ActiveBatch by Redwood vs Rocket Zena comparison

ActiveBatch by Redwood and Rocket Software are both solutions in the Workload Automation category. ActiveBatch by Redwood is ranked #19, while Rocket Software is ranked #20. ActiveBatch by Redwood holds a 2.8% mindshare in WA, compared to Rocket Software’s 2.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of ActiveBatch by Redwood users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Rocket Software users who would recommend it.

ActiveBatch by Redwood

Read 35 ActiveBatch by Redwood reviews

1,943 Views
1,477 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Rocket Zena

Read 8 Rocket Zena reviews

1,347 Views
1,347 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

ActiveBatch by Redwood

Rocket Zena

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 2025

Rocket Zena and ActiveBatch by Redwood compete in the IT automation space. ActiveBatch is viewed as superior overall due to its comprehensive features, while Rocket Zena has advantages in pricing and customer support satisfaction.

Features: Rocket Zena includes robust scheduling, monitoring capabilities, and specific-task automation, making it apt for precise task management. ActiveBatch offers extensive workflow integrations, customizable automation options, and detailed orchestration features, catering to businesses needing versatile solutions.

Room for Improvement: Rocket Zena could enhance its user interface intuitiveness, expand integration options, and improve scalability for larger enterprises. ActiveBatch may benefit from simplifying some complex features, reducing initial setup time, and enhancing real-time monitoring capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Rocket Zena is known for a straightforward deployment process with effective support, suited for businesses seeking quick implementation. ActiveBatch has a more complex deployment but compensates with comprehensive customer service for users needing detailed guidance.

Pricing and ROI: Rocket Zena is cost-effective with a strong return on investment, appealing to businesses prioritizing affordability. ActiveBatch, with a higher initial cost, delivers substantial ROI through its extensive capabilities, attracting companies willing to invest for long-term benefits.

To learn more, read our detailed ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Rocket Zena Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Rocket Zena

September 2025

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Helped 868,759 peers since 2012

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

ActiveBatch by Redwood

Ranking in Workload Automation

19th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Process Automation (34th), Managed File Transfer (MFT) (18th)

Rocket Zena

Ranking in Workload Automation

20th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of ActiveBatch by Redwood is 2.8%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rocket Zena is 2.5%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Workload Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
ActiveBatch by Redwood	2.8%
Rocket Zena	2.5%
Other	94.7%

Workload Automation

Featured Reviews

Shubham Bharti

Senior Analyst at Capgemini

Flexible, easy to use, and offers good automation

Occasionally, I find myself contemplating if there is room for improvement in the user interface (UI), and envisioning that with certain enhancements. The UI could potentially offer a more refined and user-friendly experience, fostering smoother interactions and facilitating easier navigation for users engaging with the application. New users might encounter a minor setback due to the absence of readily accessible training videos, which could have otherwise proven to be an invaluable resource in aiding their initial familiarization with the platform, potentially hindering their seamless onboarding process and delaying their ability to harness the software's full range of capabilities to its utmost potential.

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JuanGonzalez6

IT Solutions Manager at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees

A continuously evolving, stable solution, with responsive support

The visual whiteboard for design and execution included with the solution is very crucial to those who are new to Rocket Zena, especially so that the learning curve is minimized and they can focus on accomplishing the task. We process our system's payroll through Rocket Zena. The fact that it's a multi-process, multi-layered application, means that we can rely on the solution for kicking off processes, notifying user vendors of the steps, completions, error logging, and historic events from the previous run times. Rocket Zena's ability to automate jobs on the mainframe as a distribution workload automation solution is good. The solution continuously improves over time. We're eager to start the latest upgrade this coming year that'll put us on the cloud. Hopefully, this will improve the product even more. We can run things natively without the scheduler if needed. The solution working properly and up to date without the need for a mainframe scheduler is crucial. We use the solution to manage a few complex operational workflows end-to-end across multiple technology stacks. Rocket Zena does a great job of simplifying our cross-platform processes through automation. The solution helps speed operations up and keeps them automated allowing us to focus on other priorities. The solution helps increase our completion rates by working overnight to meet our SLAs. Rocket Zena completes 30 percent of our workload outside of our standard work hours. Rocket Zena's cross-platform job scheduling helped us save around 40 percent of programming time by automating repetitive tasks. We use the solution to transfer our current files and keep up with our infrastructure on a few automated jobs, such as refreshing our database which happens overnight. The solution helped free up around 15 percent of our engineer's time to focus on more value-added work.

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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

"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."

"ActiveBatch can automate predictable, repeatable processes very well. There is no real trick to what ActiveBatch does. ActiveBatch does exactly what you would expect a scheduling piece of software to do. It does it in a timely manner and does it with very little outside interference and fanfare. It runs when it is supposed to, and I don't have to jump through a bunch of hoops to double check it."

"By implementing a sophisticated scheduling mechanism, the system allows for the precise triggering of jobs at user-selected frequencies, enabling a seamless and automated execution of tasks according to specified time intervals."

"It can connect to a number of third-party/legacy systems."

"One of the most valuable features of this solution is the versatility of the prebuilt jobs."

