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Automic Automation vs OpCon comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 29, 2026

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 Scheduler
Sponsored
Ranking in Workload Automation
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Automic Automation
Ranking in Workload Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
104
Ranking in other categories
Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (16th)
OpCon
Ranking in Workload Automation
14th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of JAMS Scheduler is 3.6%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Automic Automation is 4.5%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpCon is 2.7%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
JAMS Scheduler3.6%
Automic Automation4.5%
OpCon2.7%
Other89.2%
Workload Automation
 

Q&A Highlights

RM
Sr. Data Coordinator at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Aug 26, 2021
 

Featured Reviews

SP
Developer at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
Centralized scheduling has improved automation and reduces manual monitoring for complex workflows
The best features JAMS Scheduler offers are centralized job scheduling, dependency management, and monitoring. I also appreciate the alerts and retry options because they help us handle failures without constantly checking jobs manually. Centralized scheduling makes it easier to manage all our jobs from one place instead of maintaining multiple schedulers or scripts. Dependency management is especially useful for chaining workflows because JAMS Scheduler can automatically trigger the next job only when the required previous step completes successfully. Another useful feature is the monitoring and alerting. If a scheduled job fails or runs longer than expected, we can quickly identify it and take action, which is particularly helpful for production support and reducing manual monitoring. JAMS Scheduler has helped quite a bit with identifying common job failures, missed schedules, dependency issues, and execution errors. The alerts and job history make it easier to identify the failure point and take corrective action without manually checking every workflow. JAMS Scheduler's code-driven automation has been useful for handling more complex scheduling logic and workflows that go beyond simple time-based triggers. It is important for us because we can combine scripts, dependencies, conditions, and parameters to support different production scenarios without creating too much manual intervention.
Peter Grundler - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at Tricise
Helps to move away from manual tasks and offers wide platform support and web-based interface
Customers want to move away from manual monitoring and checking processes. Automating these processes helps in time-saving and reduces human error. When you automate business processes, it reduces mistakes. It eliminates the risk of manual errors such as typos. There is a 20% to 30% reduction in human error. It fulfills all the needs when it comes to visibility and control across various operating platforms. It is the perfect product for managing processes that span multiple operating platforms. Automic Automation has the widest platform support compared to other products, such as Control-M, Tivoli from IBM, or Stonebranch. It definitely helps with compliance processes. We have had a lot of customers for two years with a focus on compliance, and it works. They were successful. Due to the fact that our customers can automate a lot of things, it reduces operating costs. It is hard to give a number because the savings are different for each customer. If a customer never had any automation, there could be about 80% savings after implementing Automic Automation, whereas for a customer who already has automated tasks, the difference will be less by adding Automic Automation. They might see 5% to 10% more savings. Automic Automation helps improve our ability to meet SLAs. In the recent versions, SLA management has been integrated, which previously was an external component. Because a lot of customers used it and asked Broadcom to implement SLA management into the workload engine, Broadcom included it. We see more and more customers running their SLA management via the Automic Automation product.
Jose Rivera Hernandez - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior VP of Technology at Triangle Credit Union
Helps automate all kinds of jobs and it's worth the price because it saves a lot of time and money
One problem that I had with them when we got SMA Technologies is that sometimes the jobs fail, but they automatically restart. SMA Technologies automatically gets a notification that the job has failed, and they restart it on their end, so now, we have the job restarting twice. There were times when we came into the office in the morning, and we had two files because the job ran twice. I do not know if the system can prevent a job from running the second time. If a job has run successfully, or it is running, it should not run again.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"JAMS has improved our productivity immensely because everything flows. I don't think we could operate at our current staffing levels without it."
"We can see all the batch execution status within the tool itself, which saves money, time, and cost, allowing us to handle everything in one single tool."
"Saving five to six hours of our working time weekly is significant because it reduces the need for manual scheduling, which is vital for our job and routine checks, helping my team focus more on their other operational responsibilities and making our workflow more organized."
"The feature or capability to import a job is most valuable. We can import an existing job from different platforms, and all the configurations get migrated as well without modifying the code, job schedule, etc."
"We looked at other companies, like VisualCron, that were cheaper, but one of the main sticking points was the fact that they wouldn't have provided a central location for us to monitor across all servers. That was one of the biggest selling points of JAMS."
"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."
"JAMS has helped save IT staff time by automating tasks previously performed with scripts, and its scheduling feature has been particularly useful."
"We also use the solution’s Interactive Agents. If we need to push something to our dealer portal, we can just drop a file in a folder and it goes. Running interactive tasks helps me users focus on business processes since I don’t have to take care of running the jobs manually."
"It is technology agnostic. It works with all the different legacy solutions we have and it allows us to look at things in one location, as opposed to going to a lot of different places."
"We can perform across platform automation with a product, and we are not bound to one architecture or system."
"This solution saves our organization time, in terms of management, is more systematic, gives us more control, and is easy to learn."
"You gain a lot of time and effort because you can automatize many things, as repetitive tasks cost us, so we can reduce them to zero effort and minimal costs by using the product."
"The two main things about it are its versatility and stability."
"We have been looking for this type of product for many years."
"We automate very manual, robust tasks, which are very time consuming and not error-free."
"If you would have to start all your jobs manually, it would cost you a lot of time and money."
"OpCon is relatively stable once running."
"OpCon makes my job so much easier."
"We have definitely seen a return on our investment with OpCon, as we have doubled our client base without needing to increase our workforce and are able to take on additional projects while our operators focus on monitoring and other valuable work."
"We particularly like the fact that it's graphical because it is Windows-based. Before, we were text-based on the mainframe. You can also produce flow charts. Because it's point-and-click, its ease of use is very nice."
"MAS is by far the best feature, although not a feature of the software specifically. MAS has more knowledge than our employees, so we have been able to develop schedules that are far beyond our own skillset."
"It allows us to have more information and more control than we previously had over the processes that are running in host systems."
"For us, the most valuable feature of the solution is the file transfer piece and being able to automate the moving of files around between our various vendors. It reduces the time involved versus somebody having to individually move the files around."
"The ability to chain jobs together allows us to create complex interdependencies between our jobs, and the integration into our core system is important because it allows us, through an automated system, to do a huge number of things that used to be done manually."
 

