Fortra's JAMS vs Tidal by Redwood comparison

Fortra and Tidal Software by Redwood are both solutions in the Workload Automation category. Fortra is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.8, while Tidal Software by Redwood is ranked #4 with an average rating of 9.7. Fortra holds a 1.8% mindshare in WA, compared to Tidal Software by Redwood’s 3.0% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Fortra users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Tidal Software by Redwood users who would recommend it.

Fortra's JAMS

Read 34 Fortra's JAMS reviews

1,859 Views
500 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Tidal by Redwood

Read 37 Tidal by Redwood reviews

2,921 Views
1,168 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Fortra's JAMS

Tidal by Redwood

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 24, 2024

Tidal by Redwood and Fortra's JAMS both compete in the workload automation category. Tidal seems to have the upper hand due to its extensive cross-platform integrations and superior customization and scripting flexibility, making it ideal for complex enterprise-level operations.

Features: Tidal stands out with cross-platform integrations, a flexible calendaring system that supports complex dependencies, and advanced scripting capabilities. It also allows for the segmentation of user permissions to ensure tailored access. JAMS, on the other hand, is appreciated for its ease of updating parameters, natural language selection for scheduling, and strong PowerShell integration. It also offers effective workload management and alert handling.

Room for Improvement: Tidal's areas for improvement include navigation, reporting capabilities, and the need for better integration with cloud platforms. Users note its steep learning curve and require better monitoring integration. JAMS seeks better search functionality, enhanced batch processing efficiency, more intuitive UI, and improved error resolution features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tidal supports deployment across on-premises, hybrid, and private cloud environments, with praised responsive customer service and helpful resources. JAMS provides strong on-premises solutions with public cloud support but faces criticism for support clarity and documentation complexity. Both products receive positive reviews for their responsive customer service teams.

Pricing and ROI: Tidal offers a flexible enterprise licensing model, allowing easy scaling without significant cost increases. Users appreciate its cost-effectiveness and transparent pricing. JAMS is competitively priced against higher-cost solutions like Control-M, offering favorable licensing terms for large-scale environments, though recent changes have added complexity. Both deliver strong ROI, with Tidal excelling in reducing manual workloads and JAMS providing value with its cost-effective pricing model.

To learn more, read our detailed Fortra's JAMS vs. Tidal by Redwood Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Fortra's JAMS vs. Tidal by Redwood

January 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

Fortra's JAMS

Ranking in Workload Automation

5th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Tidal by Redwood

Ranking in Workload Automation

4th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of Fortra's JAMS is 1.8%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tidal by Redwood is 3.0%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Workload Automation

Featured Reviews

Rob Grafrath

VP, Enterprise Systems at Capio

We can scale up our organization's scheduling and automation without having to add staff to the department

The biggest area with room for improvement is the area that my organization benefits the most from using JAMS, and that is in custom execution methods. I happen to have a very good C# developer. Ever since we got JAMS, he has spent a lot of time talking to JAMS developers, researching the JAMS libraries, and creating custom execution methods. He's gotten very good at it. He is now able to create them and maintain them very easily, but that was hard-won knowledge. If I ever lose this developer, I would be hard-pressed to find anyone who could create JAMS custom execution methods as well as he can since there really isn't all that much help, such as documentation or information, available on how to create custom execution methods. I really think that they could benefit greatly by being much more transparent about C# development, maybe by making a JAMS cookbook or a developer portal where they could throw ideas at each other. One of my complaints with the marketing around JAMS is that it says things like, "It integrates with Teams". They talk about integrating with a lot of things, but marketing doesn't tell you that they are talking about JAMS running PowerShell jobs. Since PowerShell can automate things like SharePoint and Teams, that is how marketing gets away with saying it has so many integrations. JAMS doesn't have as many built-in integrations as they advertise. I think they should build more of them, and improve on the ones they have built.

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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

"We looked at other companies, like VisualCron, that were cheaper, but one of the main sticking points was the fact that they wouldn't have provided a central location for us to monitor across all servers. That was one of the biggest selling points of JAMS."

"Previously, we manually managed file transfers by writing our scripts. The automated MFT feature is great for me and the company. It helps us know where the files are going and enables us to track errors if anything fails. It also makes the connection seamless for third-party vendors."

"The planning capabilities are most valuable."

