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 #4 with an average rating of 8.8, while Tidal Software by Redwood is ranked #5 with an average rating of 9.7. Fortra holds a 1.6% 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

1,911 Views
525 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Tidal by Redwood

Read 37 Tidal by Redwood reviews

3,239 Views
1,311 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Fortra's JAMS

Tidal by Redwood

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

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

Download the complete report

Helped 831,997 peers since 2012

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

4th

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

5th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of Fortra's JAMS is 1.6%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tidal by Redwood is 3.0%, down from 4.8% 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.

Read full review

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.

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

"The dashboard is intuitive."

"The planning capabilities are most valuable."

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

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

"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."

"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 scheduling and execution of jobs are the most valuable features. The scheduling is important because if there is a task we want to execute at 4:00 AM, there's no way we will have someone who can manually run the job. In addition, we execute 100 to 200 jobs per day, and manual intervention is not an option."

More Fortra's JAMS pros

"We use the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads. That's the biggest use for us and that's the biggest advantage."

"We had a number of different schedulers in this organization and we've been porting everything that was running out of these other, unrelated schedulers into this scheduler. That has afforded us the ability to set up direct dependencies between processes that couldn't talk to one another before. Over the 15 years, we've definitely gained a lot from that. What had been manual controls have become automated controls..."

"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."

"Tidal Automation offers extensive monitoring and reporting features that let users keep track of the status of their workflows and quickly spot any problems."

"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."

"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."

"Tidal Automation allows organizations to automate complex workflows and processes, reducing the need for manual intervention and improving operational efficiency."

"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."

More Tidal by Redwood pros

Cons

"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."

"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."

"The ACL or access permission area needs to be improved. When it comes to defining and providing security permissions, it's a bit confusing if you are new to JAMS. JAMS needs to improve the features for security access or permissions."

"It does validations when you try to delete an object and if there are any dependencies in place, the deletion process will not proceed... there is no information provided as to what it was that caused the validation to fail... it's quite a tedious process to find which object is getting in the way."

"JAMS notifications for hung jobs could be improved."

"The search capability needs to be improved because when we try to search for a job, it's hard to do."

"With no programming experience, I find JAMS code-driven automation challenging due to the required PowerShell scripting."

"The error messages from JAMS often need clarification, hindering our ability to resolve issues swiftly."

More Fortra's JAMS cons

"Tidal Software interface could be more intuitive and user-friendly."

"The GUI, the graphical user interface, gets a little bit busy."

"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."

"The solution needs more advanced reporting and data visualization capabilities to enable deeper analysis of job performance and trends."

"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."

"There are several improvement points that our team has provided to the vendor."

"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."

"The job failure alerts can be updated with more details for better troubleshooting."

More Tidal by Redwood cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

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

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

"The pricing is reasonable."

"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."

"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 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

"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 annual maintenance cost is competitive for what we have and what they do."

"The licensing model's flexibility is awesome. The way it's licensed for us is that it's licensed per master and then per agent. We have an enterprise agreement, so we have unlimited agents, and we have it on 500 devices."

"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."

"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."

"This solution is a bit expensive in the current world where everybody is trying to cut down on certain things."

"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

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Workload Automation solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

831,997 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Healthcare Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

23%

Manufacturing Company

19%

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 31% 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

VisualCron vs Fortra's JAMS

Compared 10% of the time

Rocket Zena vs Fortra's JAMS

Compared 9% of the time

More Fortra's JAMS Competitors

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

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 9% of the time

ActiveBatch by Redwood vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 9% of the time

More Tidal by Redwood Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fortra's JAMS

January 2025

Download Fortra's JAMS product report

Buyer's Guide

Tidal by Redwood

January 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

Free Report: Fortra's JAMS vs. Tidal by Redwood

Find out what your peers are saying about Fortra's JAMS vs. Tidal by Redwood and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

831,997 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Fortra's JAMS vs. Tidal by Redwood report.

See our list of best Workload Automation vendors.

We monitor all Workload Automation 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.