Cons

"JAMS has built-in reporting. I've never really used it. I tried using it a few years ago and I couldn't figure it out. It was wonky. It could be improved upon."
"The monitoring of the JAMS product and its performance is an area of concern for me."
"The biggest area with room for improvement is the area that my organization benefits the most from using JAMS, and that is in custom execution methods. I happen to have a very good C# developer. Ever since we got JAMS, he has spent a lot of time talking to JAMS developers, researching the JAMS libraries, and creating custom execution methods. He's gotten very good at it. He is now able to create them and maintain them very easily, but that knowledge was hard-won knowledge. It was difficult to come by, and if I should ever lose this developer, then I would be hard-pressed to find anyone who could create JAMS custom execution methods quite as well as he can since there really isn't all that much help, such as documentation or information, available on how to create custom execution methods."
"It is important to receive notifications if a charged job fails and SQL is halted. JAMS does not provide halted notifications by default, which is a critical feature that needs to be added."
"The product does not allow the users to cut and paste the job names from the screen."
"I take off a star because of a particular job that I have scheduled for every Monday at 6:00 AM. The setting was unintuitive when it said 'workdays' because it turns out that twice this year it didn't run because Monday was a holiday."
"Improvements could be made in the service desk's knowledge and communication skills among engineers to better address customer needs and ensure issues are fully resolved."
"One area for improvement would be making the user interface more intuitive, especially for new users working with complex job dependencies."
"Every time we have the same mistakes from one version to the next version. It is terrible."
"The new user interface AWI could improve. It is quite easy to use and work around, but it has lost some of the functionality that we used to have in our Vim client user interface."
"With every new version, things that would previously work, Automic breaks them."
"The direction in which the UI is going is concerning to me. It does not offer the security context we would need to implement future versions. While I see benefit in the Web UI, the security it would lack in separating a user's experience from an administrator's experience is an issue for us. MFA functionality is required since we're dealing with connectivity to the POS and for PCI/SOX compliance."
"From my point of view, the current product needs more stability."
"In case we run into performance issues, it is sometimes hard to find out what is the real cause for it."
"The stability is not as good as it was in former years. Stability has gone down from version to version, but it is probably due to the product's complexity and transitions in the company."
"My biggest complaint is that there is no list price."
"The learning curve could be shorter. The problem is that it's difficult to simplify a product without taking away functionality. I would love to see OpCon become a little easier to grasp. However, my concern is that making things easier isn't always better for the product. If they can keep the integrity of the product while making it easier to learn, that would be an area of improvement."
"We sometimes have a large number of jobs on the SQL Server and we can experience a very light lag in job starts. The lag can be a few seconds. It's never more than one minute, but sometimes we can experience some lags."
"I don't really think anything needs to be improved within the functionality. The only struggle I had, when I first started using it, is that it depends a lot on the command line and I didn't have that experience. So more built-in, basic commands or more education on commands would be good."
"It is a pricey solution. Comparatively speaking, you can certainly find schedulers which are cheaper."
"I wouldn't call it the easiest to automate. It has to be learned, training is required, then you get better at it over time."
"More functionality within self-service would be greatly appreciated."
"Of course they have a RESTful API within OpCon, but they have that new web services agent that we installed because we have some SOAP APIs and we had to interact with SMA to get things running. Our developers did do some tweaks, but we have now been able to get some test jobs running, and understand how the workflow goes back and forth."
"Expect price hikes and threats when you hold them to account at every opportunity."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"JAMS is relatively inexpensive, with additional costs only incurred for tags, other services, and optional support renewals."
"There are no additional costs other than the license for Fortra's JAMS which is affordable."
"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."
"This is a good product at a fair price."
"The pricing of JAMS has not been an issue for us, as it has allowed us to save time."
"The product is reasonably priced, and we don't have any add-ons."
"JAMS is priced competitively compared to similar solutions and offers flexible licensing options to cater to user needs."
"The licensing model for JAMS is straightforward and based on the number of agents, not the number of jobs you run. It's cheap and fairly simple."
"The solution seems expensive to me, but it does the job well."
"Pricing is competitive compared to other major vendors."
"This is a support system for us, not our core business, so we purchased this product inexpensively."
"They have changed the pricing on their licensing, and it's cheaper than before."
"The cost of arrays is high. If you want to buy an array for an application, and see value from it, you need about half a million dollars. That is too expensive."
"We came to a very good deal, but it took us three years to finalize."
"There are a lot of new features, but we do not use them because they are too expensive. The price point could be less."
"They have increased the license price a little bit. It is more than what we expected about two years ago. So, there could be some surprises when it comes to pricing."
"Yearly, it's around $30,000."
"The cost is based on the number of jobs. You pay for what you use. For us, the support cost is between €20,000 and €30,000 per year. It's too expensive."
"The cost is just shy of $20,000. That's for two licenses annually, production, and failover. It is a pricey solution. Comparatively speaking, you can certainly find schedulers which are cheaper. In some cases, you can find ones that are free or use free solutions. However, OpCon is by far the superior quality product, and you pay for that. This also has a cost savings associated with an FTE, so you can more than outweigh the cost of the solution if you were to reduce the staff that you have onsite. Plus, this means that you don't need to have someone during irregular hours."
"I have seen some contracts, and it seems that Control-M is a lot more expensive than OpCon, but I do not know the pricing of OpCon. Control-M seems to be four or five times more expensive than OpCon."
"Our licensing is on a yearly basis."
"On a yearly basis our cost is between $25,000 and $30,000."
"While the overall cost is reasonable, I'm interested in exploring options for making the managed automation solution, specifically the mass solution, more cost-effective."
"SMA is big on free training. They do monthly training down at their headquarter office. As long as you own the product, the only thing you pay for is your employees' travel expenses. The training is free. They are willing to train people and give them the knowledge. That way, you are equipped to do what you need to do."
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Answers from the Community

