ActiveBatch by Redwood vs Tidal by Redwood comparison

ActiveBatch by Redwood and Tidal Software by Redwood are both solutions in the Workload Automation category. ActiveBatch by Redwood is ranked #9 with an average rating of 9.4, while Tidal Software by Redwood is ranked #11 with an average rating of 9.2. ActiveBatch by Redwood holds a 2.8% mindshare in WA, compared to Tidal Software by Redwood’s 4.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of ActiveBatch by Redwood users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Tidal Software by Redwood users who would recommend it.

ActiveBatch by Redwood

Read 35 ActiveBatch by Redwood reviews

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1,633 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Tidal by Redwood

Read 37 Tidal by Redwood reviews

2,380 Views
2,356 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

ActiveBatch by Redwood

Tidal by Redwood

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 2025

Tidal by Redwood and ActiveBatch by Redwood compete in the realm of automation solutions. Tidal stands out for scheduling precision and customization, while ActiveBatch gains the upper hand in user-friendliness and integration capabilities.

Features: Tidal Workload Automation excels with advanced calendaring, job dependencies, and resource allocation customization, enhancing productivity. It supports multi-platform scheduling and integration with various systems. ActiveBatch is known for its extensive library of pre-built job steps, drag-and-drop functionality, and strong cross-platform integration, streamlining workflow automation.

Room for Improvement: Tidal faces challenges with its transporter tool for job transfers and has a steep learning curve, needing better reporting tools. It could enhance its cloud integration and monitoring capabilities. ActiveBatch has complexity in job search functionalities and could improve its user interface to be more beginner-friendly. Both tools would benefit from cloud integration and user experience improvements.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tidal is primarily deployed on-premises but offers hybrid and private cloud capabilities. Its customer service has improved after transitioning from Cisco to STA. ActiveBatch supports on-premises and cloud environments with reliable customer support, though there is room for enhancing responsiveness and clarity.

Pricing and ROI: Tidal offers flexible licensing models suitable for various organizations, perceived as cost-effective with enterprise agreements. It shows significant ROI in productivity gains and cost management. ActiveBatch also provides competitive pricing and flexible options, but recent changes to subscription models have caused some concerns. Its ROI is notable in complex job scheduling and task automation.

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

Buyer's Guide

ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Tidal by Redwood

July 2025

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Helped 865,295 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

9th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Process Automation (9th), Managed File Transfer (MFT) (10th)

Tidal by Redwood

Ranking in Workload Automation

11th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 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 Tidal by Redwood is 4.6%, up from 3.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

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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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

"It is very useful in sending confidential files through FPP servers."

"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."

"For developers, it is easy to orchestrate the workflows and the integration has been very easy."

"Using this tool, if there are any huge failures, we immediately get an email notification, and the proper team will be informed, at which time they can act accordingly."

"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."

"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."

"We leverage the solution's native integrations regularly. We have to get files from a remote server outside the organization, and even send things outside the organization. We use a lot of its file manipulation and SFTP functionality for contacting remote servers."

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

More ActiveBatch by Redwood pros

"Tidal Workload Automation Software provides the ability to quickly adapt to changing business requirements."

"Tidal Automation’s most valuable feature is customization. It can work and connect with any app."

"Especially in the newer versions of Tidal, the segmentation of user permissions enables us to give people operator permissions for their jobs, to rerun jobs, but view-only for other groups' jobs. We're able to keep people from hurting themselves or other groups accidentally. The permissioning is really good."

"It is intended to enable large-scale automation environments, making it appropriate for companies with complicated processes and big data volumes."

"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."

"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."

"The versatility of being able to run on many different types of servers is valuable. There is also a versatility of different services that you could run jobs on. It's highly versatile. You can run a lot of different types of scripts on a lot of different types of servers. It interfaces with all of them."

"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."

More Tidal by Redwood pros

Cons

"Some of the advanced features in the user interface are a bit confusing even after referring to the documents."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"The reporting needs improvement. There is a real need for the ability to generate audit reports on the fly. It needs to be a lot easier than what I can do right now. This is a major item for me."

"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."

More ActiveBatch by Redwood cons

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

"Tidal Software interface could be more intuitive and user-friendly."

"I don't know if Tidal wants to get into the business of monitoring long-running jobs, but that could be a feature for the future: a job launching and monitoring tool. Using Tidal for monitoring doesn't seem like a good fit, but if they could offer something that did that as an add-on or include it, it might be helpful."

"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."

"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."

"The solution needs more advanced reporting and data visualization capabilities to enable deeper analysis of job performance and trends."

"The job failure alerts can be updated with more details for better troubleshooting."

"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."

More Tidal by Redwood cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It allows for lower operational overhead."

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

"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."

"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 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."

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

"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."

"I have had no issues with the licensing."

"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."

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

"The licensing model's flexibility is awesome. The way it's licensed for us is that it's licensed per master and then per agent. We have an enterprise agreement, so we have unlimited agents, and we have it on 500 devices."

"Our annual maintenance cost is competitive for what we have and what they do."

"Our yearly licensing costs are between $10,000 to $20,000. They have always been reasonable with us. I like that non-production licensing is about half the cost of production licensing. Licensing is by adapter typically. We have had scenarios where we have had to take an adapter from one environment to another, and they've allowed us to do that. They have made it a very reasonable process. There's definitely a feeling that they will work with you."

"Their pricing seems very fair. It is more than the other solutions, but the functionality and the support are very much there. You pay for the job scheduler, and then they have certain things that are built into it, such as the FTP processes. If you then want to do JD Edwards jobs, you need an adapter. If you want to do SQL jobs, there is another adapter. Similarly, if you want to do Oracle jobs, there is an adapter. It is like there is the base and then there are the adapters for the jobs that you want to do, but it seems that's also how they pay for each of those adapters and keep them up to date."

"Our licensing model for Tidal is on an annual basis. It is very good and works well for us. Tidal's licensing is very transparent and simple. It lets you know, for the amount you use, that's the price that you pay. So, we buy X number of licenses, and we know that this is where we are. I'm very happy with that. I saw the licensing modules on other platforms, and I didn't like them. Other companies and solutions would calculate the connections, adapters, and instances. I think that's the reason that BMC was pretty expensive: They just didn't understand what our needs are."

More Tidal by Redwood pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ActiveBatch Workload Automation?

I'd advise users to start by knowing what the actual requirement is and thoroughly assess the automation needs. New users should take advantage of the demos and trial versions so they get an idea o...

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...

See all answers

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 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 9% of the time

GoAnywhere MFT vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 6% of the time

More ActiveBatch by Redwood Competitors

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 31% of the time

Control-M vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 20% of the time

Automic Automation vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 9% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 9% of the time

Astro by Astronomer vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 4% of the time

More Tidal by Redwood Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveBatch by Redwood

August 2025

Download ActiveBatch by Redwood product report

Buyer's Guide

Tidal by Redwood

July 2025

Download Tidal by Redwood product report

Also Known As

ActiveBatch

Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler

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

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

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

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Buyer's Guide

ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Tidal by Redwood

July 2025

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