JAMS vs Tidal by Redwood comparison

JAMS Software and Tidal Software by Redwood are both solutions in the Workload Automation category. JAMS Software is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.4, while Tidal Software by Redwood is ranked #14 with an average rating of 9.0. JAMS Software holds a 2.2% mindshare in WA, compared to Tidal Software by Redwood’s 4.8% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of JAMS Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Tidal Software by Redwood users who would recommend it.

JAMS

Read 37 JAMS reviews

1,873 Views
1,873 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Tidal by Redwood

Read 37 Tidal by Redwood reviews

2,192 Views
2,170 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

JAMS

Tidal by Redwood

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 8, 2025

Tidal by Redwood and JAMS compete in the workload automation category, with Tidal having the upper hand in scalability and cost management, whereas JAMS excels in natural language job scheduling.

Features: Tidal by Redwood features a robust calendaring system with cross-platform job execution, fiscal and regional calendar support, and advanced job scheduling. JAMS offers natural language job scheduling, integration with PowerShell, and extensive operating system support.

Room for Improvement: Tidal by Redwood could enhance its user experience and simplify its learning curve, improve its interface, enhance the Transporter tool, and monitoring functionalities. JAMS would benefit from better search functionality, a web-based interface, and improved exception handling without custom coding.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both systems are primarily deployed on-premises, with support for private and hybrid clouds. Tidal's technical support has improved post-acquisition by STA from Cisco, whereas JAMS is praised for its North American support, though it needs improvements outside this region.

Pricing and ROI: Tidal by Redwood offers flexible licensing for variable job scheduling needs, with competitive pricing. JAMS provides value through unlimited licensing, beneficial for scalability, with lower costs compared to Control-M and Tivoli.

To learn more, read our detailed JAMS vs. Tidal by Redwood Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

JAMS vs. Tidal by Redwood

September 2025

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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

Ranking in Workload Automation

3rd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Tidal by Redwood

Ranking in Workload Automation

14th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of JAMS is 2.2%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tidal by Redwood is 4.8%, up from 3.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Workload Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
JAMS	2.2%
Tidal by Redwood	4.8%
Other	93.0%

Workload Automation

Featured Reviews

Patrick Norton

Manager of Reliability Engineering and Security Operations at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

Support has been among the most helpful and knowledgeable we've ever worked with but performance monitoring needs improvement

The monitoring of the JAMS product and its performance is an area of concern for me. I also need better tools to adopt version seven. Another area for improvement would be the addition of source control for jobs internally, as this feature would solve several problems for me. JAMS has some quirks. It has a bit of a learning curve. Some exceptions are not intuitive, such as when a job is terminated due to exceeding its defined runaway time limit. This generates a misleading exception message that is difficult for new users to understand and requires experience to interpret correctly. Stalled jobs present a unique challenge, particularly when pushing a system like JAMS version six to its limits. While rare, these instances occur when jobs become unresponsive despite appearing in API queries but not in the monitoring console. Although workarounds exist, they highlight the need for improved native monitoring capabilities within JAMS. Currently, the system assumes flawless operation, necessitating supplemental monitoring tools to detect issues like excessive pending or stalled jobs, ensuring timely intervention by our teams.

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Steve Mikula

IT Scheduling Manager at Paychex, Inc.

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It makes everything that we want to do so much easier. We have had a number of instances in the past where we have had developers who have been working on a project, and even though we have had JAMS for all these years, they will create some SQL Server Agent job, or something like that, to run a task. When it is in code review and development is complete, the question always comes around, "Can JAMS do this?" The answer has always been, "Yes." Pretty much anything we have ever developed could be run by JAMS."

"I find the historical tracking feature of JAMS invaluable for reviewing past events."

"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."

"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."

"The user-friendly and adaptable scheduler allows us to manage various scheduling scenarios."

"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."

"The interface is good, and it's very easy to define and create jobs. If a job is not running or there is an error, the solution will send an email. That's all very good and very useful."

"JAMS has improved our productivity immensely because everything flows. I don't think we could operate at our current staffing levels without it."

More JAMS pros

"It's easy to use and easy to administer, and it's very flexible."

"Tidal Automation is very efficient and can quickly automate most manual and repetitive tasks."

"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."

"Especially in the newer versions of Tidal, the segmentation of user permissions enables us to give people operator permissions for their jobs, to rerun jobs, but view-only for other groups' jobs. We're able to keep people from hurting themselves or other groups accidentally. The permissioning is really good."