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

"The code-driven automation for more complex scheduling requirements frees up time because it's really easy to use... It's almost like a stand-alone software that we can't live without."

"The alerting in it is really targeted... you can set specific alerting so that if jobs in a given folder fail, certain people are alerted. You can also set security at the folder level, so that only people in those areas can go set them. That means that the alerting and security can be set at a very granular level."

"JAMS has helped save IT staff time by automating tasks previously performed with scripts, and its scheduling feature has been particularly useful."

"The dashboard is intuitive."

More Fortra's JAMS pros

"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."

"The data management on offer was valuable."

"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."

"The first, big thing that we got out of using Tidal Workload Automation was having a centralized view of the status of all of our batch processes across all these systems... We can look into the schedule at any given time and see if things are running on track or if they are falling behind. We can also see if something failed."

"It has been super stable. There are no complaints on stability. We would not be using it if Tidal wasn't stable."

"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."

"Tidal Automation software provides real-time monitoring and alerts, allowing users to track job progress and identify potential issues before they cause delays or errors."

"The job dependency is something that you cannot have in a regular, simple cron job or simple scheduler dependency. The event-driven jobs are core for us, as we really need that. Therefore, we really need Tidal with its ability to run thousands of jobs per day."

More Tidal by Redwood pros

Cons

"All my machines at work are Macs. JAMS client is a Windows-based thing. It is all built on .NET, which makes perfect sense. However, that means in order for me to access it, I need to connect to a VPN, then log onto one of our Azure VMs in order to access the JAMS client. This is fine, but if for some reason I am unable to do so, it would be nice to be able to have a web-based JAMS client that has all the exact same functionality in it. There are probably a whole bunch of disadvantages that you would get with that as well, but that is definitely something that would make life easier in a few cases."

"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."

"JAMS has built-in reporting. I've never really used it. I tried using it a few years ago and I couldn't figure it out. It was wonky. It could be improved upon."

"When looking at a folder in JAMS with many jobs, it would be good to have better information in the list display of what's inside those jobs. We get some information, but other important details are missing."

"JAMS doesn't allow us to implement SOC controls. We are a company that trades stocks on the New York Stock Exchange, so all our transactions are audited. It has a feature that saves the file for only a month but doesn't segregate the data between finance and SOC-related compliance."

"I'm not sure if they have fixed it in a newer version, but there is no global search in the version I have. If I have multiple sub-folders that are named for business units, like HR or IT, and I have to search for a job, I cannot search from the top. I have to go to the HR folder to search for a particular job, or to the IT folder."

"JAMS lacks source control features. Our previous solution had job control language, but JAMS doesn't. When migrating between versions, JAMS doesn't migrate all the data, like job change history, etc. Also, the scheduler doesn't have a way to make jobs invisible, so you can temporarily turn a job off if you decide not to run it today."

"The only thing that they could improve on is the fact that they don't have a browser version of JAMS. They've got all the bits and pieces there if you want to build your own web version of it. It does come with a web client, but it's pretty clunky. They could improve on that."

More Fortra's JAMS cons

"The UI might have the potential to provide a more polished and user-centric encounter, promoting seamless engagements and simplifying the navigation process for individuals interacting with the software."

"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."

"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 current user interface of Tidal Software is functional. However, it can be improved to make it more intuitive and user-friendly."

"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."

"From an administrative point of view, I wouldn't give really high marks to the solution. I actually entertained getting the JAWS application at one point. One of the shortcomings with the scheduler is the reporting capabilities. At least at the time, JAWS was the best that they had for a third-party integration. I think they've got things in the pipeline to help alleviate that gap."

"Initially, it is complicated to understand the functionalities as there is limited product documentation."

More Tidal by Redwood cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

"JAMS is close to the lower end of the pricing models for enterprise scheduling solutions. They are much cheaper than Control-M, as well as some other products that I've used. I also don't know of another solution where you can actually get true, unlimited licensing, where you can have as many instances and as many agents as you want."

"For what it does, the product is priced very well."

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

"Fortra's JAMS pricing structure has deteriorated significantly since its acquisition by Fortra."

"In the end, you'll find that it's really worth the price. There is some sticker shock, but it's worth every dime."

"The pricing of JAMS has not been an issue for us, as it has allowed us to save time."

More Fortra's JAMS pricing and cost advice

"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."

