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AWS Step Functions vs Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

JAMS
Sponsored
Ranking in Workload Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Amazon Managed Workflows fo...
Ranking in Workload Automation
20th
Average Rating
6.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
AWS Step Functions
Ranking in Workload Automation
11th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of JAMS is 3.0%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow is 1.9%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Step Functions is 2.0%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
JAMS3.0%
AWS Step Functions2.0%
Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow1.9%
Other93.1%
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

LV
Principal Data Base And Infrastructure Engineer at a outsourcing company with 501-1,000 employees
Automation has replaced nightly monitoring and delivers reliable, unified job scheduling
We have really enjoyed working with JAMS in terms of notifications, alerts, and streamlining. There used to be a process with Automate, which is another product from Fortra, but even before that, the other division of the company that we were merging with had a tool that was built in-house called a file handler or file distributor. It was an in-house developed tool, but it was not as streamlined or as efficient as JAMS is. We literally had to have a dedicated nighttime person monitoring. Although we are 24/7, the divisions of the company that we were using JAMS for have been small scale. While we have automated it, we have streamlined it in such a way that notifications go out and alerts go out, but if there is anything, then we get paged and alerted, and if anything needs to happen at midnight, we can wake up. On the other hand, with the tool I mentioned, the file handler and distributor, we used to have a dedicated nighttime person that had to be sitting and monitoring it to see when a file arrived, whether it met the conditions, and then execute the next particular job. By using JAMS, we have gained a lot more efficiencies in terms of all of those to streamline it, and there is no necessary need for having an overnight engineer just keeping an eye on all of this.
IP
Business and Technology Strategy Lead at Cognix Inc
Operational workflows improve as we address needs but technical support costs affect resources
Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow is easy to use and offers great scalability. The more we include and extend our capabilities, we can easily scale up according to our needs. When we compare it to other tools in the market, such as Control-M and other technologies, Airflow offers a lot of flexibility. Using this tool minimizes costs and maximizes efficiency.
reviewer2706945 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Orchestration and integration simplify processes with seamless stability and reliability
I use the Visual Workflow Editor feature of AWS Step Functions. I mainly work through code and then improve it through the visual aspect. There are two ways to do orchestration: through code and through visual. My main task is to develop flows. I have only implemented AWS Step Functions with AWS services, not with any third-party tools. The integration between AWS Step Functions and other AWS services is excellent, working seamlessly with EventBridge, Glue jobs, and databases. I have not encountered any challenges with customers regarding AWS Step Functions that needed me to find a workaround. The pricing of AWS Step Functions is moderate and not particularly costly. AWS Step Functions is affordable for small, medium, and enterprise businesses as an orchestration tool. I have not used any documentation, manuals, or guides for AWS Step Functions as it's very simple to implement. When help is needed, I consult Stack Overflow or AI for commands. Overall rating for AWS Step Functions: 9 out of 10.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It makes everything that we want to do so much easier. We have had a number of instances in the past where we have had developers who have been working on a project, and even though we have had JAMS for all these years, they will create some SQL Server Agent job, or something like that, to run a task. When it is in code review and development is complete, the question always comes around, "Can JAMS do this?" The answer has always been, "Yes." Pretty much anything we have ever developed could be run by JAMS."
"JAMS has improved my organization by taking a myriad of manual processes and allowing us to automate them. It enables our folks to focus more on tasks that require their human intelligence and their creativity and less on just mundane tasks. It increases efficiency, accuracy, and consistency."
"By using JAMS, we have gained a lot more efficiencies in terms of all of those to streamline it, and there is no necessary need for having an overnight engineer just keeping an eye on all of this."
"Getting JAMS in place was a game changer for us back then."
"While I appreciate the other features, the agent stands out for its ease of installation and configuration for JAMS monitoring."
"The most valuable aspect of JAMS is its robustness."
"The fact that we no longer need to use Excel spreadsheets is huge."
"JAMS has positively impacted our organization by saving us time, reducing errors, and improving workflows."
"Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow is easy to use and offers great scalability; the more we include and extend our capabilities, we can easily scale up according to our needs."
"One of the product's main strengths is that it is well-suited for a DevOps pattern, allowing us to automate our CI/CD pipeline."
"It has enabled my organization to create workflows with a lot of different AWS services; it's a general solution that you can adapt to your own needs and is simple to use."
"AWS Step Functions acts as a high-level layer, allowing us to seamlessly integrate with microservices."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The solution is stable...The solution is easy to scale."
"The number of historical events is great."
"The integration capability is easy, whereas building state machines is tricky."
"The JSON app launched recently allows us to define data execution more easily."
"AWS Step Functions was stable, and there were no problems that I can recall."
 