"The most valuable feature is the job scheduler, where you can schedule thousands of jobs to execute at specific times."

"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."

"From a management standpoint, when using the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads, I've never had a problem with the application. It's very interactive, especially with the different security levels that they offer."

"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."

More Tidal by Redwood pros

Cons

"The monitoring of the JAMS product and its performance is an area of concern for me."

"Sometimes the UI is not the most responsive I've ever used. But because it does its job, I don't complain."

"JAMS handles exceptions fairly well but there are some areas where it might improve a little bit. It has to do with being able to automatically handle exceptions, out-of-the-box, rather than having to code them."

"Fortra is getting much better with documentation and examples, but there is still room for improvement."

"The product does not allow the users to cut and paste the job names from the screen."

"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."

"I want JAMS to implement a global search function."

"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."

More JAMS cons

"I don't know if Tidal wants to get into the business of monitoring long-running jobs, but that could be a feature for the future: a job launching and monitoring tool. Using Tidal for monitoring doesn't seem like a good fit, but if they could offer something that did that as an add-on or include it, it might be helpful."

"The biggest improvement they need to work on is doing better QA checks before they release new patches and service packs. We do find that you can't trust getting the new product right away, as they have to get some bug fixes out. They do tend to have some bugs in the first iteration."

"My complaint about their pricing model is that every year or every time technology changes or somebody has a new requirement, it usually means that I can schedule that with Tidal, but I would need another adapter. So, every time there is a change, I need a different adapter that I don't have. That's why it is harder to plan for Tidal growth because you have to buy a new adapter every time."

"We've had some quirky stuff happen on an occasional basis where a job does not take off. For example, a job we expected to be finished by 3:00 a.m. is sitting there and not executing when we come in in the morning. We have to go all the way back to the dependencies and then we can see that one of the dependencies has become unscheduled, for some reason. No changes were made to the schedule but this prerequisite job has, all of a sudden, become unscheduled. I have brought this up with Tidal's support but they have never had an answer for it."

"Their software installation and update process could use some improvements. I'm pretty sure they're working on that, but that's definitely an area where it could be streamlined a lot. There's still a lot of manual work that you have to do with the schedule when you deploy masters or do the agents."

"One of the weaknesses of the product is, when something happens, it's difficult to find out the root cause. There are a lot of logs you can take a look at in Tidal. Sometimes, they are useful, but other times, they're not. That is mostly relegated to the administrative team. Users for the most part don't see that and don't know anything about that. They just know they have a problem, then it's up to the administrative team to see what happened and figure out the problem."

"Understanding and using Tidal Automation could be overwhelming for someone with minimal programming language."

"For the most part, the drill-down and the logging are really good. But if we take an Informatica job, for example: We have the ability, and the operators have the ability, to actually drill down and see, at a session level, where the failure is. There is, unfortunately, no way to extract that into an actual output email or failure email. It's not that that information is not available, but extracting it into an email would be a nice-to-have."

More Tidal by Redwood cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I haven't been involved in the financial side for several years, but we buy one host and unlimited agents, and we get a reasonable price for that. We're happy with the amount we pay and the scalability it provides."

"It's expensive, to be honest, but it does the job."

"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."

"JAMS is relatively inexpensive, with additional costs only incurred for tags, other services, and optional support renewals."

"This is a good product at a fair price."

"The product is reasonably priced, and we don't have any add-ons."

"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."

"Our licensing is pretty cheap because we have a state solution. So, we pay only $1,000 a year."

More JAMS pricing and cost advice

"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."

"The solution has no hidden costs. It helps me to plan forward into the future. I know that I can add another 100 or a thousand jobs, and that's how much it will cost me today."

"The price is reasonable in terms of the product’s functionality."

"They work with you on licensing. So, it has been great. Everybody has different licensing, but I've had good luck with the licensing. They've been very accommodating. You basically need to buy a license for each physical server, but then you're allowed an unlimited number of virtual servers."

"Our licensing model for Tidal is on an annual basis. It is very good and works well for us. Tidal's licensing is very transparent and simple. It lets you know, for the amount you use, that's the price that you pay. So, we buy X number of licenses, and we know that this is where we are. I'm very happy with that. I saw the licensing modules on other platforms, and I didn't like them. Other companies and solutions would calculate the connections, adapters, and instances. I think that's the reason that BMC was pretty expensive: They just didn't understand what our needs are."

