Fortra's Automate vs VisualCron comparison

Fortra and NetCart AB are both solutions in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category. Fortra is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.7, while NetCart AB is ranked #21 with an average rating of 8.3. Fortra holds a 1.3% mindshare in RPA, compared to NetCart AB’s 0.7% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Fortra users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of NetCart AB users who would recommend it.

Fortra's Automate

Read 23 Fortra's Automate reviews

1,766 Views
867 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

VisualCron

Read 11 VisualCron reviews

823 Views
459 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Fortra's Automate

VisualCron

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 4, 2024

Fortra's Automate and VisualCron are prominent products in the automation category. Automate has an advantage in pricing and scalability, making it a cost-effective choice for varied task management, whereas VisualCron is favored for its ease of use and strong visual interface.

Features: Automate provides easy deployment, drag-and-drop functionality, and comprehensive integration with platforms like Microsoft Azure, making it efficient for repetitive task automation. It allows robust integration capabilities and handles various environments efficiently. VisualCron is noted for its visual scheduling capabilities and user-friendly task management, facilitating complex workflows without extensive programming skills. It integrates effectively with databases and remote systems, offering a visual overview of workflows.

Room for Improvement: Automate could improve integration consistency with databases and enhance its user interface to compete with top offerings like UiPath. Its OCR capabilities, particularly for non-English characters, require refinement. VisualCron needs better documentation and a more streamlined user interface for easier navigation. Users also desire improved response times for technical support.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Automate supports both on-premises and cloud installations, offering flexibility but favoring on-premises environments. Its customer service is highly rated with efficient support and numerous resources. VisualCron supports various deployment modes, including hybrid environments, with generally responsive support that effectively resolves issues, though slightly slower.

Pricing and ROI: Automate distinguishes itself with flexible licensing options based on bots, offering substantial cost savings over competitors. Its pricing is reasonable, resulting in positive ROI shortly after implementation. VisualCron offers straightforward pricing without complex licensing, allowing yearly licenses suitable for different company sizes, though noted for a slightly higher upfront cost.

To learn more, read our detailed Fortra's Automate vs. VisualCron Report (Updated: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Fortra's Automate vs. VisualCron

December 2024

Download the complete report

Helped 824,053 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

Fortra's Automate

Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

5th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VisualCron

Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

21st

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Managed File Transfer (MFT) (15th), Workload Automation (18th)

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category, the mindshare of Fortra's Automate is 1.3%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VisualCron is 0.7%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Featured Reviews

Anabel Marco

Account Director at Software Greenhouse

Can automate several processes with only one bot and is easy to implement, administer, and use

We have tried other RPA solutions like UiPath or Automation Anywhere. They are fantastic products but complex, and it's hard to understand everything. It would be best if you had a skilled developer or several. Automate is easy to implement, administer, and use. It's appropriate for us because our cases are simple and easy to automate. We don't need complicated tools with many features; We prefer to get a significant ROI quickly. We can automate several processes with only one bot, so it's much cheaper than other products where you need to buy additional licenses. We need a good value for our automation. The other solutions might be more robust, but Automate is perfect for us because we're not a large enterprise.

Read full review

Sourav-Dutta

Technical Lead - Database Administrator at SMART ENERGY SYSTEMS LLC

It's user-friendly, and I didn't need long to understand the process

We use VisualCron for all our automation needs, like connecting to FileZilla, calling APIs, generating PGP keys, creating encryption files with the PGP key login to Azure, etc. It can automatically log in to SQL Server and execute SQL script jobs in bulk. We had 2,000-3,000 users at my previous…

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This product is quite easy to install, learn, and use, with our new employees being able to start using it in projects for clients after only two weeks of internal training."

"The best feature of Automate is its ease of use, which is a major selling point."

"The licensing of the product is very good. You only need to license it once and then you have it forever."

"The interface is simple, user-friendly, and very intuitive."

"The product effectively handles all the tasks we require."

