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AutoSys Workload Automation vs OpCon comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 29, 2026

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 Scheduler
Sponsored
Ranking in Workload Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
45
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
OpCon
Ranking in Workload Automation
13th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of JAMS Scheduler is 3.1%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AutoSys Workload Automation is 6.6%, down from 10.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpCon is 2.4%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
JAMS3.1%
AutoSys Workload Automation6.6%
OpCon2.4%
Other87.9%
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.
reviewer2519913 - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Systems Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Helped automate 3,000 processes, save hours, and provide work-life balance for our team
The only thing that we have been talking about with the vendor is the Solution Manager tool that we have. It is a great tool. It is getting replaced by another tool that is probably called Enterprise Manager. We just had a few complaints about it. The navigation of that new tool is a little bit more arbitrary than what we have been used to. It may be because we need more training and more time and experience, but that has been the only issue recently. We have talked with our rep, and I am sure they are hearing us when we say it often.

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 saves us on the order of thousands of hours per year."
"JAMS has positively impacted our organization by saving us time, reducing errors, and improving workflows."
"Our company is based on data. Everything we do is data-driven, so it has been very valuable having one place where we can process all of the data and do batch schedules with chunks of data."
"What my team needs are tools to reliably execute all the jobs, minimize the risks, and support high-availability, and JAMS does the job."
"The most valuable feature is the easily accessible data in the database because we run a lot of SQL scripting against the database."
"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."
"The user-friendly and adaptable scheduler allows us to manage various scheduling scenarios."
"It is stable, it works, and it does what it is supposed to."
"We automate recurring processes, keeping track of IT processes controlled worldwide."
"The solution is stable, there are no bugs or glitches, it does not crash or freeze, and it's reliable."
"It has been a wonderful tool for automating our business needs, and that they should really consider this product."
"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."
"CA ESP is a solid product and very easy to use."
"To me, what's most valuable in AutoSys Workload Automation is its robustness and quickness. The tool can trigger jobs within a few milliseconds, and it can handle large volumes of jobs."
"CA 7 Edition just performs its job day in, day out, with very little need to remediate any issues and has performed well for decades."
"There are a lot of valuable features. The version that we're currently casting, Self Service, is going to be the most valuable to us. It is going to allow us to open up the doors, broaden our automation capability and help other business units to be able to automate a lot of the little things that they do from day to day. I'm really looking forward to being able to help other areas with their automation needs. Self Service is really key."
"It is so simplistic that it gives us peace of mind."
"Utilizing OpCon has enabled us to achieve almost 98 percent automation throughout the enterprise, streamline operations from six people to one, free staff to grow into new IT roles, and reduce nightly processing from ten hours to two."
"We literally run our business on OpCon and as such OpCon needs to be, and is a 24/7 enterprise scheduling system."
"It makes everything simpler. Once OpCon is in, it just repeats itself day after day. We don't have to worry about whether a process will be missed. It will run every single time. We are not dropping jobs or missing stuff. When you have multiple institutions, it's very easy to miss jobs. You get on a roll, start doing things, and then forget somebody. With OpCon, everything is done."
"It has also helped to streamline our operations. We contract out our collection department so they are no longer housed on our system. They're housed on another platform. OpCon is able to not only pull in our data, but it also, on a daily basis, updates that third-party."
"There's also a self-service solution manager... that allows us to enable staff to run complex automation tasks by clicking a button and entering some information. They don't have to have access to the OpCon environment to kick off those kinds of events."
"We have found it scales very well. We run thousands of thousands of jobs every day, and sometimes thousands of jobs in a few hours."
 

