We performed a comparison between Stonebranch Universal Automation Center and Tidal Automation based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Stonebranch Universal Automation Center is highly regarded for its strong performance and visually appealing presentation. Users appreciate its capacity to establish connections between tasks and its efficient rerun feature. The platform boasts a user-friendly interface and a practical task monitoring tool. Tidal Automation shines with its exceptional job scheduling capabilities, enabling users to effortlessly schedule numerous tasks with interdependencies. Its unified interface provides a comprehensive view, granting flexibility to execute jobs across various servers.
Stonebranch could make the software available on the cloud to enhance safety and scalability. Additionally, the analytics feature and task monitor could be enhanced for better functionality. Users also suggest the addition of a mobile app for easier monitoring and calculation of job hours. Collaborating with the vendor for new solutions is also recommended. Tidal Automation users find the graphical user interface to be busy and tedious to navigate. They suggest simplifying the pricing model and improving the user interface, especially when it comes to drilling down into details. The process of migrating jobs and production statistics reporting could also be improved.
Service and Support: Users appreciate the technical support provided by Stonebranch, describing it as very good, excellent, and always available. Tidal Automation also receives positive feedback, with reviewers mentioning a responsive and knowledgeable support team.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for Stonebranch was considered moderately difficult due to the complexity of the infrastructure, resulting in some challenges. The initial setup for Tidal Automation was described as simple and easy, with a deployment process taking around three weeks. Users also found it relatively easy to learn how to use the system.
Pricing: Stonebranch Universal Automation Centercost-effective with favorable pricing ratings. The license requires annual payment. Tidal Automation offers fair and predictable pricing, accompanied by transparent licensing.
ROI: Stonebranch has proven to be] cost-effective. Tidal Automation offers a range of benefits including cost savings, improved efficiency, increased productivity, better risk management, and centralized job management.
Comparison Results: Stonebranch Universal Automation Center emerges as the preferred choice compared to Tidal Automation. Stonebranch stands out due to its intuitive and user-friendly interface, offering a graphical user interface (GUI) instead of relying solely on a command line.
"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."
"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 interface is very user-friendly and easy to navigate."
"The features are upgraded, and every six months they're releasing patches."
"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."
"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 support is good from Stonebranch Universal Automation Center."
"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."
"It saves times due to automation. With some files, we do hundreds a day for a particular vendor. This would be hard to do manually. Also, the speed at which we can do this is excellent."
"The best feature of Tidal Workload Automation Software is its ease of integration with other systems, including ERP, CRM, and BI tools."
"One of the most useful features is being able to set up a schedule and create dependencies. The calendar can kick off processes at certain times, based on dependencies that you specify, like time, or whether another process has finished. Dependencies are the most useful thing."
"Thinking of all the people involved in checking jobs on a daily basis, manually running jobs or auditing them through standalone tools, and trying to connect them. We have saved hundreds of hours weekly, which is substantial."
"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."
"Tidal Workload Automation Software provides the ability to quickly adapt to changing business requirements."
"Tidal Automation offers extensive monitoring and reporting features that let users keep track of the status of their workflows and quickly spot any problems."
"It's the most efficient tool in doing repetitive tasks and saves a lot of time with minimum possibility of error."
"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 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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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 software's performance and scalability could be improved, particularly when dealing with large-scale workloads or complex business processes."
"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."
"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."
"The job failure alerts can be updated with more details for better troubleshooting."
"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."
"From an administrative point of view, I wouldn't give really high marks to the solution. I actually entertained getting the JAWS application at one point. One of the shortcomings with the scheduler is the reporting capabilities. At least at the time, JAWS was the best that they had for a third-party integration. I think they've got things in the pipeline to help alleviate that gap."
"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."
"Tidal Automation could be further integrated with other systems used in the operation of tidal energy systems, such as weather forecasting tools, energy management systems, or asset management software."
Stonebranch is ranked 16th in Workload Automation with 26 reviews while Tidal by Redwood is ranked 2nd in Workload Automation with 37 reviews. Stonebranch is rated 8.8, while Tidal by Redwood is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Stonebranch writes "Allowed us to develop workflows without having to train and develop very specialized skillsets". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Tidal by Redwood writes "Great visibility with a single pane of glass and a low learning curve". Stonebranch is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence and HCL Workload Automation, whereas Tidal by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation and Redwood RunMyJobs. See our Stonebranch vs. Tidal by Redwood report.
See our list of best Workload Automation vendors.
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