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VisualCron vs WorkFusion 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
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)
WorkFusion
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
15th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (22nd), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (8th)
 

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 VisualCron is 0.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of WorkFusion is 1.5%, up from 1.5% 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.
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…
Shamus Cardon - PeerSpot reviewer
It has improved our accuracy since we are eliminating the human error element. There could be better version control through their web platform.
We only have our engineering team writing code and developing business processes since it is very technical. In terms of data extraction and training the ML models, we deployed that to our accounts payable department, which has fewer technical users than our engineering team. After a handful of training sessions, they were able to get in there and use it with decent accuracy. It could be better, but it is definitely better than nothing. One of the big upgrades that I know is happening in version 10 is an improvement to their tagging interface. That is definitely something that I am excited about to sort of reinvigorate our more non-technical users in information extraction from our documents. There could be better version control through their web platform. That is something that could be improved on. Integration from the IDE, e.g., from WorkFusion Studio directly into Control Tower, would be nice to have too.

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 for my client are timing and scheduling."
"Web scraping is quite good since it offers a lot of possibilities."
"It gives us a central place to schedule tasks and run them distributed."
"We are still in the process of rolling it to production and tweaking it (our AD groups are a mess), but the improvements are priceless. Having users ID's created the same way every time without human error is the best part. We don't need to worry about why groups were not added, user rights not set to folders or missing a private folder being created, typos or just even knowing when things are done and logged."
"This tool has machine learning and voice recognition and computer vision, which are both quite useful aspects. These aren't available in other tools. It's a good addition to this tool and it gives the solution an edge on the market."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"'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."
"The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%."
"It has improved our organization with more automation within the business departments and less administration and development in the IT department. Usually, as the IT department, we are the bottleneck for many requirements within the business. With this tool, the business departments are able to perform many task themselves."
"It helped us reduce manual steps."
"What I found most beneficial from VisualCron is that you can directly connect it with different databases, user accounts, and credentials. You can run queries from one machine to another using the credentials, unlike PowerShell, that's run by the machine itself. With VisualCron, you can directly ask other machines and run requests through user credentials. Suppose you have an AWS or Azure environment. In that case, you can maintain the connection between on-premises and cloud-based machines, which is the type of setup in the organization I'm working for. You can directly call some of the services via VisualCron on your local on-premises machine, and I found that an excellent feature of the tool."
"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."
"For automating mundane activities, I can recommend WorkFusion."
"The cognitive features of this solution are good."
"WorkFusion's RPA Express's ability to scale across multiple geographies with limited impact on additional IT Hardware requirements. This has enabled the scaling of Robotics capabilities and solutions across all our entities."
"It's a pretty robust product."
"It takes care of simple tasks so users can focus more on exceptions than on regular use cases. They only focus on orders where they need to handle an exception, some information was not given, or there is an issue that they had to focus on. The rest of it goes straight through without human touch. We want to see our employees as engineers, wherein they think and solve problems, not necessarily have to do repetitive tasks. I think WorkFusion helps with avoiding repetitive tasks."
"In our opinion this group are the leaders in providing RPA solutions."
"The tool itself is easy. I started using it without really having any coding experience... After just a few clicks, it was doing reconciliations for me."
"WorkFusion helps by speeding up processes. The process takes time. It has business costs associated because there are people waiting to take the next steps in the process. The end result of waiting, whether it is an internal or external team, is that they are delayed. Therefore, it helps us in speeding up business processes and improving employee morale, as people don't have to do repetitive work anymore."
 

