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IBM Workload Automation vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

IBM Workload Automation
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
Workload Automation (12th)
Red Hat Ansible Automation ...
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
68
Ranking in other categories
Release Automation (3rd), Configuration Management (1st), Network Automation (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

IBM Workload Automation and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. IBM Workload Automation is designed for Workload Automation and holds a mindshare of 8.3%, up 8.3% compared to last year.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, on the other hand, focuses on Configuration Management, holds 16.0% mindshare, down 16.3% since last year.
Workload Automation
Configuration Management
 

Featured Reviews

Ilhami Arikan - PeerSpot reviewer
With an easy setup phase in place, agent-based installation can be done in minutes
Sometimes we have issues with the solution's stability. So, stability can be improved. Reporting and visibility of the solution need improvement. These days, we need more visibility. We need to access the logs and databases easily. You need to keep track of the running number of logs, like which ones are executed, completed, etc. So if there would be a good reporting dashboard, then it would be good. There's room for improvement in the solution since it is a challenging thing when we want to use the solution's technology with our new technologies. For example, if we need to use TWS on our OpenShift platform, the solution's API is not capable enough. So the product itself needs to be aligned with new technologies.
Surya Chapagain - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to manage and simple to learn
We use Red Hat a lot. I open tickets for the Red Hat cases, however, with Ansible, I haven't opened any cases. My manager worked with them a bit. If we have a problem with some file and we need to get Red Hat to analyze the issue and the file is 100GBs, we'll have an issue since we need to provide a log file for them to analyze. If it is around 12GB or 13GB, we can easily upload it to the Red Hat portal. With more than 100GBs, it will fail. I heard it should cover up to 250GB for an upload, however, I find it fails. Therefore, Red Hat needs to provide a way to handle this.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Jobs can be triggered in multiple nodes."
"The project we worked on involved the running of nearly 24,000 job instances in a single day, so I would say that the solution is stable."
"The support from Cisco is very good. I was with them as a company for 40 years"
"The most important feature is the creation of folders. It's a really great feature because you can organize the process with naming conventions."
"I have supported this product in literally 100s of different environments and its unmatched in its ability to scale to any size."
"IBM Workload Automation provides good performance and monitoring."
"The technical support is great, the product is easy-to-use, and it is stable."
"The whole product is valuable because it is a tool for batch automation."
"Being a game-changer in configuration management software is what has made Ansible so popular and widespread. Much of IT is based on SSH direct connectivity with a need for running infrastructure in an agentless way, and that has been a big plus. SSH has become a great security standard for managing servers. The whole thing has really become an out-of-the-box solution for managing a Unix estate."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is quite stable. If you set it up correctly with the right configurations and there are no hiccups during installation and deployment, it will be stable. I'd give stability a rating of eight out of ten."
"This solution allows us to stitch a lot of different parts of the workflow together."
"Ansible Tower provides a GUI, which is an enhancement, and a well-liked feature by operation teams."
"The most valuable features of the solution are automation and patching."
"The solution is very simple to use."
"It has made our infrastructure more testable. We are able to build our infrastructure in CI, then are more confident in what we are deploying will work, not breaking everything."
"The most valuable feature of Ansible is repeatability because when you're working at the DoD, you want things to be cookie-cutter and replicable."
 

Cons

"The schedule refreshes daily and that's a challenge for us."
"There should be more custom documentation, specifically around Java APIs. There should also be more training. In terms of features, we are currently using only 50% of its features. We don't use all features that are available, but there is always room for improvement in all of the tools."
"It should support other schedulers that aren't IBM products."
"Scalability-wise, it can be a little bit challenging."
"Slow down on the releases a bit. I fully understand that IWA functionality is increasing at an amazing rate, but trying to keep up with the upgrades is rough."
"The performance of the previous versions could be better."
"It would be helpful to have a mobile app that could be used to follow the job schedule."
"The solution should offer more free technical sessions to customers so that they can gain more experience or learn more about how to use it."
"It should support more integration with different products."
"There could be more stuff in the workflows. I hope that if I have ten templates with different services on it, workflow could auto-populate all the template-based services."
"The documentation for the installation step of deployment, OpenStack, etc., and these things have to be a bit more detailed."
"I have seen indications that the documentation needs improvement. They are providing a "How to Improve Your Documentation" presentation at this conference."
"Additional features could be added."
"When you set up Playbooks, I may have one version of the Playbook, but another member of the team may have a different vision, and we will not know which version is correct. We want to have one central repository for managing the different versions of Playbooks, so we can have better collaboration among team members. This is our use case for using Git version control."
"It can use some more credential types. I've found that when I go looking for a certain credential type, such as private keys, they're not really there."
"Ansible has just been upgraded, and the only issue that we are seeing at the moment is that the user interface can be slow. We're currently investigating the refresh period with Red Hat when you click a job and run a job. It seems that the buffer no longer runs in real-time. We haven't discovered whether that's partially an issue with our environment, but Red Hat has come back and said that they're working on a couple of bugs in the background. We've upgraded to that version in the last six months, and that's the only issue that we've seen."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is a little bit expensive."
"It is about one-third of the cost of a controller."
"The contract is with the customer with whom we are working, so IBM is not directly involved in this."
"The solution's pricing is affordable."
"To my knowledge, IWA is the only WLA product that will provide "parallel tracking" capability to assist in upgrading from one platform to IWA."
"We transitioned from a server license to per job license, and that saved us a lot money."
"Pricing depends on the number of agents that you install."
"Everything is generally fair. No one ever likes to pay a lot of money, but we are getting the value. We also get support with it. It has been fair and worthwhile."
"Ansible Tower is free. Until they lower the cost, we are holding off on purchasing the product."
"If you only need to use Ansible, it's free for any end-user, but when you require Ansible Tower, you need to pay per Ansible Tower server."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is an affordable solution."
"The cost is determined by the number of endpoints."
"It’s an open-source tool."
"We use the open-source version of the solution."
"Red Hat's open source approach was a factor when choosing Ansible, since the solution is free as of right now."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
32%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
Educational Organization
32%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with IBM Workload Automation?
IBM needs to move away from its native terminology and adopt a more cloud-centric approach. For example, IBM still refers to machines as 'workstations,' whereas other systems, like Control-M, use m...
What is the difference between Red Hat Satellite and Ansible?
Red Hat Satellite has proven to be a worthwhile investment for me. Both its patch management and license management have been outstanding. If you have a large environment, patching systems is much ...
How does Ansible compare to Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (SCCM)?
Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager takes knowledge and research to properly configure. The length of time that the set up will take depends on the kind of technical architecture that your org...
What do you like most about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform?
The most valuable features of the solution are automation and patching.
 

Also Known As

IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler, IBM TWS
Ansible
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Standard Life Group, Banca Popolare di Milano, A*STAR, ArcelorMittal Gent
HootSuite Media, Inc., Cloud Physics, Narrative, BinckBank
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC, Redwood Software, Broadcom and others in Workload Automation. Updated: January 2025.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.