JAMS vs Stonebranch comparison

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JAMS

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Stonebranch and JAMS compete in the job scheduling software category. Stonebranch has an edge in Unix platform expertise and support response time, while JAMS excels with natural language scheduling and integration capabilities.

Features: Stonebranch excels in integrating multiple applications across UNIX tasks, offers a stable Universal Agent with minimal maintenance, and supports diverse workflows. JAMS is strong in job scheduling, natural language scheduling, resource allocation, and providing extensive automation capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Stonebranch could enhance FTP task performance, graphical workflow visualization, and REST API information access. JAMS needs improvements in search capabilities, browser-based client solutions, and enhancing reporting features. Users also suggest enhancements in exception handling and global search functionalities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Stonebranch offers comprehensive deployment options including on-premises and cloud with commendations for support responsiveness and Unix expertise. JAMS supports various deployment models, and its support team is praised for its responsiveness and helpfulness.

Pricing and ROI: Stonebranch is known for its cost-effective pricing with flexible licensing options. JAMS offers competitive pricing with advantages in unlimited licensing, scalability, and lower costs than certain competitors. Both are recognized for reducing manual job management and providing substantial ROI through effective licensing models.

To learn more, read our detailed JAMS vs. Stonebranch Report (Updated: April 2025).

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JAMS vs. Stonebranch

April 2025

Helped 848,716 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

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

Stonebranch

Ranking in Workload Automation

15th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of JAMS is 1.7%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Stonebranch is 5.0%, up from 4.0% 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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Earl Diem

Sr. Manager - Performance and Automation Engineering at PSCU Financial Services

Allowed us to develop workflows without having to train and develop very specialized skillsets

The Universal Agent is the most valuable feature. Being agent-based and being able to go across multiple technology stacks, which is what our workflows do, Stonebranch gives us the ability to bridge those disparate technologies. It enables us to remove the dependency-gap with the agent so we know the status of the workflow at each step. Workflow development in Stonebranch is straightforward. There is something of a learning curve, but it's not very steep. Being able to develop workflows without having to train and develop some very specialized skillsets to use the tool is very useful. Stonebranch absolutely helped enable digital transformation in our company and it still is. In our automation efforts, we're pushing everything to Informatica and, as we move those ETLs, we're automating the entire workflows. In phase-one and phase-two, there were 244 jobs migrated in from other ETL platforms to Informatica, and we've automated all of those. We have almost 200 jobs remaining. We're going to have something approaching 450 workflows in Stonebranch when we're done.

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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

"One of the things I like the most, as a SQL DBA, is the fact that we can manipulate tables in the background. Also, the fact that you can have your own views and work with the product the way it fits best is a very helpful feature."

"The planning capabilities are most valuable."

"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."

"I like how you can add new execution methods on the fly. It isn't overly complex to add Python script support to an execution method in the JAMS system. The scheduling is excellent. You can schedule a maintenance window and take that resource unit out of everything. It halts all of the jobs."

"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."

"It has definitely drastically improved our capabilities to scale our automation. Before JAMS, there were a lot of manual processes. We had a couple of operators who spent all day doing that. A lot of the time with human intervention and human processes, it is as good as the person who may be following a procedure and human error is a big problem."

"Being able to create a series of chained jobs, which are basically linked jobs is valuable."

"The most valuable feature is the easily accessible data in the database because we run a lot of SQL scripting against the database."

More JAMS pros

"The most valuable feature is the reliability of the agents, because we need them accessible and we need to run stuff. The agent technology and compatibility are top-notch."

"The tasks are incredibly capable, and as long as you name them with a nice, uniform naming convention, they are very useful. You can create some interesting workflows through various machines, or you can just have it kick off single tasks. All in all, I really like the Universal Task. You can do some mutually exclusive stuff, such as an "A not B" kind of thing. It has a lot of capabilities behind the scenes."

"When it comes to agent technology and compatibility with other vendors, from a platform perspective it was the one vendor that fit all the platforms that we have, from your old platforms - mainframe, NSK, IBM i - to the new ones, going into cloud and container"

"I like the dashboard and the various workflows."

"We like that it has GUI and is not just a command line."

"Stonebranch performs well, and the graphical representation is excellent. Overall, it requires more technical effort from our teams, but the solution is intuitive, so anybody can use it."

"I love the Universal Controller. It's been great for us. We host it on-premise... It's High Availability, meaning there's failover from one server to the other if one goes down."

"I can name the aliases on the agent, so if we need a passive environment for an agent, that's one of the nice features. If our primary goes down, I can bring up the passive one and I don't have to change anything in the scheduling world. It will start running from that new server."

More Stonebranch pros

Cons

"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."

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

"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 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."

