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AutoSys Workload Automation vs Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

AutoSys Workload Automation
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
Workload Automation (8th)
Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT
Average Rating
9.2
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
Managed File Transfer (MFT) (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Infrastructure Software Management solutions, they serve different purposes. AutoSys Workload Automation is designed for Workload Automation and holds a mindshare of 16.1%, down 18.8% compared to last year.
Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT, on the other hand, focuses on Managed File Transfer (MFT), holds 7.0% mindshare, up 5.3% since last year.
Workload Automation
Managed File Transfer (MFT)
 

Featured Reviews

Antony Askew - PeerSpot reviewer
Mar 18, 2024
Helps us manage complex workloads, reduce our workload failure rates, and save us time
The visibility and control features are somewhat limited. This is a recognized weakness, but thee vendor is currently revamping the user interface to address it. While the current UI is a bit outdated, it's undergoing improvement. AutoSys Workload Automation has some areas for improvement, particularly in housekeeping and product maintenance. These tasks are currently quite manual and labor-intensive for our team. Additionally, the reporting and forecasting functionalities could be more robust. One area for improvement with AutoSys Workload Automation is that it comprises several distinct tools configured to work together. This necessitates familiarity with multiple tools for effective solution management. Consequently, it can sometimes lack a sense of cohesiveness as a unified solution.
Earl Diem - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 16, 2022
Key to our workflow and our workload automation strategy, helping us trade and consume files
File monitors are one of the most valuable features. We have about 400 file monitors running in GoAnywhere. They monitor the NAS locations where files arrive, and they kick off workflows. When a file arrives, GoAnywhere will identify that the file is there, move it to a consumption zone, then reach out to our enterprise scheduler through a REST API call. The solution helps centralize the exchange of data between systems, employees, customers, and trading partners. It's very central and that's pretty important. We generally move about 3,000 files a day, between our partners and internal workflows. My team really likes the intuitiveness of GoAnywhere's user interface. For example, my automation team has a file coming in from a bank, a file that needs to be unzipped, reformatted, re-zipped up, and then put into another folder where another team is going to consume it. Because of all the progressive elaboration—the project started a year ago—the format of the file is not the same. We addressed it with GoAnywhere instead of having the producer of the file change the format. That's how flexible it is for us. And looking at the comprehensiveness of GoAnywhere's workflow features, we use it pretty extensively for working with files. Stonebranch is our enterprise automation platform, but we don't really do any file work with Stonebranch. We chose to use GoAnywhere, our MFT tool, to move and manipulate files. The solution also connects to popular ICAP servers and that's pretty important to our security guys when it comes to preventing malware and other malicious content from entering our organization. The connection to popular ICAP servers, so that content is inspected for sensitive information like credit cards, is pretty important. We're a financial institution and a lot of the data we work with has PAN data and card numbers in it, coming in from partners.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"CA Workload Automation AutoSys Edition is one of the most powerful schedulers that you have on the open systems, or going between Window servers; to be able to schedule and take advantage of the different powers that the automation has with it."
"The initial setup is easy."
"The capabilities of the product to schedule on multiple platforms, multiple operating systems."
"AutoSys Workload Automation is scalable."
"The scheduling feature allows us to know when jobs are going to run and makes sure they run in the order needed."
"We automate recurring processes, keeping track of IT processes controlled worldwide."
"It has improved my organization by automating IT applications."
"The web UI is beneficial and the granular security policies allow us to cover all of our audit requirements."
"I like the organization of resources, specifically listing out all of our FTPs and having a name and description to easily organize them. I also like the scheduler. The organization and the scheduling, being able to create the folders and the jobs, have been really helpful."
"The most valuable feature is customer data transfers for traditional SFTP. Some of our biggest customers are on the platform, and it works out very well for us as a big selling point."
"The security and vendor management features are helpful in terms of providing access to data."
"If it's dealing with SFTP or any kind of secure transfer, we don't hear about it. It's good. Everything works."
"When users say, 'I'm building spreadsheets that I would like to be uploaded on a regular basis into the IBM i,' we are able to accommodate that request within a matter of hours rather than the days it would take to create programs to do that. That is very useful. It has eliminated several dozens of scripts for us."
"Another nice feature is that you can invoke a native program from GoAnywhere. That helps you because you don't have to get fancy with agents. If a native program runs on the server that GoAnywhere is running on, like sed or perl, you can use it,"
"The user interface is simple."
"The SFTP and encryption functionality works well, and SFTP is the bulk of what we use."
 