"It's very easy to use. That's a big selling point for it. It has got a drag-and-drop interface, so you can quickly deploy bots."

"We are still in the process of rolling it to production and tweaking it (our AD groups are a mess), but the improvements are priceless. Having users ID's created the same way every time without human error is the best part. We don't need to worry about why groups were not added, user rights not set to folders or missing a private folder being created, typos or just even knowing when things are done and logged."

"A great feature that you seldom see in these kind of systems is the ability to use a database as trigger to launch a task. This is something I asked for a few years ago and that was added."

More Fortra's Automate pros

"'ve only had a few cases where I've had to request support in the past 12 years of use, but the support response time and resolution were was extremely quick."

"It helped us reduce manual steps."

"The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%."

"What I found most beneficial from VisualCron is that you can directly connect it with different databases, user accounts, and credentials. You can run queries from one machine to another using the credentials, unlike PowerShell, that's run by the machine itself. With VisualCron, you can directly ask other machines and run requests through user credentials. Suppose you have an AWS or Azure environment. In that case, you can maintain the connection between on-premises and cloud-based machines, which is the type of setup in the organization I'm working for. You can directly call some of the services via VisualCron on your local on-premises machine, and I found that an excellent feature of the tool."

"We don't have to do any coding. We just plug and play and it works."

"The most valuable feature of VisualCron is its ability to schedule interactive jobs so that you can have interdependencies within the job and interdependencies of a job on another job, and so on."

"VisualCron is a very powerful program to automate different steps in your business processes. We use it to automate replacing files and inform departments about the replacement."

"The ability to clone jobs to shorten the time it takes to implement a process has been invaluable, but its flexibility also gives us the ability to create a job that can handle a multifaceted process with a complex workflow."

More VisualCron pros

Cons

"The documentation for errors needs improvement as many of the error messages we receive are very vague."

"The solution has a very weak knowledge base."

"There is room for improvement regarding cloud functionality; there are a few missing features, and the logging could be better, especially air logging. We can go into logging events and create our own task, but it would be nice if this were more detailed."

"The vendor is currently working on a solution that allows us to automatically create a process that is based on a document that we receive via email."

"We really need a free development environment for customers. Building and testing automation on production isn't ideal."

"I believe we need to test various OCR tools that assist in evaluating, let's say, six different customer resyncs. We analyze their spending patterns and documentations, but current OCR support has limitations, requiring highly standardized documents, which isn't always the case. With a more advanced OCR system, we could improve processes related to credit risk management and legal matters. We're exploring how to integrate Fortra's Automate with our CRM platform, taking cues from instances where Salesforce seamlessly merged with Automate. However, we use a different CRM, Insight for New Enterprise, and we're seeking ways to connect the automation process within our CRM. We aim for the automation to continue smoothly, even in instances where traditional automation methods might face hurdles."

"It would be an improvement if Automate had better stability tools, whether by recommending a certain amount of memory because it can be a memory hog at times."

"The documentation is not that great."

More Fortra's Automate cons

"The error timeout and info could be better. When making web request calls, it will time out sometimes and we won't get any useful info out of the error response."

"There are some conditions in the mail trigger, but you can only use them as an "AND" condition, not as an "OR" condition. This is an improvement that could be useful. For example, some people put "invoice" in the subject and others put "invoice" in the body. If I want to make a trigger for everybody whose sending invoices, I have to make two jobs for this now."

"VisualCron seems to operate like an efficient machine when it comes to improvements and enhancements and new features. I always appreciate the quick response I get when bringing up an issue or coming up with suggestions. I've mentioned before that it would be great to see a move away from SQLCE and XML configuration files."

"The only problem I face when I use the tool is that it doesn't contain much documentation or it doesn't have many video tutorials on its features."

"I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run."

"The documentation is a bit weak."