"Approximately ~20 hours of manual effort have been reduced to ~5 hours with the help of ActiveBatch."

"The Jobs Library has been a tremendous asset. For the most, that's what we use. There are some outliers, but we pretty much integrate those Jobs Library steps throughout the process, whether it's REST calls, FTP processes, or file copies and moves... That has helped us to build end-to-end workflows."

"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."

More ActiveBatch by Redwood pros

"Its FTP feature is very good, as is scheduling any process or task with the Zena client. I have found it to be very helpful. If a task fails, it gives you a prompt."

"In the latest upgrade, Zena added a web-based client. The more I use it, the more I like it. It's an excellent interface. They do a good job of steadily improving the solution to make it more useful."

"The most valuable feature is the FTP file transfer."

"From a Linux configuration point of view, Rocket Zena is straightforward. It's fairly easy to set up the server and agents once you know how to do it."

"I have found the scheduling feature the most valuable. I can map dependencies by using ASG-Zena. It gives a nice, quick visualization as to where things are."

"You can click Ctrl-G and bring a diagram view. You're able to view in a diagram format. The view that it provides is easy, and you can move to the left, up, or down. You can double-click on a certain process. It'll drill into that process and all of its underlying components. You can double-click on an arrow or a component, and it'll bring up a screen that'll have all the variables that are assigned to that particular piece, as well as the values at run time. So, the diagram feature of it, at least for me, is pretty valuable."

"I like the whole product, but specifically, I like the license part. It's very easy to acquire a license for this product."

"We haven't had any problems since we installed it. It runs as expected, we haven't had any critical problems. It helps keeps the business running 24/7."

Cons

"Except for the GUI, everything looks good."

"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."

"Between version 10 and version 12 there was a change. In version 10, they had each object in its own folder. But on the back end, they saw it at the root level. So when we moved over to version 12, everything was in the same area mixed together. It was incredibly difficult and we actually had to create our own folders and move those objects—like schedules, jobs, user accounts—and manually put those into folders, whereas the previous version already had it."

"There are very few documents that provide us with detailed information on the troubleshooting of errors that occur during integration with the existing environment."

"Providing some detailed training materials could be very helpful for new users who have very limited technical information about the tool."

"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."

"An area for improvement in ActiveBatch Workload Automation is its interface or GUI. It could be a little better. There isn't any additional feature I'd like to see in the tool, except for the GUI, everything looks good."

"ActiveBatch UI could use a little more help, and video tutorials would be greatly appreciated for user guides."

More ActiveBatch by Redwood cons

"In the next release, I would like the user experience to be improved. The user interface should be more appealing to gen-z."

"The documentation has room for improvement."

"In the web interface, it stacks the tasks across the top, and they accumulate until you close or clean those out. That seems a little cumbersome. You must right-click and close all tabs constantly to keep the console clean and manage your views."

"The UI is not intuitive, and it would be nice if there was a web interface."

"Rocket Zena is a mainframe-based job scheduler. I would like it to be more open so that we can use it on a distributed platform."

"The scheduling mapping is a little disjointed. There is no wizard-type approach. There are a lot of different things that you have to do in completely different areas. They could probably add the functionality for creating all components of a mapping or an OPA schedule. The component creation could be done collectively rather than through individual components."

"One area where it could be improved is communication between the different servers. Sometimes there are processes that have already been completed but we get a status notification that they're still active."

"Another one that is probably a little bit bigger for me is that when there is an issue or there's an error, it writes on a different screen. I have to find the actual process name and go to a different screen to view the alert that got generated. On that screen, everyone's processes, not just the processes of the folks in my department, are thrown. It takes me a while to find the actual error so that I could go in there and look at the alert. It could be because of the way it was set up, but at least for me, it isn't too intuitive."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Currently, we are paying approximately $7,000 yearly, which includes support."

"It allows for lower operational overhead."

"The price was fairly in line with other automation tools. I don't think it's exorbitantly expensive, relatively speaking."

"The pricing was fair. There are additional costs for the plugins. We have the standard licensing fees for different pieces, then we have the plugins which were add-ons. However, we expected that."

"If you compare ActiveBatch licensing to Control-M, you're looking at $50,000 as opposed to millions."

"I don't think we've ever had a problem with the pricing or licensing. Even the maintenance fees are very much in line. They are not excessive. I think for the support that you get, you get a good value for your money. It's the best value on the market."

"ActiveBatch is currently redesigning themselves. In the past, they were a low cost solution for automation. They had a nice tool that was very inexpensive. With their five-year plan, they will be more enhancement-driven, so they're trying to improve their software, customer service, and the way that their customers get information from them. In doing that, they're raising the price of their base system. They changed from one pricing model to another, which has caused some friction between ActiveBatch and us. We're working through that right now with them. That's one of the reasons why we're why we were evaluating other software packages."

"I like ActiveBatch Workload Automation's licensing model because they're not holding you down on an agentless model or agent model, where every server needs to have an agent. That's the main selling point of the solution and I hope they stay that way."