Cons

"An area for improvement in AutoSys Workload Automation is that it lacks advanced features or advanced built-in functionalities found in competitors, for example, an advanced workflow feature. Even the handling or notification from AutoSys Workload Automation isn't the best in the industry. Other products have very good workflow-related functionalities such as ActiveBatch that's missing in AutoSys Workload Automation, so I wish the tool had those features."
"I am looking forward to more of their dashboard features. I think it would be very valuable for us to have dashboard features that could be delivered to our customers in the form of a URL, and they could refresh that URL whenever they wanted to get up to date performance metrics out of our systems."
"I would like to see two-factor authentication, since you see a lot of companies in the news for security breaches. That is a really big thing for us."
"More benefits with the agent upgrades, and that's about it. Other than that we have no complaints with it. It's been awesome."
"We had a few issues, however, the issues were more on the infrastructure rather than with the application itself."
"Documentation and cross-application externals could be improved."
"The lack of documentation, that is an issue. When we do need to bring it down for maintenance, it is always a scary moment for us because we have never had it crash."
"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 process of adding a vendor is very easy. You just point and click. You create your job, schedule, and project, and off you go. You just need to know what the processes do when you add in a new job that runs daily and so on. For us, it is not a problem, but maybe the documentation on that could be a little more straightforward. We, however, have no problems figuring that out. It is pretty straightforward for us."
"The biggest weakness I have seen in the product is scheduling. It is very limited in that aspect. It needs more flexibility and more ways to schedule."
"There's not a lot of improvement I can think of. Maybe in the tools section, they have an SQL Wizard and a URL Wizard, which are really good. I think that the SQL Wizard might need some improvement. I don't know how to improve it, but it's just a little slow here and there."
"There are a number of built-in tasks in GoAnywhere. One, in particular, the write to CSV task, is slow. If you have, say, 100,000 records in your row set and you want to write them to a CSV file, it takes a long time. That definitely requires performance improvement."
"For training, there should be some sites or resources on YouTube or Udemy. They do not have that currently."
"It would be helpful to have a way to actually have a job run without notifying the email addresses you have set up and without posting to the actual FTP... when you need to make a small change to a job that is deployed to production, and test that change, you have to go back and reset everything. It's not really a great way to test."
"Upgrading was a challenge and I ran into some problems along the way."
"I want to be able to use GoAnywhere to create customizable reports that I can share with the MSP containing any information related to file transfers."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The return on investment would be very high because doing things manually without this product would be extremely expensive."
"I certainly think the pricing is worth the value."
"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."
"CA pricing has been a problem, and not looked upon favorably here at all."
"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."
"It is overpriced."
"There is an annual license to use AutoSys Workload Automation."
"Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT is an inexpensive solution."
"Compared to other tools it's less expensive."
"The cost was definitely within reason and it has definitely been worth the cost, based on how much we can automate. It has exceeded my expectations."
"The cost of GoAnywhere versus the value it brings to our data transfer operations is reasonable... The cost is relatively expensive but, back to the car analogy, that's to be expected with a Ferrari."
"HelpSystems GoAnywhere MFT is very reasonably priced for the value it brings."
"GoAnywhere was the most attractively priced product that met our needs. In our PoC it really came down to MOVEit and GoAnywhere, and GoAnywhere's pricing was about 30 percent less."
"It would be good for the company to explore a modular approach to selling the product so it could be cheaper and more attractive to users."
"The product's pricing is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
47%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
6%
Insurance Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 because nothing gets left unattended since it is all visible in one place, and th...
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 started for new users.
What do you like most about Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT?
GoDrive eliminates the need to use the exchange server for file sharing.
What needs improvement with Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT?
For what we are using it for, it is doing the job, so I would not be able to say how to improve it. For us, it is perfect. It is a good solution that we are using, and we are going to continue to d...
 

Also Known As

CA Workload Automation, CA Workload Automation AE
HelpSystems GoAnywhere MFT, GoAnywhere MFT, GoAnywhere Managed File Transfer,
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Gaumont, Mercantil do Brasil, CCEE, Hanwha Life
McKesson City of Modesto, California Kwik Trip Northwestern University Charter Communications
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC, Redwood Software, Broadcom and others in Workload Automation. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.