"I want to improve the UI in VisualCron, as it's not as user-friendly, particularly when setting up the task scheduler. If you're familiar with the tool, then no problem, but if not, you'll have a problem typing text because sometimes, the cursor points to other places, so there's an issue with text box alignment in VisualCron. That was painful for me when I was just a VisualCron novice, but when you become used to it, there won't be a problem."

"Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way."

More VisualCron cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Once you buy the software, you just pay for the support for backend help."

"Compared to other products, the pricing model for this solution is much more convenient, flexible, and adaptable to the Portuguese reality."

"The cost is a bit high for a small business like ours, but we manage with Fortra's Automate."

"The pricing is quite reasonable. We can run the process with one bot. The limitation is at the server level because they have some resources, and sometimes that is enough. It isn't too expensive, so you can get a good return off of one, and you can also have a pack of five bots that is quite competitive."

"I'm only involved in running the product and maintaining the systems, so I can't speak to the cost."

"From a distributor's side, one of the biggest selling points is its price point. Without going into any numbers, compared to UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism, we're significantly cheaper. The main difference is that other competitors usually charge you per process. However, in Automate's case, it's priced per bot. So, a bot can run multiple processes at the same time, but you are only priced for a single bot."

"I like the way this solution is priced because you can buy a license, or you can buy the software outright."

"It comes with a package that costs approximately $20,000 USD per year."

More Fortra's Automate pricing and cost advice

"ROI is one month."

"The price is a bit high."

"The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."

"ROI is 95 percent."

"VisualCron is correctly priced because it wasn't very cheap, and it wasn't overly expensive, so the price for it was set correctly. When my previous company bought VisualCron, it was €800 per server per year. On a scale of one to five, I would rate the pricing for VisualCron a five because it was just right. The tool was affordable, and it has one of the most competitive pricing in the market."

"We are fine with a rather cheap setup. Licensing with VisualCron is fair. You have a simple one-year licence in different sizes. There isn't a licensing jungle with hundreds of options and opt-ins."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Healthcare Company

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

27%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Healthcare Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about HelpSystems AutoMate?

We use it for specific cases, mainly secure file transfers, which are vital for us. And it works for us.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for HelpSystems AutoMate?

We used the platform primarily for task automation, including transmitting EDR files. Additionally, we've utilized it for repetitive tasks, such as downloading web-based reports using the browser a...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortra Automate?

The starter pack was all we needed and was reasonable. Others were either more expensive or didn't do all that I wanted to do without an addon.

See all answers

What do you like most about VisualCron?

The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VisualCron?

The price is a bit high. However, it is okay.

See all answers

What needs improvement with VisualCron?

The documentation is a bit weak. The tool must provide a better set of documentation.

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Power Automate vs Fortra's Automate

Compared 48% of the time

UiPath vs Fortra's Automate

Compared 37% of the time

Automation Anywhere vs Fortra's Automate

Compared 7% of the time

MOVEit vs Fortra's Automate

Compared 5% of the time

Blue Prism vs Fortra's Automate

Compared 4% of the time

More Fortra's Automate Competitors

Microsoft Power Automate vs VisualCron

Compared 43% of the time

Control-M vs VisualCron

Compared 19% of the time

Stonebranch vs VisualCron

Compared 7% of the time

OpCon vs VisualCron

Compared 7% of the time

MOVEit vs VisualCron

Compared 6% of the time

More VisualCron Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fortra's Automate

December 2024

Download Fortra's Automate product report

Buyer's Guide

VisualCron

November 2024

Download VisualCron product report

Also Known As

HelpSystems Automate, Automate

No data available

Learn More

Video not available

Fortra

NetCart AB

Overview

Fortra's Automate is predominantly used in HR and operational departments for automating reports, file manipulation, and data processing. Key uses include automating repetitive tasks, integrating PDFs and emails, running scripts, processing large data sets, transforming file formats, synchronizing databases, managing job schedules, and transferring files.

