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AWS Step Functions vs Tidal by Redwood comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

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

AWS Step Functions
Ranking in Workload Automation
13th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (12th)
Tidal by Redwood
Ranking in Workload Automation
6th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of AWS Step Functions is 1.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tidal by Redwood is 2.9%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Alberto Marangon - PeerSpot reviewer
Automate complex workflows with seamless AWS integration
Step Functions provide seamless integration with AWS services, which enhances the speed of application development. The JSON app launched recently allows us to define data execution more easily. The Standard Workflows feature includes error replay capabilities, which are crucial for efficient error management. The Amazon State Language (ASL) in JSON format facilitates workflow automation and accelerates the deployment of Step Functions.
Steve Mikula - PeerSpot reviewer
Very reliable processing engine, and scheduling is flawless—crucial elements in our financial transaction processing
Because we've been on it for 20 years, it's pretty easy for us to automate jobs with Tidal at this point. It has become second nature. It's pretty simplistic to set up and get going, although there are different levels of complexity you can have within the product. It depends on how simple you want to keep it. If you just keep it: Job A, Job B, Job C, Job D, that becomes pretty simple. But when you start integrating some complex calendars that use sub-calendars—and you can go three, four, or five deep to set up schedules—it becomes more complicated. The beauty of it is you can go as deep as you need to. We can get really complex or we can keep it simple. We have some use cases for both scenarios. The thing that I like the most is the reliability of the engine. The actual scheduling part of the product is pretty much flawless, but the stability of the product is what I find to be reassuring. We are a financial company, we move billions of dollars a day, and if we don't have our transactions processed in a timely manner we can be penalized and our clients can be penalized. It can have a serious financial impact.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The JSON app launched recently allows us to define data execution more easily."
"AWS Step Functions offers advanced workflows that save time and enhance efficiency by reducing delays and ensuring consistent orchestration among various services."
"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."
"One can rate all the calls and that is a good feature."
"The number of historical events is great."
"Overall, I would rate AWS Step Functions at least nine out of ten."
"It's Amazon, it's scalable."
"What I like the most about Amazon Step Functions is how easy it is to use."
"The feature that I find to be valuable, as I'm working with other folks, is the ability to cross-schedule across platforms, and the flexibility that comes with that."
"I like the fact that I have control, and I am able to monitor. If there is an issue, I would be able to respond to any jobs that may fail. With any other scheduler that I know of, a lot of times, when I have a very complex script, if there is an issue in the middle of it, I have to let the whole process fail and then figure out a way to recover from it, whereas Tidal will stop the process, and I can resolve that issue. Once I resolve the issue, I can continue the process. This is very important for invoicing, accounts payable, accounts receivable, or any kind of financial reporting. It allows you to recover from an issue much more effectively than anything else that I have seen."
"We wouldn't be able to do many of the complex scheduling that we do today without it. For us, it is a mission-critical app. Because if it doesn't work or has a problem, then SAP doesn't function. It is that critical. So, it's an essential tool for us to manage and run SAP jobs."
"One of the most useful features is being able to set up a schedule and create dependencies. The calendar can kick off processes at certain times, based on dependencies that you specify, like time, or whether another process has finished. Dependencies are the most useful thing."
"Tidal helps administrators and users to see the information that is relevant to them in that single pane of glass. They can see jobs running, they can see job history, and they can see job progression. If you look at alternatives like Airflow and clouds, you'd have to design your own UI to monitor the progress of the different jobs that you've created in Airflow. So Tidal is huge for us."
"It's easy to use and easy to administer, and it's very flexible."
"Thinking of all the people involved in checking jobs on a daily basis, manually running jobs or auditing them through standalone tools, and trying to connect them. We have saved hundreds of hours weekly, which is substantial."
"The versatility of being able to run on many different types of servers is valuable. There is also a versatility of different services that you could run jobs on. It's highly versatile. You can run a lot of different types of scripts on a lot of different types of servers. It interfaces with all of them."
 

Cons

"I would like to see more data transformation features in Amazon Step Functions like additional operators and logic."
"Increasing the payload size would be beneficial."
"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."
"The solution's data size limit can be improved."
"It is hard to coordinate the declaratory language."
"There is room for improvement in terms of integration with other products. It would benefit from more integration with different applications or services."
"The pricing of the solution can be improved."
"The drill-down into details using the Graphical Views feature is a bit difficult and not that helpful. If you want to go into the details, you have to go to the Job Activity. Graphical Views is not that easy for getting that kind of information."
"Tidal Software interface could be more intuitive and user-friendly."
"When we patch to the next version, there is often a little thing that breaks. It has rarely been a big deal, but I always seem to have to follow up on one tiny issue. It would help if they had some better QA testing of their patches."
"The GUI, the graphical user interface, gets a little bit busy."
"One area for improvement is the command-line interface and the API to bulk-load jobs. It's a little bit kludgy, but we still manage without it. They're working on it and it's getting better all the time. In addition, the documentation for their API for creating jobs needs to be updated. It's a bit of a learning curve."
"The job failure alerts can be updated with more details for better troubleshooting."
"To better fit their unique needs, the solution should give more customization options."
"The user interface is the place that needs the most work. If and when we find issues with the product, they are usually in that area. If I had to choose, that's where I'd want issues, as opposed to in the engine. But the UI is average. It's a little sluggish at times and there are some bugs in it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's price is reasonable."
"The solution is expensive."
"We've been able to purchase more adapters because the cost of the product has been very reasonable."
"This solution is a bit expensive in the current world where everybody is trying to cut down on certain things."
"The new prices that we've received seem reasonable and comparable to the marketplace."
"The price is reasonable in terms of the product’s functionality."
"There have been pricing increases, but with the reduction that our company obtained from Tidal this year, the pricing has become very acceptable for this type of product."
"There are project, system, and server costs. Some of the things that they are doing is introducing new products. They are introducing what they call their Repository, which is a way for you to move a job. That doesn't cost anything to us, because it is reusing a tool called Transporter. The repository is the successor to Transporter, so we already own it and are sort of grandfathered in. But that new product requires a server and database, so now we have to go out and get a server and database. So, there is a cost there."
"We think the pricing is very fair. We have been happy with the pricing compared to some of the other solutions in the space."
"Our annual maintenance cost is competitive for what we have and what they do."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
31%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Insurance Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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?
I use Step Functions for orchestrating several application workflows. Specifically, I often use Step Functions to automate processes requiring multiple steps and for application orchestration. I fo...
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon Step Functions?
Overall, I would rate AWS Step Functions at least nine out of ten. The technology is robust, but improving the payload size could enhance the product's utility further.
What do you like most about Tidal Automation?
Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Tidal Automation?
The price is reasonable in terms of the product’s functionality.
What needs improvement with Tidal Automation?
Initially, it is complicated to understand the functionalities as there is limited product documentation. The setup and configuration of the software is a bit complicated. Providing the training vi...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Step Functions, Step Functions
Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Alpha Apps, The Guardian, SGK, Bigfinite
Information Not Available
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846,617 professionals have used our research since 2012.