Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users
ActiveBatch by Redwood Logo

ActiveBatch by Redwood pros and cons

4.6 out of 5

Pros & Cons summary

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.
Get the report

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

ActiveBatch by Redwood's job templates enhance efficiency by allowing the creation and reuse of tasks across multiple clients.
Its automation capabilities help reduce development costs by minimizing the need for manual intervention and facilitating easy replication of jobs.
The ability to integrate BI and data quality jobs increases productivity, offering a more efficient process management system.
The software offers advanced scheduling features, ensuring task automation is completed as expected without external interference.
ActiveBatch by Redwood supports seamless integration with third-party tools, optimizing workflows through versatile prebuilt jobs and real-time monitoring.

CONS

ActiveBatch by Redwood has a learning curve due to its complexity and nature, making it challenging for new users to understand and set up.
ActiveBatch by Redwood lacks clear responsibility when issues arise, with communication gaps between different vendors like Oracle leading to unresolved problems.
Users find the Help function limited, especially for Linux-based solutions, as it lacks sufficient examples and documentation.
There are frequent issues with the reliability of logs and navigation, making it difficult to find and manage job outputs effectively.
Reporting capabilities in ActiveBatch by Redwood need enhancement, with a demand for easier generation of audit reports and improved monitoring features.
 

ActiveBatch by Redwood Pros review quotes

reviewer1319073 - PeerSpot reviewer
Client Service Manager/Programmer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
Mar 29, 2020
One of the most valuable features is the job templates. If we need to create an FTP job, we just drag over the FTP template and fill out the requirements using the variables that ActiveBatch uses. And that makes it reusable. We can create a job once but use it for many different clients.
BO
Supervisor IT Operations at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees
Mar 29, 2020
The nice thing about ActiveBatch is once we have created a specific job that can be easily be replicated to another job, then minimal changes will have to be made. This makes things nice. Reduction of coding is substantial in a lot of cases. The replication of one job to another is just doing a few minor tweaks and rolling it into production. This decreases our development costs substantially.
MS
Data Warehouse Operations Analyst at a leisure / travel company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Mar 31, 2020
One of the valuable features is the ability to trigger workflows, one after another, based on success, without having to worry about overlapping workflows. The ability to integrate our BI, analytics, and our data quality jobs is also valuable
Learn what your peers think about ActiveBatch by Redwood. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.
PM
Senior IT Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Mar 31, 2020
What ActiveBatch allows you to do is develop a more efficient process. It gave me visibility into all my jobs so I could choose which jobs to run in parallel. This is much easier than when I have to try to do it through cron for Windows XP, where you really can't do things in parallel and know what is going on.
SG
Senior Operations Administrator at Illinois Mutual Life Insurance Company
Apr 8, 2020
As far as centralization goes it's nice because we can see all these processes that are tied to this larger process. The commissions, FTP processing, the reporting, the file moves to the business users — all that is right there. It's very easy to read. It's easy to tie it together, visually, and see where each of these steps fits into the bigger picture.
GJ
Operations Manager at Statkraft AS
Apr 2, 2020
We use the main job-scheduling feature. It's the only thing we use in the tool. That's the reason we are using the tool: to reduce costs by replacing manual tasks with automated tasks and to perform regular, repetitive tasks in a more reliable way.
NP
DBA Individual Contributor at Aristeia Capital
Oct 6, 2020
From a scheduling point of view, it is pretty good.
RB
Systems Architect at a insurance company with 201-500 employees
Nov 4, 2020
Since we are no longer waiting for an operator to see that a job is finished, we have changed our daily cycle from running in eight hours down to about five. We had a third shift-operator retire and that position was never refilled.
PB
Senior System Analyst at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees
May 5, 2022
The most valuable feature is its stability. We've only had very minor issues and generally they have happened because someone has applied a patch on a Windows operating system and it has caused some grief. We've actually been able to resolve those issues quite quickly with ActiveBatch. In all the time that I've had use of ActiveBatch, it hasn't failed completely once. Uptime is almost 100 percent.
JF
Sr Technical Engineer at Compeer Financial
Nov 30, 2020
ActiveBatch's Self-Service Portal allows our business units to run and monitor their own workloads. They can simply run and review the logs, but they can't modify them. It increases their productivity because they are able to take care of things on their own. It saves us time from having to rerun the scripts, because the business units can just go ahead and log in and and rerun it themselves.
 