Users commend Fortra's Automate for its ease of implementation and user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, which requires minimal technical skills for efficient bot deployment. The software is appreciated for its effective scheduling tools, reliable integration capabilities, and a wide range of functions such as file interaction, secure file transfers, and extensive automation without the need for coding. Businesses achieve significant time savings and simplified processes, bolstered by continuous updates and robust customer support.

What are the key features?

Scheduling Tools: Enables precise control and timing for automation tasks
Integration Capabilities: Seamlessly connects with various systems and software
File Interaction: Comprehensive functions for file manipulation and transfer
Secure Transfers: Ensures data safety during file transfers
User-Friendly: Minimal technical skills needed for deployment and use

What benefits should you look for in reviews?

Ease of Implementation: Fast and simple setup process
Time Savings: Reduces time spent on repetitive tasks
Process Simplification: Streamlines complex workflows
Customer Support: Access to continuous support and updates

In various industries such as healthcare, transportation, and payroll, Fortra's Automate automates workflows like invoice generation, data retrieval, data uploading, and insurance eligibility checks, enhancing efficiency and accuracy for HR and operational tasks.

VisualCron automates tasks like file encryption, scheduling SQL jobs, system integration, data workflow management, and application triggering, making it ideal for handling nightly syncs, FTP server file replacements, job scheduling, and invoice processing.

VisualCron provides an efficient automation solution with features like error and status reporting, API connections, PGP key generation, encryption file creation, and bulk SQL script execution. It simplifies task automation through its mail and event triggers, job variables, conditional execution, and logging with error alerts. Users benefit from its integration capabilities, scheduling flexibility, visual interface, and support for databases and credential management without extensive coding.

What are the most important features?

Simplicity: Easy-to-use interface for seamless automation.
Mail and Event Triggers: Automate tasks based on specific events.
Job Variables: Customize tasks using various input variables.
Conditional Execution: Execute tasks based on predefined conditions.
Error Alerts: Logging and error reporting to ensure task reliability.
Integration Capabilities: Easily connect and integrate with systems and APIs.
Scheduling Flexibility: Create complex schedules with ease.
Visual Interface: User-friendly GUI for efficient management.
Database Support: Manage and automate database tasks efficiently.
Credential Management: Securely handle credentials for various tasks.
PowerShell Commands: Execute PowerShell commands directly.

What are the benefits or ROI users should look for in the reviews?

Efficiency: Streamline and automate repetitive tasks to save time.
Cost Savings: Reduce manual labor and associated costs.
Reliability: Ensure consistency and accuracy in task execution.
Integration: Enhance workflows by integrating with different systems.
Flexibility: Adjust quickly to changes and handle complex scheduling needs.
Support: Benefit from extensive post-sales support and configuration options.
Innovation: Foster innovation by eliminating the need for coding.

Industries like finance, healthcare, and logistics implement VisualCron to automate data workflows, secure file transfers, and schedule critical tasks. It is used to streamline invoice processing, manage large-scale data operations, and ensure compliance through encryption and error reporting. VisualCron enhances operational efficiency, scalability, and security in various sectors, making it essential for businesses requiring robust automation capabilities.

Sample Customers

Aldergrove Financial Group, Preferred Health Professionals, Mindbeam Technologies, First Credit Union in British Columbia, Vestcom International, Prime Liberty Benefits, University of Tampa, CNLBancshares, World Precision Instruments, BJ's Restaurants, Globe Pequot Press, Accudata Technologies, Norton Healthcare, Pacific Toxicology Laboratories

7 Eleven, ABB Sécheron SA, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Amazon Europe Core, Apple, Assa Abloy, Aston Martin, Banco Santander, BMW (Australia)

Buyer's Guide

Fortra's Automate vs. VisualCron

December 2024

Free Report: Fortra's Automate vs. VisualCron

Find out what your peers are saying about Fortra's Automate vs. VisualCron and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.

DOWNLOAD NOW

824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Fortra's Automate vs. VisualCron report.

See our list of best Robotic Process Automation (RPA) vendors.

We monitor all Robotic Process Automation (RPA) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.