IBM Workload Automation vs Tidal by Redwood comparison

IBM and Tidal Software by Redwood are both solutions in the Workload Automation category. IBM is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.0, while Tidal Software by Redwood is ranked #12 with an average rating of 9.2. IBM holds a 6.8% mindshare in WA, compared to Tidal Software by Redwood’s 4.2% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Tidal Software by Redwood users who would recommend it.

IBM Workload Automation

Read 33 IBM Workload Automation reviews

3,944 Views
3,628 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Tidal by Redwood

Read 37 Tidal by Redwood reviews

2,404 Views
2,380 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

IBM Workload Automation

Tidal by Redwood

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 2025

IBM Workload Automation and Tidal by Redwood compete in the workload automation category. Tidal appears to have the upper hand due to its seamless integrations and adaptable scheduling, though IBM offers robust customer service and high availability.

Features: IBM Workload Automation offers diverse automation capabilities with dependencies, event-based scheduling, and integration with applications such as Oracle and SAP. It provides dynamic conditional branching and high availability for critical business processes. Tidal by Redwood provides real-time monitoring, scheduling flexibility, and ease of management across platforms, simplifying workflows with its integration capabilities.

Room for Improvement: IBM Workload Automation users report challenges with the interface and monitoring unscheduled dependencies, indicating a need for better cloud capabilities. Tidal struggles with an outdated UI and complexity in setup and integration. While Tidal is seen as flexible, improvements in reporting and real-time insights are suggested. Both products could enhance customization options.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Workload Automation supports hybrid and on-premises deployments with high-level customer service, yet support experiences may vary by region. Customers may encounter technical support delays. Tidal by Redwood is noted for effortless on-premises deployments, less frequent support interactions, and responsive follow-up, making it simple to scale operations.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Workload Automation’s pricing model can be costly with sub-capacity licensing, though valued for its reliability. Users may consider alternatives for greater cost efficiencies despite appreciating its ROI. Tidal by Redwood offers flexible, transparent pricing with an enterprise-friendly model, facilitating budget planning without unexpected costs, allowing for scalable operations and robust ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Workload Automation vs. Tidal by Redwood Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Workload Automation vs. Tidal by Redwood

July 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

IBM Workload Automation

Ranking in Workload Automation

11th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Tidal by Redwood

Ranking in Workload Automation

12th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of IBM Workload Automation is 6.8%, down from 8.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tidal by Redwood is 4.2%, up from 3.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Workload Automation

Featured Reviews

Ilhami Arikan

Cloud Services Automation Technologies Manager at Garanti Teknoloji

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.

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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

"This solution has a request feature where users can request the added features they need to have developed. Based on client voting for those features, these are developed and released."

"I have supported this product in literally 100s of different environments and its unmatched in its ability to scale to any size."

"It offers features like MDM and a Windows workstation, although there are some technical dependencies. It is more user-friendly and also includes failover and failback capabilities. While both systems offer high availability, Control-M's high availability is superior to AWS's."

"The DWC, when configured correctly, is a great GUI tool to provide Self-Service Scheduling capabilities to the user community."

"The support from Cisco is very good. I was with them as a company for 40 years"

"The solution helps automate processes so that the workload can be handled on a daily basis."

"The technical support is great, the product is easy-to-use, and it is stable."

"The most important feature is the creation of folders. It's a really great feature because you can organize the process with naming conventions."

More IBM Workload Automation pros

"Tidal Automation’s most valuable feature is customization. It can work and connect with any app."

"It saves times due to automation. With some files, we do hundreds a day for a particular vendor. This would be hard to do manually. Also, the speed at which we can do this is excellent."

"Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution."

"The data management on offer was valuable."

"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."

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

"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."

"It is intended to enable large-scale automation environments, making it appropriate for companies with complicated processes and big data volumes."

More Tidal by Redwood pros

Cons

"IBM Workload Automation could be improved by reducing its cost. The maintenance charges have increased significantly, and a lower cost would be beneficial."

"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 would be helpful to have a mobile app that could be used to follow the job schedule."

"This solution does have bugs and could be improved in this regard. However, these bugs are resolved relatively quickly."

"IBM needs to move away from its native terminology and adopt a more cloud-centric approach."

"The solution's installation could be improved because the customers have to do it all the time."

"It should support other schedulers that aren't IBM products."

"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."

More IBM Workload Automation cons

"I know they are working on it, but there needs to be better reporting. Currently, there are only three or four reports that we can get off of the system. That needs to be improved. They already have a solution to this in the new version. I.e., a schedule of all the jobs running for one day, specifically calling out what dependencies that job relies on. It would be like a flow chart of how the day's jobs would run."

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

"The software's performance and scalability could be improved, particularly when dealing with large-scale workloads or complex business processes."

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

"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."

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

"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."

More Tidal by Redwood cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing depends on the number of agents that you install."

