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Jiffy.ai Automate vs VisualCron comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 4, 2024

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 Automate
Sponsored
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Jiffy.ai Automate
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
25th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VisualCron
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
20th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Managed File Transfer (MFT) (15th), Workload Automation (16th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category, the mindshare of Fortra's Automate is 1.3%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jiffy.ai Automate is 0.4%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VisualCron is 0.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
 

Featured Reviews

Anabel Marco - PeerSpot reviewer
Automates processes efficiently with cost-effective scaling and robust customer support
Web scraping is quite good since it offers a lot of possibilities. Another important feature for me is its compatibility with MBI, the Power that is ISEQUADO Centers. I appreciate the ability to scale and increase the number of bots or studios without additional expense. Automate's non-reliance on additional orchestrators makes it quite cost-effective.
HA
You don't have to code; it is just drag and drop
They are still new in the market. Or, at least, they are still a small player. They require a lot of improvement in terms of learning material as well as the community developers. If you compare Jiffy.ai to an established solution, like UiPath, you can go to YouTube and find a lot of learning material posted by UiPath, partners, and other people in the community. However, for Jiffy.ai, you won't find that available in the market. Because of this it is very hard for us to find talent in the market. Most of the developers in the market are used to the bigger players. For Jiffy.ai, if you search a resume because you are trying to find someone who has used Jiffy.ai, you won't be able to find it. So, when we onboard a new person, we want them to learn this new system, but it is a bit hard for them to pick up because there are no external learning materials on the Internet. For training, they provide the foundation and advanced training. If you have other issues, they have a support portal, which shows a brief summary of the features. It's not very extensive, like Google Cloud Platform. Sometimes there are things that may not be available in the portal. While other products will also not have available the information in their portal, other people know it. So, you don't have in the community discussions about solutions to a problem that would not be available in the portal.
Sourav-Dutta - PeerSpot reviewer
It's user-friendly, and I didn't need long to understand the process
We use VisualCron for all our automation needs, like connecting to FileZilla, calling APIs, generating PGP keys, creating encryption files with the PGP key login to Azure, etc. It can automatically log in to SQL Server and execute SQL script jobs in bulk. We had 2,000-3,000 users at my previous…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features of Fortra's Automate include its FTP functionality and file manipulation capabilities."
"A great feature that you seldom see in these kind of systems is the ability to use a database as trigger to launch a task. This is something I asked for a few years ago and that was added."
"Compared to other vendors, it's the scheduling tool because a lot of vendors want to charge you extra for their enterprise-level license to have a scheduling tool built in to give you the ability to set up regular schedules to run and do certain data checks."
"The product effectively handles all the tasks we require."
"We use it for specific cases, mainly secure file transfers, which are vital for us. And it works for us."
"I actually quite liked the no-coding functionality."
"The most valuable feature is the drag-and-drop interface, which is very Windows-like."
"The pricing is excellent. I would give them perfect marks in that regard."
"The way Jiffy.ai integrates into existing infrastructure has been great for us. Our company is pretty stringent when it comes to cyber security and integrating with our apps... We've definitely had very strong scrutiny over this platform and this work, and even within that, it's been really successful at being able to integrate."
"It removes the burden of having to do some tasks manually. However, we are just using it in production for a single project. It saves us a lot of time in terms of extracting that information. So far, it has made a big impact."
"Its initial setup process was quite efficient."
"With the customization option, we can write custom expressions using its compatibility with Python or other programming languages."
"I found the invoice data extraction very exciting. It is really good."
"The most valuable feature is the computer vision or OCR. That has a lot of use cases in real life. A lot of man hours can be saved, as we've seen in the finance processes... The feedback I have gotten from the team is that the OCR is quite powerful."
"The biggest driver was the cost savings. We wanted to improve productivity and save costs. Therefore, we gave most of the mundane tasks currently being done by a human to a bot. Some of the mundane tasks were reading invoices and keying in the data. We are talking about 15,000 documents every day. That is a huge volume that needs a lot of people. With the bot, it is just a fraction of the cost, because there is a huge savings in terms of manpower."
"It is a one stop solution for automating process. The modular way that is assigned and works together follows a certain logic, and it encompasses a wide range of processes in a very structured and logical manner."
"'ve only had a few cases where I've had to request support in the past 12 years of use, but the support response time and resolution were was extremely quick."
"What I like about VisualCron is that like its name, it's a very visual tool. In my previous company, there were a lot of scripts for all kinds of services, and through VisualCron, you get to group all flows and get a nice visual overview. VisualCron also has an alerting feature, so you receive alerts from it. VisualCron makes everything clearer and easier to maintain. Every other solution that I was looking for almost always needed a programmer, but with VisualCron, you can do what you need to do without programming skills, so this is another valuable feature of the tool."
"The ability to clone jobs to shorten the time it takes to implement a process has been invaluable, but its flexibility also gives us the ability to create a job that can handle a multifaceted process with a complex workflow."
"The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%."
"The most valuable feature of VisualCron is its ability to schedule interactive jobs so that you can have interdependencies within the job and interdependencies of a job on another job, and so on."
"I love VisualCron because we previously spent a lot of time writing Power switches to connect to SQL Server. VisualCron makes it easier to execute services or connect to FileZilla by only adding the credentials to the master credentials stored in the solution."
"VisualCron is a very powerful program to automate different steps in your business processes. We use it to automate replacing files and inform departments about the replacement."
"We don't have to do any coding. We just plug and play and it works."
 