"BMC is really expensive. The other solutions are about the same price. I think Tidal is even cheaper than the others, such as CA, Stonebranch, and JAMS."

"Tidal is a low-cost tool and not expensive in comparison to other tools."

"The pricing is pretty reasonable. That seems to help a lot versus other companies. There are no other fees aside from the standard licensing fees. There are other products out there where you pay based on how many jobs you run and so on, and I know that's very frustrating for users."

More Tidal by Redwood pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	18

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	38

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about JAMS?

I find the historical tracking feature of JAMS invaluable for reviewing past events.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JAMS?

They recently switched to subscription-based pricing, which increased. The price is fair considering the functionality and importance of the tool, although the increase did unsettle our management.

See all answers

What needs improvement with JAMS?

As far as we are using JAMS version 6, it looks good and there is nothing major to add about it. Everything is functioning properly. From the past three years, it has remained the same, but sometim...

See all answers

What do you like most about Tidal Automation?

Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution.

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Tidal Automation?

I would recommend Tidal Automation by Redwood as the first priority for users looking for any automation tool. Overall, I rate Tidal Automation by Redwood a nine out of ten.

See all answers

Comparisons

Control-M vs JAMS

Compared 16% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs JAMS

Compared 14% of the time

Stonebranch vs JAMS

Compared 9% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs JAMS

Compared 8% of the time

VisualCron vs JAMS

Compared 8% of the time

More JAMS Competitors

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 29% of the time

Control-M vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 16% of the time

Automic Automation vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 10% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 9% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 8% of the time

More Tidal by Redwood Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

JAMS

October 2025

Download JAMS product report

Buyer's Guide

Tidal by Redwood

October 2025

Download Tidal by Redwood product report

Also Known As

No data available

Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler

Interactive Demo

JAMS Software

Demo not available

Tidal Software by Redwood

Overview

JAMS offers efficient automation and scheduling with strong capabilities in planning, dependency management, and multi-platform support. Its intuitive interface and robust tools assist in managing complex workflows for enhanced resource allocation.

JAMS stands out for its blend of automation and scheduling capabilities, making it suitable for handling complex workflows across platforms. Its features such as batch scheduling, natural language scheduling, and interactive agents promote seamless integration with other tools like PowerShell. The focus on metrics and notifications ensures users are informed about operational efficiency enhancements. While JAMS is effective in many areas, users report a need for improved simulation for termination processes and a more intuitive client setup. They see potential in enhanced search functions, better exception handling, and greater transparency in custom execution. The current setup challenges like disappearing options and mobile accessibility can affect user satisfaction. Including a fully web-based client and improving documentation could add value.

What are JAMS' key features?

Planning and Scheduling: Coordinates workflows efficiently with advanced scheduling techniques.
Dependency Management: Ensures seamless operation by managing inter-task dependencies.
Interactive Agents: Integrates with PowerShell and other tools to enhance automation.
Natural Language Scheduling: Simplifies job creation with intuitive language use.
Multi-Platform Flexibility: Operates across diverse environments ensuring robust performance.

What benefits should users consider?

Operational Efficiency: Reduction in manual oversight with robust scheduling and integration tools.
Resource Allocation: Efficient management of workflows across multiple timeframes and platforms.
User Satisfaction: Seamless user experience with intuitive interfaces and integration capabilities.
Visibility: Centralized management provides comprehensive oversight over tasks.

Organizations using JAMS for workflow and batch job automation leverage its capabilities for SSIS, SQL procedures, and Python scripts. JAMS supports file automation and managed file transfers across environments like AWS and Azure. Users employ JAMS for data management, reporting, and integration tasks, including handling holiday-aware scheduling for improved task coordination.

JAMS Software

Tidal Software is a leading provider of enterprise workload automation solutions that orchestrate the execution of complex workflows across systems, applications and IT environments. With a comprehensive portfolio of products and services, Tidal optimizes mission-critical business processes, increases IT cost efficiencies and satisfies legal and regulatory compliance requirements. Hundreds of customers around the world count on Tidal for modernizing their workload automation and driving their digital transformation. Tidal Software is headquartered in Chicago with offices in Houston, London, Minsk, Belarus and Chennai, India. For more information, visit tidalsoftware.com.

Tidal Software by Redwood

Sample Customers

Teradata, Arconic, General Dynamics, Yum!, CVS Health, Comcast, Ghiradelli, & Boston’s Children’s Hospital

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

JAMS vs. Tidal by Redwood

September 2025

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