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Rocket Zeke vs Stonebranch comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 2025

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
Sponsored
Ranking in Workload Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Rocket Zeke
Ranking in Workload Automation
28th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Stonebranch
Ranking in Workload Automation
9th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of JAMS is 2.8%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rocket Zeke is 1.1%, down from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Stonebranch is 4.8%, down from 5.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
JAMS2.8%
Stonebranch4.8%
Rocket Zeke1.1%
Other91.3%
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2770605 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Has streamlined complex job scheduling across scripting languages while reducing manual effort
JAMS could be improved with a web client that is accessible and as fast as a normal website, eliminating the need to RDP to the servers to access the JAMS client. A functionality running on the JAMS server to continuously check the JAMS agents would ensure they are working properly. If an agent is not responding, a feature to restart the service from the job server machine would be beneficial. The upgrade process, particularly when switching from V6 to V7, could be clearer in terms of documentation, ideally with screenshots showing exactly what needs to be done on each screen.
Daniele Folatelli - PeerSpot reviewer
Mainframe Systems Programmer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
It's a reliable solution that gets a lot done quickly
I work a lot with the support side when there are issues. I see a lot of confusion about the various licenses. The licensing model is somewhat complicated. The product license has to be installed. Sometimes, when a license is expiring and I need a new one, it's hard to understand where those licenses are in the guest support portal. I've discussed this with ASG, and they've acknowledged that it's too complicated. It has had an impact. It's not that the product doesn't work, but we get messages from the user worried that the product will run out of support and their whole operation will be affected.
Saktheeswaran Ravichandran - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Modern workload automation has unified job scheduling and reporting across regions and platforms
I feel that Stonebranch can be improved in certain areas. Since I have been a Control-M user for a very long time and have also used Dollar Universe in the past, creating a task or job and then creating a schedule with time triggers and other triggers in different objects feels a bit complicated compared to other tools in the market where everything is laid out in a single pane and scheduling is easy. Here, since we have a task and a time schedule and time trigger separately from the task, I am getting a bit confused becoming accustomed to those concepts, but that can be managed more easily.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"JAMS has improved my organization by taking a myriad of manual processes and allowing us to automate them. It enables our folks to focus more on tasks that require their human intelligence and their creativity and less on just mundane tasks. It increases efficiency, accuracy, and consistency."
"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."
"Fortra's JAMS helped us centralize job management across our platforms and applications. This is critical because we schedule tasks across multiple applications and operating systems, using triggers and start dates to coordinate their execution."
"It's a full-featured job scheduling tool. The part that I liked the best was the support team. This tool was new, and we were all learning it and setting up the different jobs that were complex in nature. Their support team was very responsive in helping us out through the setup and resolving the issues. They have been incredibly awesome."
"The alerting in it is really targeted... you can set specific alerting so that if jobs in a given folder fail, certain people are alerted. You can also set security at the folder level, so that only people in those areas can go set them. That means that the alerting and security can be set at a very granular level."
"The planning capabilities are most valuable."
"I appreciate JAMS for its readily available templates that allow me to create and deliver stand-up presentations within minutes quickly."
"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."
"Two features are valuable. One is Rocket Zeke's ability to integrate with the mainframe, which is the main processor using the agent. It works on any computer, so users don't have to wait. They can use their laptop or any other way to connect and securely access all the necessary information. The other valuable feature is automation, which is an integral part of batch processing."
"The ability to monitor tasks that are on the open-system side as well as our mainframe side gives us a one-window view of all our processes."
"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."
"The interface is very user-friendly and easy to navigate."
"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."
"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."
"The features are upgraded, and every six months they're releasing patches."
"We like that it has GUI and is not just a command line."
"We lean a lot on the multi-tenancy that they offer within the product, the ability to get other people to self-manage their estate, versus having a central team do all the scheduling."
 