ActiveBatch by Redwood Cons review quotes

reviewer1319073 - PeerSpot reviewer
Client Service Manager/Programmer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
Mar 29, 2020
It does have a little bit of a learning curve because it is fairly complex. You have to learn how it does things. I don't know if it's any worse than any other tool would be, just because of the nature of what it does... the learning curve is the hardest part.
BO
Supervisor IT Operations at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees
Mar 29, 2020
There is this back and forth, where ActiveBatch says, "Your Oracle people should be dealing with this," and Oracle people say, "No, we don't know anything about ActiveBatch." Then, it all falls back on me as to what happens. Nobody is taking responsibility. This is the biggest failing for ActiveBatch.
MS
Data Warehouse Operations Analyst at a leisure / travel company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Mar 31, 2020
The thing I've noticed the most is the Help function. It's very difficult, at times, to find examples of how to do something. The Help function will explain what the tool does, but we're not a Windows shop at the data warehouse. Our data warehouse jobs actually run on Linux servers. Finding things for Linux-based solutions is not as easy as it is for Windows-based solutions. I would like to see more examples, and more non-Windows examples as well, in the Help.
Learn what your peers think about ActiveBatch by Redwood. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.
PM
Senior IT Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Mar 31, 2020
I can't get the cleaning up of logs to work consistently. Right now, we are not setup correctly, and maybe it is something that I have not effectively communicated to them.
SG
Senior Operations Administrator at Illinois Mutual Life Insurance Company
Apr 8, 2020
One thing I've noticed is that navigation can be difficult unless you are familiar with the structure that we have in place. If someone else had to look at our ActiveBatch console and find a job, they might not know where to find it.
GJ
Operations Manager at Statkraft AS
Apr 2, 2020
It could be easier to provide dashboards on how many jobs are running at the same time; more monitoring.
NP
DBA Individual Contributor at Aristeia Capital
Oct 6, 2020
The interface is not that user-friendly and is a little tough to navigate.
RB
Systems Architect at a insurance company with 201-500 employees
Nov 4, 2020
There are some issues with this version and finding the jobs that it ran. If you're looking at 1,000 different jobs, it shows based on the execution time, not necessarily the run time. So, if there was a constraint waiting, you may be looking for it in the wrong time frame. Plus, with thousands of jobs showing up and the way it pages output jobs, sometimes you end up with multiple pages on the screen, then you have to go through to find the specific job you're looking for. On the opposite side, you can limit the daily activity screen to show only jobs that failed or jobs currently running, which will shrink that back down. However, we have operators who are looking at the whole nightly cycle to make sure everything is there and make sure nothing got blocked or was waiting. Sometimes, they have a hard time finding every item within the list.
PB
Senior System Analyst at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees
May 5, 2022
A nice thing to have would be the ability to comfortably pass variables from one job to another. That was one of the things that I found difficult.
JF
Sr Technical Engineer at Compeer Financial
Nov 30, 2020
They have some crucial design flaws within the console that still need to be worked out because it is not working exactly how we hoped to see it, e.g., just some minor things where when you hit the save button, then all of a sudden all your job's library items collapse. Then, in order to continue on with your testing, you have to open those back up. I have taken that to them, and they are like, "Yep. We know about it. We know we have some enhancements that need to be taken care of. We have more developers now." They are working towards taking the minor things that annoy us, resolving them, and getting them fixed.