Cons

"JAMS handles exceptions fairly well but there are some areas where it might improve a little bit. It has to do with being able to automatically handle exceptions, out-of-the-box, rather than having to code them."
"I would like a simple web interface that I could give to my team to go in and kill jobs or see why jobs died so that we don't have to drill down deeper into the application and know everything about it. It would be good to have a really clean web engine that would say here are the jobs running. We can then click to see the time running and whether any of them fails and other similar things. I know they have one, but it's not very simplistic."
"It does validations when you try to delete an object and if there are any dependencies in place, the deletion process will not proceed... there is no information provided as to what it was that caused the validation to fail... it's quite a tedious process to find which object is getting in the way."
"I'm not sure if they have fixed it in a newer version, but there is no global search in the version I have. If I have multiple sub-folders that are named for business units, like HR or IT, and I have to search for a job, I cannot search from the top. I have to go to the HR folder to search for a particular job, or to the IT folder."
"I would like to see the ability to interface with Microsoft group-managed service accounts, but they're still in the research phase. They need to ensure everything's legit and safe. The report designer and dashboards could also be improved. We're running 7.3, so I don't know if they have updated the reporting in 7.5, but I think the reports and dashboards could be better."
"The monitoring of the JAMS product and its performance is an area of concern for me."
"One thing that I know that the JAMS people said that they were working on that would be huge for us is a search capability so that you could search for tasks. It may be available in version 7 or in a future release of 7. I think that's on their roadmap. But right now, for us to do a search, we have to search through database queries."
"The ACL or access permission area needs to be improved. When it comes to defining and providing security permissions, it's a bit confusing if you are new to JAMS. JAMS needs to improve the features for security access or permissions."
"To be very honest, technical support from AWS is extremely expensive."
"The documentation provided is good."
"It is difficult to suggest improvements at the moment."
"There is room for improvement in terms of integration with other products. It would benefit from more integration with different applications or services."
"The solution's pricing could be cheaper. It is cheaper than Airflow."
"One area for improvement is the payload size. Currently, I sometimes have to save data as a file since I cannot pass it within Step Functions, necessitating caching in processes."
"If AWS Step Functions keeps adding more integrations, it would be even better."
"Increasing the payload size would be beneficial."
"The interface can sometimes feel limited, as we're unable to see what AWS is running behind the scenes."
"The pricing of the solution can be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is reasonably priced, and we don't have any add-ons."
"The pricing is very fair. We have seen very minimal to no price increases over the years. We are not banging down the door of support all the time either. I would imagine if we were a company that submitted a dozen support tickets a week for the last nine years, then it might be a little different because we would be eating up everybody's time. However, for what we get out of it, the pricing is extremely fair. Back when we were originally looking and brought in JAMS, we were looking at a couple of the other competitive products that were in this space, but the pricing from JAMS was far and away better than what the other competitors could offer for the same functionality."
"It's expensive, to be honest, but it does the job."
"It's certainly a lot cheaper than Tivoli and Control-M. In comparison to them, you get a lot more bang for your buck. You get pretty much the whole functionality and more, in some cases, when compared to Control-M, but at a fraction of the price."
"The product is reasonably priced, and we don't have any add-ons."
"This is a good product at a fair price."
"It was $10,000 for the first year. Then, there is a maintenance cost for licensing every year that we get billed $5,000 for every year."
"JAMS is relatively inexpensive, with additional costs only incurred for tags, other services, and optional support renewals."
"It is not an inexpensive solution but it is less expensive than other options."
"The solution is expensive."
"The solution's price is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
24%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Computer Software Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise20
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JAMS?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the pricing was acceptable. I have gone with JAMS licen...
What needs improvement with JAMS?
I am fine with what JAMS offers and have nothing to suggest for improvement. JAMS' code-driven automation is not wide...
What is your primary use case for JAMS?
My main use case for JAMS is scheduling, which is the primary usage. I am mainly using JAMS for scheduling various jo...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow?
I rate the product pricing a five. It is not an inexpensive solution but it is less expensive than other options like...
What needs improvement with Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow?
Customization in general depends on the use cases that we are trying to address, but I don't have a specific thing ri...
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow?
Custom Generalizations do not directly correlate with specific sections conventional to reviews. Less clarity on dire...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Step Functions?
My customer's usual use cases for AWS Step Functions that I've been working with include orchestration, flows, diagra...
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon Step Functions?
I use the Visual Workflow Editor feature of AWS Step Functions. I mainly work through code and then improve it throug...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Step Functions?
I am not familiar with the pricing as most of my projects have environments from the customer side, and the contract-...
 

Also Known As

No data available
No data available
Amazon Step Functions, Step Functions
 

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Teradata, Arconic, General Dynamics, Yum!, CVS Health, Comcast, Ghiradelli, & Boston’s Children’s Hospital
Information Not Available
Alpha Apps, The Guardian, SGK, Bigfinite
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Step Functions vs. Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.