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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
6.9
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
AutoSys Workload Automation
Ranking in Workload Automation
5th
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
11th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of JAMS is 2.8%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AutoSys Workload Automation is 8.0%, down from 14.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Step Functions is 1.6%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
JAMS2.8%
AutoSys Workload Automation8.0%
AWS Step Functions1.6%
Other87.6%
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2770605 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Has streamlined complex job scheduling across scripting languages while reducing manual effort
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. A functionality running on the JAMS server to continuously check the JAMS agents would ensure they are working properly. If an agent is not responding, a feature to restart the service from the job server machine would be beneficial. The upgrade process, particularly when switching from V6 to V7, could be clearer in terms of documentation, ideally with screenshots showing exactly what needs to be done on each screen.
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

"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."
"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."
"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."
"The feature or capability to import a job is most valuable. We can import an existing job from different platforms, and all the configurations get migrated as well without modifying the code, job schedule, etc."
"JAMS has been a beneficial monitoring tool for our project in terms of being able to deliver data that is essential for users."
"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."
"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."
"It has definitely drastically improved our capabilities to scale our automation. Before JAMS, there were a lot of manual processes. We had a couple of operators who spent all day doing that. A lot of the time with human intervention and human processes, it is as good as the person who may be following a procedure and human error is a big problem."
"The customized views that each individual can create, and views that can be made free-form, makes this very popular with the programmers."
"It gives a real-time view of all the batch processing that we have. Monitoring-wise, it is really good."
"We need to have things run in a very sequential order, so it is very useful that we can schedule the work flows."
"This solution enables us to improve our daily processing times. We can do everything faster than before we used this solution."
"Running anything in crontab, you need to put a lot of logic into it to make it work. With this product, you don't have to worry about it. You have the schedule object where you put all the dates or holidays in it, and it does it for you."
"The aggregator reporting utility which tells us our throughput in lag and latency."
"It works constantly and is pretty seamless. You do not have to open up many support tickets."
"The most valuable aspects of AutoSys Workload Automation are its performance, scalability, and ease of getting started for new users."
"AWS Step Functions was stable, and there were no problems that I can recall."
"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."
"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."
"The JSON app launched recently allows us to define data execution more easily."
"AWS Step Functions acts as a high-level layer, allowing us to seamlessly integrate with microservices."
"The integration capability is easy, whereas building state machines is tricky."
"The solution is stable...The solution is easy to scale."
 

Cons

"The client is horrible. Every time JAMS puts out a survey on what they can improve, I always say, "The client: When you are setting up jobs, it is quite horrible." The response has been, "Well, we are just using the Windows foundation," and I am like, "Why isn't it only your product?" We can get around it now that we know its quirks, but it is not the most user-friendly of tools out there. The UI is completely unintuitive. We had to go and open up a support ticket with JAMS just to get something back. It is not user-friendly at all."
"The documentation is not super... It's not as quick and slick as I'd like it to be."
"I would like to see the ability to interface with Microsoft group-managed service accounts, but they're still in the research phase. They need to ensure everything's legit and safe. The report designer and dashboards could also be improved. We're running 7.3, so I don't know if they have updated the reporting in 7.5, but I think the reports and dashboards could be better."
"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."
"With no programming experience, I find JAMS code-driven automation challenging due to the required PowerShell scripting."
"Sometimes the UI is not the most responsive I've ever used. But because it does its job, I don't complain."
"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."
"For scalability, I would rate it as seven because when we have a huge volume, sometimes the tool is not so responsive."
"Some of the reports are either a bit hard to understand or don’t give you what you might expect to see."
"We see improvement possibilities in the processing provision of predefined evaluations or individual objects, or in the Self Service portal, which can be used by any user to monitor objects or start objects."
"They could do better supporting it. They have too many of the same type of products, so sometimes it doesn't get as much attention as it should."
"We are trying to see if we can use this from a cloud perspective with AWS, Azure, and other clouds, but it seems that there is no cloud integration in this product. We would like to see cloud integration. We are very pleased with this solution, but we are moving our application to the cloud, and we found out that it doesn't support any cloud features. So, we are trying to find a replacement."
"The scalability is poor because I cannot use it for all automation solutions."
"Performance improvements in the UI would be appreciated."
"​CA installation processes are never anything but complex.​"
"The graphical interface can be improved."
"It is hard to coordinate the declaratory language."
"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."
"I would like to see more data transformation features in Amazon Step Functions like additional operators and logic."
"If AWS Step Functions keeps adding more integrations, it would be even better."
"The price and support are areas with shortcomings where the solution needs to improve."
"It is difficult to suggest improvements at the moment."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 product is reasonably priced, and we don't have any add-ons."
"Take advantage of its scalability. You can start small. The initial cost is very reasonable. Once you have started picking up the tool and adopting it, then you can scale up from there and buy more agents."
"JAMS is priced competitively compared to similar solutions and offers flexible licensing options to cater to user needs."
"JAMS is relatively inexpensive, with additional costs only incurred for tags, other services, and optional support renewals."
"There are no additional costs other than the license for Fortra's JAMS which is affordable."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It is overpriced."
"Validate how many agents you need beforehand."
"There is an annual license to use AutoSys Workload Automation."
"The pricing needs to be improved. Some of my client's complained that it was too expensive."
"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's price is reasonable."
"The solution is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
42%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
5%
Insurance Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise19
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 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?
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...
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 do you like most about AutoSys Workload Automation?
The most valuable aspects of AutoSys Workload Automation are its performance, scalability, and ease of getting starte...
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: January 2026.
882,961 professionals have used our research since 2012.