Cons

"If there were a softcover book on how to really take advantage of all of JAMS' tools, I would buy it. I do better with training books than online searching, so a book would be helpful."
"Right now there's not much of an Azure integration with JAMS at the moment directly because we run separate pipelines."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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?'"
"The error messages from JAMS often need clarification, hindering our ability to resolve issues swiftly."
"With no programming experience, I find JAMS code-driven automation challenging due to the required PowerShell scripting."
"The WCC could be improved."
"AutoSys Workload Automation does not perform performance tuning, monitoring, or management."
"The GUI/Workstation is weak and needs to be improved. CA is working on this right now."
"We received a 'Not active. "Scan Failed"; "The 'path/file' does not exist or not a directory" error message/email on one of our event level file triggers."
"CA Workload Automation AE (AutoSys Edition) should have a few features like the CA7 FQJOB command (to get all the downstream/upstream jobs with the batch current position)."
"The graphical interface can be improved."
"SQL server clustering is not supported."
"There is a slow response time by tech support. Unless, you say it's severity level one. That will give you a two hour timing window for them to call you. It doesn't really happen exactly in two hours, but they try."
"I'd like to see the product include a view where you can see everything about a specific job on a single screen."
"The UI refresh rate is really bad and needs improvement."
"The initial setup is very complex, but that's not necessarily something that needs to be improved. I'm told that in the next version they're improving the upgrade process. So that's in the works already."
"It is a complex product to use. Programming the schedules is complex."
"The only downside to OpCon is that its features can be complicated and really must be taught. Most of our users don't have training beyond the free Basic Training that SMA provides, so for fresh eyes, it is kind of difficult to understand some of the language used."
"Some additional logging-information reporting would also help. They have all the information there but you still have to search around and look back. It's not right there for you, where you click and can get the reporting. You have to know the system and do some additional searches. So reporting is another area that they can build on by simplifying it."
"Of course they have a RESTful API within OpCon, but they have that new web services agent that we installed because we have some SOAP APIs and we had to interact with SMA to get things running. Our developers did do some tweaks, but we have now been able to get some test jobs running, and understand how the workflow goes back and forth."
"It does not have the ability to interact with third-parties via the web/Internet. We have certain processes where we have to interact with a third-party on a website, and unfortunately OpCon just cannot do that."
 

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."
"There are no additional costs other than the license for Fortra's JAMS which is affordable."
"The product is reasonably priced, and we don't have any add-ons."
"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."
"The pricing of JAMS has not been an issue for us, as it has allowed us to save time."
"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."
"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 return on investment would be very high because doing things manually without this product would be extremely expensive."
"The price of this solution is reasonable and there is an annual license required."
"We paid to use the solution monthly."
"I certainly think the pricing is worth the value."
"There is an annual license to use AutoSys Workload Automation."
"Validate how many agents you need beforehand."
"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."
"It is overpriced."
"If we choose to purchase consulting hours, that is an additional cost. However, we've been lucky enough that we've not used all of our allotted consulting hours. Therefore, that is not something that we have had to purchase a lot of. The last time that we purchased consulting hours was roughly two years ago. We purchased a block of 10 for $2,500. It was $250 per hour."
"Cost depends on your environment. We are doing stuff now with failover and recovery, so we have boosted our costs."
"Yearly, it's around $30,000."
"This solution is certainly not the cheapest, but we win in time."
"It used to be per machine, so we had X number of devices licensed. Now it's not. If we had a lot of machines, the new license might've decreased the cost. Unfortunately, we didn't see the same gains."
"Operating OpCon comes with a cost."
"While the base pricing is reasonable, the à la carte options are making the overall cost more complicated and potentially problematic."
"Our license is for 1000 jobs. Including support, the license and upgrades are 2000 euros a month."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Construction Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
34%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Retailer
5%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
16%
Construction Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise23
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise79
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise29
Large Enterprise19
 

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?
In terms of improvements, I believe JAMS can enhance its user interface for better user experiences. I would like to ...
What is your primary use case for JAMS?
My primary use case for JAMS is enterprise workload automation and batch job orchestration. I use it to schedule and ...
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 OpCon?
In this credit union, we use OpCon for automation. That is the main use of it. We have over 3,000 jobs and schedules ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
CA Workload Automation, CA Workload Automation AE
No data available
 

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
LOHR, Carnival Cruise Lines, Herbalife, Digital Federal Credit Union, Synergent, Frandsen Bank & Trust
Find out what your peers are saying about AutoSys Workload Automation vs. OpCon and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
910,956 professionals have used our research since 2012.