Cons

"The technical support could be better. We suffer from language barriers, as we are in Argentina."
"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."
"There is a lack of good development for artificial intelligence, such as machine learning."
"I find that most important features are strong, however, there is a lack of good development for artificial intelligence, such as machine learning."
"The intelligent automation feature could be improved. It's interesting because it's simple, but the automation quality isn't always good. It's easy to use, but sometimes you need to make a slight improvement to the automation, and that's not so easy."
"Fortra's Automate is not as reliable as I would like it to be."
"I would like the updates to be easier to deploy. Integration with Amazon S3 is somewhat lacking."
"There are some conditions in the mail trigger, but you can only use them as an "AND" condition, not as an "OR" condition. This is an improvement that could be useful. For example, some people put "invoice" in the subject and others put "invoice" in the body. If I want to make a trigger for everybody whose sending invoices, I have to make two jobs for this now."
"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."
"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."
"The documentation is a bit weak."
"VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve."
"Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way."
"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."
"I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run."
"The product could do more to expand its 'codeless' coding options by adding drag-and-drop assistance in building bots for non-technical users."
"I frequently face issues with infrastructure and some WorkFusion-related problems, such as login issues."
"I would also like for it to be NLP-based."
"We have had some problems in the past with the Inspector tool that looks at the elements on the screen. Replacing it or improving it is needed."
"It is difficult for non-technical users to use WorkFusion. If we really want to build automation, we definitely need Java developers. Their RPA is not for non-technical people. If I look at competing products, like Automation Anywhere, UiPath, Blue Prism, or even Power Automate, a non-technical person can build basic automations and deploy them. Since non-technical people can easily build basic automations, they can be deployed in no time. With WorkFusion, there isn't a similar feature that works well. One needs to write code from scratch to build automation. That is definitely a deterrent if we really want to do quick, dirty automation. I would not rate WorkFusion very high on their no-code, low-code paradigm. In this area, I would definitely expect them to improve."
"We have executed our robots thousands of times in our enterprise environment. However, in an enterprise environment, WorkFusion has performance problems. It is slow in production."
"One of the issues that we are facing here in China, is that we cannot access the material for training because it is on YouTube. In China, we do not have access to YouTube."
"So far, we have developed only one automation using machine learning. The results were less than optimal. Part of this could be because of the use case that was selected. Overall, our experience was suboptimal. WorkFusion was an outstanding partner in terms of providing their experts for free to help us on that particular use case, but we still have a lot of things to figure out in terms of how to use its machine learning capability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I like the way this solution is priced because you can buy a license, or you can buy the software outright."
"From a distributor's perspective, one of the biggest selling points of Automate is its price point."
"Once you buy the software, you just pay for the support for backend help."
"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."
"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."
"I believe the price falls within a reasonable range, which significantly influenced our decision regarding the product. This aspect is crucial for any technological solution, especially in our country where enterprises might be hesitant to invest heavily in something untested or uncertain about its practicality and potential returns."
"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."
"I'm only involved in running the product and maintaining the systems, so I can't speak to the cost."
"The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."
"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."
"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."
"ROI is one month."
"ROI is 95 percent."
"The price is a bit high."
"One upgrade took a year to do, from the first server being built to the last bot being migrated. This was because we had to migrate all our existing bots. This is the same process and time frame that we are expecting towards the upcoming upgrade. I will end up spending half a million dollars to do an upgrade."
"My client is using RPA Express, which is available for them to use free of charge."
"It is not the most expensive solution, but it is also not the cheapest."
"In addition to the licensing fee, there is also an implementation cost for each use case and technical support costs."
"The pricing is fair because WorkFusion's out-of-the-box solution is appealing."
"We have a good deal from WorkFusion. We have an unlimited global licensing deal with WorkFusion. For us, it is a no-worry solution. We can go ahead and use it as much as possible anywhere we need it. If WorkFusion has a different kind of a deal for licensing with others, then their business decisions need to be evaluated based on that."
"They have a very expensive license compared to any other automation tool. For instance, at $50,000 - $60,000, you can bring in an Automation Anywhere solution. For this solution, you need at least $250,000 to get something going."
"We are on an annual contract to use the solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Healthcare Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
28%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Insurance Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
7%
Insurance Company
6%
 

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 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.
What do you like most about WorkFusion?
If you compare it to its competitors in the market, it is more Java-native.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for WorkFusion?
Everything should be cheaper. However, it's fairly priced. They have a pricing scale. We've been with them for a whil...
What needs improvement with WorkFusion?
For non-technical users, it may be easy to use. It depends on what perspective we're talking about. From a business p...
 

Comparisons

 

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
7 Eleven, ABB Sécheron SA, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Amazon Europe Core, Apple, Assa Abloy, Aston Martin, Banco Santander, BMW (Australia)
Deutsche Bank, Amerant Bank, Bank of Asia, Scotiabank, Bank of Montreal, LPL Financial, Carter Bank & Trust, Selective Insurance, HPE, Canadian Tire, Standard Bank, Humana, New York-Presbyterian, Houston Methodist, Six Financial, State Street
Find out what your peers are saying about VisualCron vs. WorkFusion and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.