"The pricing and the licensing are good. It is affordable and can be used to improve and optimize productivity."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

28%

Insurance Company

12%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	10
Midsize Enterprise	13
Large Enterprise	46

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Large Enterprise	6

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about ActiveBatch Workload Automation?

Managing the workload and monitoring the tasks were very difficult with manual interventions. Now, by using ActiveBatch, the process is automated and it runs tasks on a scheduled basis.

See all answers

What needs improvement with ActiveBatch Workload Automation?

After upgrades we are facing a few issues and errors triggered, so focusing on this would be appreciated. Some of the advanced features in the user interface are a bit confusing even after referrin...

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What is your primary use case for ActiveBatch Workload Automation?

ActiveBatch helped us to streamline our IT workflows and improve overall efficiency. It is the most essential tool in our Infrastructure now. The best part of ActiceBatch is its user-friendly Inter...

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Do you have any tips for managing my company's modernization, without any disruptions?

Today, we will look at the legacy systems, the red flags that point at the system getting old and rusty, and the ways a reliable custom software. This guide: https://www.cleveroad.com/blog/legacy-s...

See all answers

Comparisons

Control-M vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 16% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 14% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 10% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 8% of the time

MOVEit vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 3% of the time

More ActiveBatch by Redwood Competitors

Control-M vs Rocket Zena

Compared 48% of the time

IBM Workload Automation vs Rocket Zena

Compared 17% of the time

Rocket Zeke vs Rocket Zena

Compared 13% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Rocket Zena

Compared 6% of the time

Automic Automation vs Rocket Zena

Compared 3% of the time

More Rocket Zena Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveBatch by Redwood

September 2025

Download ActiveBatch by Redwood product report

Buyer's Guide

Rocket Zena

September 2025

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Also Known As

ActiveBatch

ASG-Zena

Overview

ActiveBatch by Redwood enhances efficiency with features like job scheduling, integration, and real-time monitoring. It supports diverse platforms, automates tasks, and offers a single-pane view with robust security.

ActiveBatch streamlines automation by offering drag-and-drop functionality, pre-built job steps, and native integrations. Its customizable workflows and alert system aid in managing complex workloads like data processing and server monitoring across hybrid environments. While it effectively reduces manual errors and enhances productivity, areas like navigation and support for cloud platforms need enhancement. New users may face challenges due to its complexity and steep learning curve, and further improvements in reporting, mobile access, and training could provide additional support to users.

What important features does ActiveBatch offer?

Comprehensive Job Scheduling: Manages and automates complex workloads efficiently.
Integration Capabilities: Seamlessly connects with different platforms and applications.
Real-time Monitoring: Offers a single-pane view for quick issue identification.
Customizable Workflows: Tailors processes to specific organizational tasks.
Robust Alert System: Ensures timely notifications for critical events.
Data Protection: Incorporates strong security measures for secure operations.

What benefits should be considered when evaluating ActiveBatch?

Enhanced Efficiency: Automates repetitive tasks, reducing manual intervention.
Improved Productivity: Streamlines processes across hybrid environments.
Error Reduction: Decreases likelihood of manual errors.
Platform Support: Provides integration with diverse systems.

In finance, ActiveBatch is implemented for orchestrating batch processes and data management. The healthcare industry utilizes it for automating patient data updates and server monitoring, while the retail sector benefits from file transfers and inventory management automation.

ActiveBatch by Redwood

Rocket Zena offers scheduling and dependency mapping, intuitive interface, and containerized deployment. It simplifies workflow automation, enhancing efficiency across platforms.

Rocket Zena's strengths lie in its scheduling capabilities, graphical interface, and efficient deployment. It supports users in task management with cross-platform scheduling, streamlining repetitive tasks through automation. The web-based client facilitates process visualization and workflow management, while the notification system enhances task handling. Users can manage mainframe, Linux, and Windows environments while integrating with SAP and Oracle, ensuring comprehensive automation and efficient job execution.

What are the key features of Rocket Zena?

Scheduling and Dependency Mapping: Manages tasks efficiently with a graphical interface.
Containerized Deployment: Simplifies deployment and improves efficiency.
FTP Capabilities: Facilitates secure file transfers and backups.
Web-based Client and Whiteboard: Enhances process visualization and control.
Cross-Platform Scheduling: Automates repetitive tasks, reducing manual intervention.

What benefits and ROI should users expect?

Enhanced Efficiency: Automates complex tasks, freeing time for value-added work.
Improved Accuracy: Minimizes manual errors with reliable automation.
Streamlined Task Management: Simplifies workflow with intuitive notification systems.
Easy Integration: Supports SAP, Oracle, and other enterprise platforms.

In industries like finance and manufacturing, Rocket Zena plays a vital role in scheduling batch jobs and automating file transfers. It helps adapt task scheduling to business calendars and integrate with existing platforms, ensuring a smooth workflow that meets business objectives.

Rocket Software

Sample Customers

Informatica, D&H, ACES, PrimeSource, Sub-Zero Group, SThree, Lamar Advertising, Subway, Xcel Energy, Ignite Technologies, Whataburger, Jyske Bank, Omaha Children's Hospital

Fraternidad Muprespa

Buyer's Guide

ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Rocket Zena

September 2025

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