RM
Sr. Data Coordinator at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Aug 26, 2021
Aug 26, 2021
@PhilippeLLORET, All worked out fine in the end. We had demos for all three products, and it was decided that Automic Workload Manager was the best option for our needs. The vendor is now able to provide some support for the Automic Workload Automation product.
2 out of 6 answers
AJ
Owner at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Jul 20, 2020
I am sorry because cannot help you. We have no experience with Appworx Application Manager.
Rony_Sklar - PeerSpot reviewer
Community Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Jul 20, 2020
@NickWilcox you recently reviewed OpCon - would you be willing to share your experiences with @Rick Murray to help him with his decision? @reviewer1166826 maybe you can give some insight into the pros and cons of AppWorx?
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Construction Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise30
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise67
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise29
Large Enterprise19
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JAMS?
My experience with pricing for JAMS Scheduler was good. The pricing was reasonable, and the vendor only charged us fo...
What needs improvement with JAMS?
JAMS Scheduler can be improved by sectioning off credentials and also the web functionality and setting that up.
What is your primary use case for JAMS?
My main use case for JAMS Scheduler is to trigger integrations as well as send out alerts and reports. For sending al...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Automic Workload Automation?
The pricing was client-wise, but they are changing it to execution-wise pricing. So, we are in negotiation.
What needs improvement with Automic Workload Automation?
Automic Automation has some disadvantages; it is more simplified, and sometimes it can be complicated. The technical ...
What is your primary use case for Automic Workload Automation?
I have been dealing with Automic Automation for probably around ten years. I have been both a partner with Automic, w...
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Also Known As

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Automic Dollar Universe
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Teradata, Arconic, General Dynamics, Yum!, CVS Health, Comcast, Ghiradelli, & Boston’s Children’s Hospital
ING, Adidas, 84.51, ESB
LOHR, Carnival Cruise Lines, Herbalife, Digital Federal Credit Union, Synergent, Frandsen Bank & Trust
Find out what your peers are saying about Automic Automation vs. OpCon and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.