Cons

"I would like to see some better web automation, a wizard like the one in the product WinAutomation would be very nice."
"Sometimes when we communicate with the ERP system and there is an issue, we are not always aware of the specifics of Automate and the source of the problem."
"The documentation is not that great."
"I currently have three bugs open with them that I don't know if they are addressed in the new release."
"I would like the updates to be easier to deploy. Integration with Amazon S3 is somewhat lacking."
"I find that most important features are strong, however, there is a lack of good development for artificial intelligence, such as machine learning."
"We really need a free development environment for customers. Building and testing automation on production isn't ideal."
"The documentation for errors needs improvement as many of the error messages we receive are very vague."
"They are still new in the market. Or, at least, they are still a small player. They require a lot of improvement in terms of learning material as well as the community developers. If you compare Jiffy.ai to an established solution, like UiPath, you can go to YouTube and find a lot of learning material posted by UiPath, partners, and other people in the community. However, for Jiffy.ai, you won't find that available in the market. Because of this it is very hard for us to find talent in the market. Most of the developers in the market are used to the bigger players. For Jiffy.ai, if you search a resume because you are trying to find someone who has used Jiffy.ai, you won't be able to find it. So, when we onboard a new person, we want them to learn this new system, but it is a bit hard for them to pick up because there are no external learning materials on the Internet."
"I believe this is also being addressed, but a lot of the platform work, as we were putting in new versions or making some updates, was, ironically, very manual. It's improved greatly, but I would imagine that's an area that they're probably still working on, on the backend, to help when it comes to what we need to do for platform support."
"Initially, in version 3, Jiffy.ai did not have support for containerization. In our environment, we are heavy users of containers and container illustrators. So, the initial deployment option was running based on individual hosts that we deployed in the cloud. That created a singularity in the way that we deployed services in our system."
"The solution has just not closed the gap of being accessible to non-IT users. If you are a non-IT person, then this all looks like gobbledygook. Maybe that is something that can be improved upon."
"The UI or the UX has room for improvement. The approach for designing the workflow is not that straightforward. It's quite difficult."
"The solution's support services need improvement."
"The setup process could definitely be better."
"When using UiPath automation, we could just Google issues if we were stuck with something. In the initial days with Jiffy.ai, we could not get that type of information from Google because there wasn't much of a community."
"VisualCron seems to operate like an efficient machine when it comes to improvements and enhancements and new features. I always appreciate the quick response I get when bringing up an issue or coming up with suggestions. I've mentioned before that it would be great to see a move away from SQLCE and XML configuration files."
"I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run."
"The documentation is a bit weak."
"VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve."
"The only problem I face when I use the tool is that it doesn't contain much documentation or it doesn't have many video tutorials on its features."
"An area for improvement in VisualCron is its cluttered interface. It isn't always easy to find all functionalities, so what VisualCron needs is a user interface expert who can improve the interface. There's a learning curve in terms of finding what you need from the interface of VisualCron. The technical support for VisualCron also needs improvement in terms of response time. Currently, there's no live support or hotline you can call to get quick answers, so this is what I'd like to see in the next version of VisualCron. A less cluttered and more streamlined interface, where you don't need to hunt for some of the features, is also what I'd like to see in the next VisualCron update."
"Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way."
"I want to improve the UI in VisualCron, as it's not as user-friendly, particularly when setting up the task scheduler. If you're familiar with the tool, then no problem, but if not, you'll have a problem typing text because sometimes, the cursor points to other places, so there's an issue with text box alignment in VisualCron. That was painful for me when I was just a VisualCron novice, but when you become used to it, there won't be a problem."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It has gone up in price. The price of Fortra's Automate has increased since we first started using it. It does a lot but also costs a lot. It was a lot more affordable before Fortra owned the software."
