Stonebranch vs Tidal by Redwood comparison

Stonebranch and Tidal Software by Redwood are both solutions in the Workload Automation category. Stonebranch is ranked #16 with an average rating of 7.5, while Tidal Software by Redwood is ranked #5 with an average rating of 9.7. Stonebranch holds a 5.1% mindshare in WA, compared to Tidal Software by Redwood’s 2.9% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Stonebranch users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Tidal Software by Redwood users who would recommend it.

Stonebranch

Read 26 Stonebranch reviews

2,996 Views
1,389 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Tidal by Redwood

Read 37 Tidal by Redwood reviews

3,239 Views
1,311 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Stonebranch

Tidal by Redwood

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 24, 2024

Tidal by Redwood and Stonebranch compete in the automation software space. Tidal holds the upper hand with its robust scheduling and permission segmentation, while Stonebranch excels in cross-platform integration and agent-driven reliability.

Features: Tidal shines with its robust calendaring system that effectively prevents job failures during holidays. It offers advanced permission segmentation, allowing for customized access levels across numerous job groups. Its cross-platform scheduling enhances flexibility. Stonebranch distinguishes itself with reliable agents and compatibility across various technology stacks, bridging disparate technologies. The unified task view allows seamless task monitoring and control, enhancing workflow development.

Room for Improvement: Tidal still encounters challenges with user navigation and reporting capabilities, despite recent improvements in its Transporter tool. Drill-down and root cause analysis can be cumbersome for some users. Stonebranch requires enhancements in mainframe connectivity, interface, and task monitor management. Both products could benefit from improved reporting and user interfaces, focusing on intuitive navigation for Tidal and better mainframe support for Stonebranch.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tidal is usually deployed on-premises with some hybrid implementations. There have been notable improvements in technical support after an acquisition, leading to increased responsiveness. Stonebranch, also primarily on-premises, lacks public cloud presence. Its customer service is strong, known for its responsiveness and knowledgeability. Tidal has enhanced its support, while Stonebranch consistently receives praise for its established service quality.

Pricing and ROI: Tidal's pricing model is recognized for flexibility and transparency, enabling scaling without hidden costs. Users report significant time and cost savings from its automation capabilities. Stonebranch offers competitive pricing, often being more cost-effective than its rivals. Both solutions provide substantial ROI through operational efficiency, with Tidal emphasizing time and management resource savings, and Stonebranch highlighting value in licensing flexibility and included support.

To learn more, read our detailed Stonebranch vs. Tidal by Redwood Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Stonebranch vs. Tidal by Redwood

January 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

Stonebranch

Ranking in Workload Automation

16th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Tidal by Redwood

Ranking in Workload Automation

5th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of Stonebranch is 5.1%, up from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tidal by Redwood is 2.9%, down from 4.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Workload Automation

Featured Reviews

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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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

"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 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."

"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."

"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 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 support is good from Stonebranch Universal Automation Center."

"The features are upgraded, and every six months they're releasing patches."

"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

"Tidal integrates with other third-party systems, which makes it easy to connect and exchange data."

"Tidal helps administrators and users to see the information that is relevant to them in that single pane of glass. They can see jobs running, they can see job history, and they can see job progression. If you look at alternatives like Airflow and clouds, you'd have to design your own UI to monitor the progress of the different jobs that you've created in Airflow. So Tidal is huge for us."

"By leveraging machine learning algorithms, Tidal Automation can use this data to optimize turbine settings and improve overall efficiency and performance."

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

"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 use the solution for cross-platform and cross-application workloads. That's one of the core reasons we chose it. It's one of a few things in the industry that can be used for cross-platform integration."

"We have to run about 12,000 jobs every day and the majority of them need to be launched from our ERP, JD Edwards. The native compatibility of the Tidal platform with JD Edwards dovetails with our greatest need. It's directly connected to the heart of our IT system. We couldn't work without it."

"We use the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads. The solution’s ability to manage and monitor these workloads is very easy and accurate. We have file dependencies for running jobs. The job does not start until a file exists on a completely different server, then where the job will run. So, it is cross systems."

More Tidal by Redwood pros

Cons

"It can be hard to manage the task monitor."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Stonebranch cons

"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."

"I would like more involvement with the cloud."

"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 UI might have the potential to provide a more polished and user-centric encounter, promoting seamless engagements and simplifying the navigation process for individuals interacting with the software."

"Their software installation and update process could use some improvements. I'm pretty sure they're working on that, but that's definitely an area where it could be streamlined a lot. There's still a lot of manual work that you have to do with the schedule when you deploy masters or do the agents."

"One area for improvement is the command-line interface and the API to bulk-load jobs. It's a little bit kludgy, but we still manage without it. They're working on it and it's getting better all the time. In addition, the documentation for their API for creating jobs needs to be updated. It's a bit of a learning curve."

"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."

"Understanding and using Tidal Automation could be overwhelming for someone with minimal programming language."

More Tidal by Redwood cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

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

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

"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."

"This solution is a bit expensive in the current world where everybody is trying to cut down on certain things."

"If you are willing to shop around to other vendors, you can possibly get a good price on your support license."

"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."

"I have had no issues with the licensing."

"BMC is really expensive. The other solutions are about the same price. I think Tidal is even cheaper than the others, such as CA, Stonebranch, and JAMS."

"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."

More Tidal by Redwood pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

27%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

23%

Manufacturing Company

19%

Computer Software Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Stonebranch Universal Automation Center?

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

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Stonebranch Universal Automation Center?

The pricing is good. I would rate it eight out of ten. The pricing is similar to AutoSys. It's lower than Redwood, which was on the higher side in terms of pricing.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Stonebranch Universal Automation Center?

It can be hard to manage the task monitor. We are still working with the vendor, and we are trying to make the changes as per our requirements. We are asking them to build some new solutions so the...

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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

Control-M vs Stonebranch

Compared 33% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Stonebranch

Compared 20% of the time

ESP Workload Automation Intelligence vs Stonebranch

Compared 10% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Stonebranch

Compared 9% of the time

Rocket Zena vs Stonebranch

Compared 2% of the time

More Stonebranch Competitors

Control-M vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 49% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 10% of the time

IBM Workload Automation vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 10% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 10% of the time

Automic Automation vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 4% of the time

More Tidal by Redwood Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Stonebranch

January 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Tidal by Redwood

January 2025

Download Tidal by Redwood product report

Also Known As

Stonebranch Universal Automation Center

Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler

Overview

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.

Stonebranch

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

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

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Stonebranch vs. Tidal by Redwood

January 2025

Free Report: Stonebranch vs. Tidal by Redwood

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