"The solution’s licensing model in terms of its flexibility and transparency regarding costs is pretty good. A person can buy the license, and if you decide to stop support, you can do that but still have the product. So, it's not like you're paying constantly to keep that license alive. Certainly, you want to keep support going too. Once you buy it, you own it. It's not like I have to keep paying somebody to keep using it."

"We are satisfied with the pricing of Tidal. It's in the moderate range and it feels very achievable for us."

"If you are willing to shop around to other vendors, you can possibly get a good price on your support license."

"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."

"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."

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

"Right now, we are in a good position with the licensing model that we have with the Tidal vendor. So, we won't have any issues. even if we double in our current production. Initially, Tidal provided us some specs where if you have these number of jobs, then you come under this category. They usually provide a range of jobs from 2,000 to 10,000. You can use these specs for your infrastructure. Whether you have 2,000 or 8,000 jobs, Tidal should support it."

More Tidal by Redwood pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

15%

Healthcare Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

22%

Manufacturing Company

17%

Computer Software Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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?

Fortra's JAMS pricing structure has deteriorated significantly since its acquisition by Fortra. Previously, both Help Systems and MVP offered more favorable pricing and licensing terms. However, Fo...

See all answers

What needs improvement with JAMS?

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 co...

See all answers

What do you like most about Tidal Automation?

Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Tidal Automation?

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

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Control-M vs Fortra's JAMS

Compared 25% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Fortra's JAMS

Compared 20% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Fortra's JAMS

Compared 14% of the time

Stonebranch vs Fortra's JAMS

Compared 10% of the time

VisualCron vs Fortra's JAMS

Compared 10% of the time

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Control-M vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 46% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 10% of the time

IBM Workload Automation vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 9% of the time

ActiveBatch by Redwood vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 9% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 9% of the time

More Tidal by Redwood Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fortra's JAMS

March 2025

Download Fortra's JAMS product report

Buyer's Guide

Tidal by Redwood

February 2025

Download Tidal by Redwood product report

Also Known As

No data available

Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler

Overview

Fortra's JAMS is a powerful tool for workflow automation, batch job scheduling, file transfer, and centralizing tasks, enabling streamlined job management and monitoring from a single console across multiple servers and systems.

Widely used for scheduling SSIS jobs, SQL Server stored procedures, Python scripts, and FTP jobs, Fortra's JAMS offers comprehensive solutions for data manipulation, reporting, backup tasks, and job coordination. Organizations automate file movements, database maintenance, and nightly processes, providing a centralized platform for job management and monitoring across servers and environments.

What are the most important features of Fortra's JAMS?

Planning Capabilities: Efficiently plan and coordinate job schedules.
Job Dependency Management: Manage dependencies between jobs to ensure proper execution order.
Batch Scheduling: Automate and schedule batch jobs seamlessly.
Single Pane of Glass: Centralized console for tracking all automation tasks.
Interactive Agents: Deploy agents for interactive job management.
Natural Language Scheduling: Create schedules using natural language commands.
Custom Execution Methods: Implement custom methods for job execution.
PowerShell Integration: Integrate with PowerShell for enhanced scripting capabilities.
Exception Handling: Robust handling of job exceptions to minimize disruptions.
Monitoring and Historical Views: Comprehensive monitoring and historical job views for better oversight.
Extensibility: Extend the platform to meet specific needs.
File Watching: Monitor files and trigger jobs based on changes.
Complex Scheduling: Handle intricate scheduling requirements for diverse scenarios.

What are the main benefits of using Fortra's JAMS?

Centralized Control: Manage all jobs from a single console.
Efficiency: Increase efficiency by automating repetitive tasks.
Scalability: Easily scale job management across multiple servers.
Reduced Errors: Minimize human errors through automation.
Improved Monitoring: Benefit from robust monitoring and alerting options.
Customizability: Tailor workflows and schedules to specific needs.
Integration: Seamlessly integrate with a wide range of applications and systems.
Time Savings: Save time with efficient job scheduling and execution.

In industries like finance, healthcare, and manufacturing, Fortra's JAMS enables seamless automation of critical tasks, ensuring data integrity, compliance, and operational efficiency. Whether it's automating nightly batch processing for financial transactions, managing data flows in healthcare, or coordinating manufacturing processes, Fortra's JAMS provides a robust solution to enhance productivity and reliability.

Fortra

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

Fortra's JAMS vs. Tidal by Redwood

January 2025

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