"The UI could be better. There were some things that were not quite intuitive, such as the search tool. When we tried to search for jobs, we had to clear the entire search and then go in and enter the new search query. That's something that wasn't intuitive for a new user."

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

"The JAMS automation code isn't so clean."

"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."

More JAMS cons

"I would rate Stonebranch somewhere in the middle for ease of setup. It wasn't too straightforward for us because our infrastructure is complex."

"It would be ideal if they had the exact same features as the CA Workload Automation DE series. It would be helpful to have calendaring options."

"There is room for improvement with its connectivity with the Microsoft SRS system. It is very weak. They keep telling us it works with it, and technically it does, but it does not provide a lot of visibility. We have lost a lot of visibility migrating to Stonebranch, compared with just running tasks on the SRS server. That's really about the only thing that is a sore point for us."

"It can't handle negative written codes."

"The Universal Controller is decent for the money it costs... It needs some work to have full features, compared to other products that are out there, specifically IBM's Workload Scheduler."

"It's not available on the cloud, so they should take that due to safety, security, and scalability."

"Occasionally, we have an agent that doesn't come back up after patching. That doesn't happen very often... It's really just a restart of the agent and it comes back up. But that might be one thing that could be improved."

"One hiccup we've had is due to the fact that we have other internal scheduling tools. We're able to talk to them, but we have trouble with some of the networking between them, so we're still trying to work out the kinks there."

More Stonebranch cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"JAMS is priced competitively compared to similar solutions and offers flexible licensing options to cater to user needs."

"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."

"There are no additional costs other than the license for Fortra's JAMS which is affordable."

"The licensing model for JAMS is straightforward and based on the number of agents, not the number of jobs you run. It's cheap and fairly simple."

"The pricing is reasonable."

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

More JAMS pricing and cost advice

"The price of the solution is at a medium level compared to the competition."

"Stonebranch is cheaper than Control-M, so many companies are using Stonebranch."

"I don't have pricing information, but I do know it's cheaper than our old legacy system. Other than the standard licensing fees there are no additional costs."

"Outside of licensing fees, there aren't any other costs."

"When we reviewed this solution against other vendors, Stonebranch blew everybody out of the water in terms of cost."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Healthcare Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

25%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing 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.

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...

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...

How would you compare Stonebranch Universal Automation Center vs Control-M?

Hi Doug, I am looking at the same, or at least a very similar issue. Have a customer who is leaving z/OS on which he is using IWS to go to Linux, and the question now is whether to pick up IWS (TWS...

Redwood RunMyJobs vs JAMS

Comparisons

Control-M vs JAMS

Compared 19% of the time

Compared 16% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs JAMS

Compared 13% of the time

VisualCron vs JAMS

Compared 9% of the time

Rocket Zena vs JAMS

Compared 8% of the time

More JAMS Competitors

Control-M vs Stonebranch

Compared 34% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Stonebranch

Compared 15% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Stonebranch

Compared 11% of the time

ESP Workload Automation Intelligence vs Stonebranch

Compared 9% of the time

Automic Automation vs Stonebranch

Compared 3% of the time

More Stonebranch Competitors

Product Reports

Download JAMS product report

JAMS

April 2025

Download Stonebranch product report

March 2025

Also Known As

No data available

Stonebranch Universal Automation Center

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.

Fortra

Stonebranch automates enterprise-level workload and task scheduling across platforms like Linux, Windows, and mainframe, managing thousands of daily tasks for improved efficiency and visibility.

Stonebranch enables organizations to streamline job scheduling by replacing older systems with a robust solution that automates complex workflows, batch processing, and secure file transfers. Its compatibility with multiple platforms and enhanced visibility aid teams in efficiently managing business processes, database interactions, and IT workflows. Equipped with a Universal Controller and Agent, it provides seamless integration across diverse systems, empowering users with greater control over their tasks. While it fosters digital transformation, there are opportunities for enhancements in areas like graphical workflow overviews and API functionality.

What features does Stonebranch offer?

User-friendly interface for intuitive navigation
Robust agents ensuring reliable task execution
Comprehensive workflow automation tools
Platform-agnostic compatibility for diverse systems
Secure file transfer capabilities
High scalability for growing needs
Effective error handling features

What benefits should users expect?

Improved efficiency in task management
Streamlined processes reducing operational complexities
Enhanced visibility and control over workflows
Seamless integration with existing systems
Support for digital transformation initiatives

Organizations in industries such as finance and healthcare implement Stonebranch for its ability to automate complex processes, manage mainframe and distributed environments, and securely transfer sensitive data. Its platform-agnostic nature caters to the demanding needs of these industries, providing a reliable backbone for essential operations.

Sample Customers

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

Nissan, Coop, United Supermarkets, Groupon, CSC, Orbitz, Johnson & Johnson, BMW, Qantas.