Cons

"There could be a better simulation for banning the termination. You have to simulate every one of the processes in order to have an idea for better planning. This kind of simulation is broken and needs improvement."
"The JAMS automation code isn't so clean."
"I want JAMS to implement a global search function."
"If around 5,000 or more jobs run at a time, JAMS slows down, and we have to wait around five to 10 minutes or restart JAMS scheduler services."
"JAMS could be improved with a web client that is accessible and as fast as a normal website, eliminating the need to RDP to the servers to access the JAMS client."
"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 monitoring of the JAMS product and its performance is an area of concern for me."
"All my machines at work are Macs. JAMS client is a Windows-based thing. It is all built on .NET, which makes perfect sense. However, that means in order for me to access it, I need to connect to a VPN, then log onto one of our Azure VMs in order to access the JAMS client. This is fine, but if for some reason I am unable to do so, it would be nice to be able to have a web-based JAMS client that has all the exact same functionality in it. There are probably a whole bunch of disadvantages that you would get with that as well, but that is definitely something that would make life easier in a few cases."
"I work a lot with the support side when there are issues. I see a lot of confusion about the various licenses. The licensing model is somewhat complicated. The product license has to be installed. Sometimes, when a license is expiring and I need a new one, it's hard to understand where those licenses are in the guest support portal. I've discussed this with Rocket Zeke, and they've acknowledged that it's too complicated."
"I would rate Stonebranch somewhere in the middle for ease of setup. It wasn't too straightforward for us because our infrastructure is complex."
"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."
"It can be hard to manage the task monitor."
"I feel that Stonebranch can be improved in certain areas."
"I have a request regarding our agent on the mainframe. It may time out when communicating to the Universal Controller, when the mainframe is extremely busy. That can cause a task which is running at that time to not see the results of the job that ran on the mainframe. It happens sporadically during times of really busy CPU usage. We're expecting that enhancement from them in the fourth quarter."
"There is a component called the OMS, which is the message broker. We rely on infrastructure, resiliency, and availability for that piece. If that could change to be highly available just as a software component, so that we don't have to provide the high-available storage, etc. for it, that would be a plus. It would just be cheaper to run."
"Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Our licensing is pretty cheap because we have a state solution. So, we pay only $1,000 a year."
"The pricing of JAMS has not been an issue for us, as it has allowed us to save time."
"I haven't been involved in the financial side for several years, but we buy one host and unlimited agents, and we get a reasonable price for that. We're happy with the amount we pay and the scalability it provides."
"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."
"JAMS is close to the lower end of the pricing models for enterprise scheduling solutions. They are much cheaper than Control-M, as well as some other products that I've used. I also don't know of another solution where you can actually get true, unlimited licensing, where you can have as many instances and as many agents as you want."
"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."
"Fortra's JAMS pricing structure has deteriorated significantly since its acquisition by Fortra."
"I don't make purchasing decisions, but the decision-makers tell me they don't switch to other solutions because this one has the price they need. Pricing is part of their decision to stick with this product."
"Stonebranch is cheaper than Control-M, so many companies are using Stonebranch."
"When we reviewed this solution against other vendors, Stonebranch blew everybody out of the water in terms of cost."
"The price of the solution is at a medium level compared to the competition."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Insurance Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
44%
Insurance Company
9%
Retailer
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Insurance Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise19
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise25
 

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?
My thoughts on the pricing of JAMS are that I won't say it is cheap, but it is cost-efficient, and that should be acc...
What needs improvement with JAMS?
An area that has room for improvement is related to the AWS RDS and database part, where they said that is in progres...
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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Stonebranch Universal Automation Center?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been straightforward.
What needs improvement with Stonebranch Universal Automation Center?
Stonebranch can be improved due to an issue I had a few weeks ago with data leakage, as the servers consume more RAM ...
What is your primary use case for Stonebranch Universal Automation Center?
My main use case for Stonebranch is file transfers, such as FTP and SFTP protocols, where I mostly transfer files fro...
 

Also Known As

No data available
ASG Zeke
Stonebranch Universal Automation Center
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Teradata, Arconic, General Dynamics, Yum!, CVS Health, Comcast, Ghiradelli, & Boston’s Children’s Hospital
Reliance, Raley's, Oney, Primerica, Postbank
Nissan, Coop, United Supermarkets, Groupon, CSC, Orbitz, Johnson & Johnson, BMW, Qantas.
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC, Broadcom, JAMS Software and others in Workload Automation. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.