"The solution's pricing is affordable."

"The solution is a little bit expensive."

"The contract is with the customer with whom we are working, so IBM is not directly involved in this."

"To my knowledge, IWA is the only WLA product that will provide "parallel tracking" capability to assist in upgrading from one platform to IWA."

"It is about one-third of the cost of a controller."

"We transitioned from a server license to per job license, and that saved us a lot money."

"There have been pricing increases, but with the reduction that our company obtained from Tidal this year, the pricing has become very acceptable for this type of product."

"Our yearly licensing costs are between $10,000 to $20,000. They have always been reasonable with us. I like that non-production licensing is about half the cost of production licensing. Licensing is by adapter typically. We have had scenarios where we have had to take an adapter from one environment to another, and they've allowed us to do that. They have made it a very reasonable process. There's definitely a feeling that they will work with you."

"Their pricing seems very fair. It is more than the other solutions, but the functionality and the support are very much there. You pay for the job scheduler, and then they have certain things that are built into it, such as the FTP processes. If you then want to do JD Edwards jobs, you need an adapter. If you want to do SQL jobs, there is another adapter. Similarly, if you want to do Oracle jobs, there is an adapter. It is like there is the base and then there are the adapters for the jobs that you want to do, but it seems that's also how they pay for each of those adapters and keep them up to date."

"We've been able to purchase more adapters because the cost of the product has been very reasonable."

"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 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 solution enables admins and users to see the information relevant to them, but this is bundled as an add-on that we would have to pay for."

More Tidal by Redwood pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

31%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

19%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

10%

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with IBM Workload Automation?

IBM Workload Automation could be improved by reducing its cost. The maintenance charges have increased significantly, and a lower cost would be beneficial.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for IBM Workload Automation?

We use IBM Workload Automation ( /products/ibm-workload-automation-reviews ) as a scheduler. We install agents on the application servers and use scheduling to trigger jobs on other servers. Our us...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering IBM Workload Automation?

I recommend IBM Workload Automation as it's a well-established and stable product. However, the cost is a concern. The product features a master-slave setup that ensures continuity during failures....

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

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Compared 26% of the time

HCL Workload Automation vs IBM Workload Automation

Compared 18% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs IBM Workload Automation

Compared 12% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs IBM Workload Automation

Compared 6% of the time

BMC Compuware ThruPut Manager vs IBM Workload Automation

Compared 4% of the time

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MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 31% of the time

Control-M vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 22% of the time

Automic 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 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Workload Automation

July 2025

Download IBM Workload Automation product report

Buyer's Guide

Tidal by Redwood

June 2025

Download Tidal by Redwood product report

Also Known As

IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler, IBM TWS

Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler

Overview

IBM Workload Automation streamlines scheduling with automation and dynamic workload balancing. It integrates multiple platforms, offering efficient management across diverse systems, enhancing operational productivity.

IBM Workload Automation provides end-to-end control in managing tasks across varied platforms, supporting event-based scheduling and real-time updates. Its intuitive GUI allows seamless scripting and monitoring, facilitating integration with applications like SAP and Oracle. The inclusion of FTA agents ensures efficient local dependency management, while offering versatile scheduling options. Its capability to provide a comprehensive view, manage CPU usage, and meet service level agreements positions it as a valuable tool for large-scale operations.

What are the most important features?

Automation with Dependencies: Allows integration of complex tasks and workflows across multiple platforms.
Dynamic Workload Balancing: Ensures optimal resource utilization by adapting to changing demands.
Event-Based Scheduling: Initiates processes based on real-time events for timely task execution.
Real-Time Updates: Keeps users informed with instantaneous status changes and alerts.
User-Friendly GUI: Facilitates custom scripting and monitoring with ease.
Application Integration: Supports seamless connectivity with SAP, Oracle, and more.
FTA Agents: Efficiently handle local dependency resolution for consistent workflow operation.

What benefits or ROI should users look for in reviews?

Operational Efficiency: Streamlines workload management and reduces manual intervention.
Improved Resource Management: Balances CPU usage and avoids bottlenecks.
Enhanced SLA Compliance: Assures adherence to service level agreements, boosting reliability.
Scalability: Supports expanding operations with robust scheduling capabilities.
Integration Flexibility: Adapts to evolving technological landscapes with ease.

Industries such as government, banking, and large enterprises implement IBM Workload Automation for automated scheduling, workload balancing, and batch processing. It assists in migrating from legacy systems to web-based services, integrating with numerous applications, and managing extensive daily job lists. Key functions include offshore management and backend data collection, crucial for effective resource tracking. This adaptability enables organizations to efficiently support operations while scaling workloads as needed.

IBM

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

Standard Life Group, Banca Popolare di Milano, A*STAR, ArcelorMittal Gent

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

IBM Workload Automation vs. Tidal by Redwood

July 2025

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