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Stonebranch vs Tidal by Redwood 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
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
Tidal by Redwood
Ranking in Workload Automation
19th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
37
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 Stonebranch is 4.8%, down from 5.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tidal by Redwood is 4.6%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
JAMS2.8%
Stonebranch4.8%
Tidal by Redwood4.6%
Other87.8%
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.
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.
JG
Batch Production Manager at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
Its versatility, ease of use, scalability, and cost-effectiveness make it a 10/10 and the best of the breed
The company is not really big. One of the areas that they are working on is improving the process of migrating jobs from the lower environment to the upper environment. They had used a tool called Transporter, which was a little difficult to use, but they've now released a new tool in August, which I've not yet used, to do that. It's probably called Repository or something like that, but it's a tool for migrating jobs from the lower environment to the upper environment. That's where they needed to improve, and it looks like they may have, but I haven't tried the tool yet. They can do better reporting in terms of production statistics reporting.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Previously, we manually managed file transfers by writing our scripts. The automated MFT feature is great for me and the company. It helps us know where the files are going and enables us to track errors if anything fails. It also makes the connection seamless for third-party vendors."
"The interface is good, and it's very easy to define and create jobs. If a job is not running or there is an error, the solution will send an email. That's all very good and very useful."
"The fact that we no longer need to use Excel spreadsheets is huge. Before JAMS, every group was keeping track of their own batch jobs. Nobody really knew what the other jobs were. So, if jobs failed, other groups wouldn't necessarily know. With JAMS, everything is done through a single scheduler. You can choose who to notify."
"The ability to sequence jobs is excellent; it means we don't have to schedule them individually, and if one fails, it doesn't unwind the entire workflow."
"JAMS is easier to use and cheaper than our previous solution. The installation is more straightforward, and JAMS has a graphical user interface, so it's more accessible."
"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."
"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."
"JAMS has been a beneficial monitoring tool for our project in terms of being able to deliver data that is essential for users."
"Stonebranch's security stands out to me because I use SFTP for secured file transfers, which includes encryptions and antivirus scanning to block any files containing viruses from transferring."
"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 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."
"The features are upgraded, and every six months they're releasing patches."
"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."
"I like the dashboard and the various workflows."
"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."
"In every way, Stonebranch is a very much improved product in the industry."
"The data management on offer was valuable."
"The versatility of being able to run on many different types of servers is valuable. There is also a versatility of different services that you could run jobs on. It's highly versatile. You can run a lot of different types of scripts on a lot of different types of servers. It interfaces with all of them."
"Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution."
"Tidal integrates with other third-party systems, which makes it easy to connect and exchange data."
"The Graphical Views feature is also very good for helping us to understand a job stream. It's great for providing a visual overview of the status of a workflow, especially the Critical Path view. That is one of our favorites."
"We use the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads. That's the biggest use for us and that's the biggest advantage."
"The best feature is that it allows task scheduling based on particular occurrences, like the receipt of files, database updates, or system notifications."
"From a management standpoint, when using the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads, I've never had a problem with the application. It's very interactive, especially with the different security levels that they offer."
 

Cons

"We have had a lot of people working from home who can't always connect to the JAMS server. We use VPN, as most companies do, and we have it set up so that everybody can access the JAMS server. But many times, our people cannot access it... JAMS could do a better job of telling you what the problem is when you try to log in to the server."
"JAMS has built-in reporting. I've never really used it. I tried using it a few years ago and I couldn't figure it out. It was wonky. It could be improved upon."
"It is important to receive notifications if a charged job fails and SQL is halted. JAMS does not provide halted notifications by default, which is a critical feature that needs to be added."
"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."
"I would like to see the ability to interface with Microsoft group-managed service accounts, but they're still in the research phase. They need to ensure everything's legit and safe. The report designer and dashboards could also be improved. We're running 7.3, so I don't know if they have updated the reporting in 7.5, but I think the reports and dashboards could be better."
"Fortra is getting much better with documentation and examples, but there is still room for improvement."
"If there were a softcover book on how to really take advantage of all of JAMS' tools, I would buy it. I do better with training books than online searching, so a book would be helpful."
"The only thing that they could improve on is the fact that they don't have a browser version of JAMS. They've got all the bits and pieces there if you want to build your own web version of it. It does come with a web client, but it's pretty clunky. They could improve on that."
"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."
"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."
"Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics."
"I feel that Stonebranch can be improved in certain areas."
"It can be hard to manage the task monitor."
"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."
"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."
"Tidal's adaptability and user-friendliness could be increased by integrating it with additional programmes and platforms."
"I don't know if Tidal wants to get into the business of monitoring long-running jobs, but that could be a feature for the future: a job launching and monitoring tool. Using Tidal for monitoring doesn't seem like a good fit, but if they could offer something that did that as an add-on or include it, it might be helpful."
"We've had some quirky stuff happen on an occasional basis where a job does not take off. For example, a job we expected to be finished by 3:00 a.m. is sitting there and not executing when we come in in the morning. We have to go all the way back to the dependencies and then we can see that one of the dependencies has become unscheduled, for some reason. No changes were made to the schedule but this prerequisite job has, all of a sudden, become unscheduled. I have brought this up with Tidal's support but they have never had an answer for it."
"I'm still hoping with Explorer to be able to see end-to-end job streams. That's not really something that's easy to see today in the web client. However, I haven't worked with Explorer yet. One of the things that we have found frustrating is not being able to see an end-to-end job stream across multiple applications within Tidal. We use jobs for that right now, but I have high hopes that we'll be able to see that in Explorer."
"The drill-down into details using the Graphical Views feature is a bit difficult and not that helpful. If you want to go into the details, you have to go to the Job Activity. Graphical Views is not that easy for getting that kind of information."
"It takes a lot of time to learn the product. I have admins and developers who are working on the products for the last three to four years and still don't know all the functionalities. Tidal has really great things about it, but people are focused on their day-to-day job and the solution is not intuitive."
"The GUI, the graphical user interface, gets a little bit busy."
"Setting up the initial product was a little hard."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"This is a good product at a fair price."
"The product is reasonably priced, and we don't have any add-ons."
"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."
"There are no additional costs other than the license for Fortra's JAMS which is affordable."
"For what it does, the product is priced very well."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"All licensing models are a little overpriced, but JAMS offers a good value, especially given their support response times and ability to handle unforeseen issues like the SFTP transfers. I hope to find more use cases to get a better bang for our buck."
"Stonebranch is cheaper than Control-M, so many companies are using Stonebranch."
"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."
"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."
"The price of the solution is at a medium level compared to the competition."
"We've been able to purchase more adapters because the cost of the product has been very reasonable."
"This solution is a bit expensive in the current world where everybody is trying to cut down on certain things."
"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."
"The price is reasonable in terms of the product’s functionality."
"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 new prices that we've received seem reasonable and comparable to the marketplace."
"Our annual maintenance cost is competitive for what we have and what they do."
"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."
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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
23%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Insurance Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Performing Arts
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise25
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise38
 

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...
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...
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Also Known As

No data available
Stonebranch Universal Automation Center
Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
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Overview

 

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.
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Stonebranch vs. Tidal by Redwood and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.