
"It is difficult to suggest improvements at the moment."
"There is room for improvement in terms of integration with other products. It would benefit from more integration with different applications or services."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is reasonably priced, and we don't have any add-ons."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"JAMS is priced competitively compared to similar solutions and offers flexible licensing options to cater to user needs."
"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."
"The licensing model for JAMS is straightforward and based on the number of agents, not the number of jobs you run. It's cheap and fairly simple."
"The pricing needs to be improved. Some of my client's complained that it was too expensive."
"I certainly think the pricing is worth the value."
"CA pricing has been a problem, and not looked upon favorably here at all."
"The price of this solution is reasonable and there is an annual license required."
"I don't have information on the exact licensing cost of AutoSys Workload Automation because that's managed by the tools and financing teams. For agents, it's close to $4,00, but for the server setup, it's usually a one-time license initially, and it's AMC which is paid every year and comes close to $8,000 to $10,000."
"We paid to use the solution monthly."
"Validate how many agents you need beforehand."
"The return on investment would be very high because doing things manually without this product would be extremely expensive."
"The solution's price is reasonable."
"The solution is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
39%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
5%
Retailer
5%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise20
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise77
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JAMS?
My thoughts on the pricing of JAMS are that I won't say it is cheap, but it is cost-efficient, and that should be acc...
What needs improvement with JAMS?
An area that has room for improvement is related to the AWS RDS and database part, where they said that is in progres...
What is your primary use case for JAMS?
My use case is in batch scheduling and managing the batch jobs.
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 do you like most about Amazon Step Functions?
The integration capability is easy, whereas building state machines is tricky.
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...
 

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: April 2026.
890,088 professionals have used our research since 2012.