"From a distributor's side, one of the biggest selling points is its price point. Without going into any numbers, compared to UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism, we're significantly cheaper. The main difference is that other competitors usually charge you per process. However, in Automate's case, it's priced per bot. So, a bot can run multiple processes at the same time, but you are only priced for a single bot."
"From a distributor's perspective, one of the biggest selling points of Automate is its price point."
"It comes with a package that costs approximately $20,000 USD per year."
"Compared to other products, the pricing model for this solution is much more convenient, flexible, and adaptable to the Portuguese reality."
"The pricing is quite reasonable. We can run the process with one bot. The limitation is at the server level because they have some resources, and sometimes that is enough. It isn't too expensive, so you can get a good return off of one, and you can also have a pack of five bots that is quite competitive."
"While solutions like UiPath and Blue Prism cost around $11,000-$12,000 for each license, this product costs around $7,000 and you can keep it forever."
"I'm only involved in running the product and maintaining the systems, so I can't speak to the cost."
"The pricing and license make sense. They have a model based on the concurrency of the workforce, which is very suitable in our case. The savings are great on the licensing cost."
"The solution's price is reasonable."
"If cost is of concern, then start with Jiffy. If cost is not your main concern there are a few premium products out there, but they come with a huge price tag."
"Its license is yearly. There are no additional costs to the standard fee. It is a standard license."
"The licensing is not expensive; it is quite cheap. The expensive part is to support and maintain it. Understandably, we engage them to do a lot of work that could have been done by our own staff, if we had an RPA team. I wouldn't hold that against them. It is just that the cost of support is on the higher side for us."
"I like that it is very cost-efficient."
"The pricing is quite competitive. As a small player in the market, they are quite aggressive in their pricing. With the features that they offer, it is quite worth the value."
"The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."
"We are fine with a rather cheap setup. Licensing with VisualCron is fair. You have a simple one-year licence in different sizes. There isn't a licensing jungle with hundreds of options and opt-ins."
"The price is a bit high."
"ROI is 95 percent."
"VisualCron is correctly priced because it wasn't very cheap, and it wasn't overly expensive, so the price for it was set correctly. When my previous company bought VisualCron, it was €800 per server per year. On a scale of one to five, I would rate the pricing for VisualCron a five because it was just right. The tool was affordable, and it has one of the most competitive pricing in the market."
"ROI is one month."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Healthcare Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
12%
Healthcare Company
10%
Transportation Company
9%
Computer Software Company
28%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Insurance Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about HelpSystems AutoMate?
We use it for specific cases, mainly secure file transfers, which are vital for us. And it works for us.
What is your primary use case for HelpSystems AutoMate?
I am a consultant and I am making a lot of processes in human resources, payroll, certifications, trainings, web scra...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortra Automate?
The pricing is quite good compared to its competitors. Competitors are often more expensive than Automate. I would ra...
What do you like most about Jiffy.ai Automate?
Its initial setup process was quite efficient.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Jiffy.ai Automate?
The solution's price is reasonable in terms of its performance. The licensing costs approximately $10,000 per year. T...
What needs improvement with Jiffy.ai Automate?
The solution's support services need improvement.
What do you like most about VisualCron?
The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%.
What needs improvement with VisualCron?
The documentation is a bit weak. The tool must provide a better set of documentation.
 

Also Known As

HelpSystems Automate, Automate
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Aldergrove Financial Group, Preferred Health Professionals, Mindbeam Technologies, First Credit Union in British Columbia, Vestcom International, Prime Liberty Benefits, University of Tampa, CNLBancshares, World Precision Instruments, BJ's Restaurants, Globe Pequot Press, Accudata Technologies, Norton Healthcare, Pacific Toxicology Laboratories
Southwest Airlines
7 Eleven, ABB Sécheron SA, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Amazon Europe Core, Apple, Assa Abloy, Aston Martin, Banco Santander, BMW (Australia)
Find out what your peers are saying about Jiffy.ai Automate vs. VisualCron and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.