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Automic Automation vs VisualCron 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
42
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Automic Automation
Ranking in Workload Automation
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
104
Ranking in other categories
Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (10th)
VisualCron
Ranking in Workload Automation
17th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Managed File Transfer (MFT) (15th), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of JAMS is 3.0%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Automic Automation is 5.8%, down from 7.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VisualCron is 1.8%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Automic Automation5.8%
JAMS3.0%
VisualCron1.8%
Other89.4%
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.
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.
Sourav-Dutta - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead - Database Administrator at SMART ENERGY SYSTEMS LLC
It's user-friendly, and I didn't need long to understand the process
We use VisualCron for all our automation needs, like connecting to FileZilla, calling APIs, generating PGP keys, creating encryption files with the PGP key login to Azure, etc. It can automatically log in to SQL Server and execute SQL script jobs in bulk. We had 2,000-3,000 users at my previous…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature for us is that it's DR-ready. With respect to disaster recovery, it has the built-in capability for failover to our DR site. If all of the required ports are open, it can be done seamlessly."
"Because we have gone from a lot of manual processes to automated processes with JAMS, we have been able to free up IT staff time, and for just the Technical Operations Center team that I manage, it has saved about 20 hours a week."
"I appreciate JAMS for its readily available templates that allow me to create and deliver stand-up presentations within minutes quickly."
"The product is easy to use."
"JAMS has helped save IT staff time by automating tasks previously performed with scripts, and its scheduling feature has been particularly useful."
"The most valuable feature is the easily accessible data in the database because we run a lot of SQL scripting against the database."
"JAMS has positively impacted our organization by saving us time, reducing errors, and improving workflows."
"The most valuable aspect of JAMS is its robustness."
"We do not have different automated silos. We have one view for our operators, which are doing things 24/7, and need just one interface, not multiple ones."
"We implemented the solution about 20 years ago when we switched from our legacy mainframe systems. We were looking for a scheduler to replace the one in our new SAP systems, as the SAP system scheduler wasn't considered robust enough. The solution was chosen to replace SAP scheduling at that time."
"Without automation, it would be nearly impossible to do all the jobs that we are doing."
"We have been looking for this type of product for many years."
"For us, it gives us what we need so it's a good value."
"It works to automate business processes over all the systems. You have a central point where you can automate everything."
"ONE Automation has centralized tools, it is really strong and really easy to use ONE Automation."
"With the automation, we are able to provide background services. It is very economical and not possible to do manually."
"It has improved our organization with more automation within the business departments and less administration and development in the IT department. Usually, as the IT department, we are the bottleneck for many requirements within the business. With this tool, the business departments are able to perform many task themselves."
"'ve only had a few cases where I've had to request support in the past 12 years of use, but the support response time and resolution were was extremely quick."
"VisualCron has enabled us to efficiently automate and maintain many tasks with minimal effort from our internal IT resources."
"VisualCron is a very powerful program to automate different steps in your business processes."
"What I like about VisualCron is that like its name, it's a very visual tool. In my previous company, there were a lot of scripts for all kinds of services, and through VisualCron, you get to group all flows and get a nice visual overview. VisualCron also has an alerting feature, so you receive alerts from it. VisualCron makes everything clearer and easier to maintain. Every other solution that I was looking for almost always needed a programmer, but with VisualCron, you can do what you need to do without programming skills, so this is another valuable feature of the tool."
"The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%."
"The most valuable feature of VisualCron is its ability to schedule interactive jobs so that you can have interdependencies within the job and interdependencies of a job on another job, and so on."
"What I found most beneficial from VisualCron is that you can directly connect it with different databases, user accounts, and credentials. You can run queries from one machine to another using the credentials, unlike PowerShell, that's run by the machine itself. With VisualCron, you can directly ask other machines and run requests through user credentials. Suppose you have an AWS or Azure environment. In that case, you can maintain the connection between on-premises and cloud-based machines, which is the type of setup in the organization I'm working for. You can directly call some of the services via VisualCron on your local on-premises machine, and I found that an excellent feature of the tool."
 

Cons

"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."
"For the most part, JAMS is very stable. Occasionally, if you leave multiple windows open over a period of time, it is necessary to end that task and restart."
"JAMS notifications for hung jobs could be improved."
"The solution is good, it's reliable. But sometimes the UI is not the most responsive I've ever used."
"There could be a better simulation for banning the termination. You have to simulate every one of the processes in order to have an idea for better planning. This kind of simulation is broken and needs improvement."
"All my machines at work are Macs. JAMS client is a Windows-based thing."
"For scalability, I would rate it as seven because when we have a huge volume, sometimes the tool is not so responsive."
"JAMS lacks source control features. Our previous solution had job control language, but JAMS doesn't. When migrating between versions, JAMS doesn't migrate all the data, like job change history, etc. Also, the scheduler doesn't have a way to make jobs invisible, so you can temporarily turn a job off if you decide not to run it today."
"The vendor support is really bad and should be improved."
"We have some problems with updates where some functions are changed, so you have to check your whole system to see if everything is still running."
"For the user interface of version 12.1, I cannot find a lot of utilities and objects from previous versions, making me change my habits. This is not good."
"The only thing that we would like improved is the FTP agent. It only supports SOCKS proxy, and we would like it to also support an HTTP proxy."
"I would like more training on workload automation, because I do not have a complete insight of the product yet."
"Integration with the cloud is an area for improvement. They have to make it somehow fit or usable for cloud use cases. Right now, it works great for our on-prem data center, but they have to come up with a very good reason why people should be using it in the cloud."
"The new UI feels unready. It makes your browsers crash."
"I should be able to grant a user access to execute a job without having to directly list every include, prompt set, output scan, script, login, etc. An inherited read for execution purposes would accomplish the same results without making the admin list every single object every time, as well as deny the user the ability to edit."
"An area for improvement in VisualCron is its cluttered interface."
"There are some conditions in the mail trigger, but you can only use them as an "AND" condition, not as an "OR" condition. This is an improvement that could be useful. For example, some people put "invoice" in the subject and others put "invoice" in the body. If I want to make a trigger for everybody whose sending invoices, I have to make two jobs for this now."
"I've mentioned before that it would be great to see a move away from SQLCE and XML configuration files."
"The documentation is a bit weak."
"Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way."
"The error timeout and info could be better. When making web request calls, it will time out sometimes and we won't get any useful info out of the error response."
"VisualCron is software, and you will experience performance degradation when you scale up. VisualCron takes too much memory or CPU power. We have to increase the hardware resources of a specific server or system."
"The only problem I face when I use the tool is that it doesn't contain much documentation or it doesn't have many video tutorials on its features."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Fortra's JAMS pricing structure has deteriorated significantly since its acquisition by Fortra."
"The product is reasonably priced, and we don't have any add-ons."
"The product is reasonably priced, and we don't have any add-ons."
"This is a good product at a fair price."
"All licensing models are a little overpriced, but JAMS offers a good value, especially given their support response times and ability to handle unforeseen issues like the SFTP transfers. I hope to find more use cases to get a better bang for our buck."
"JAMS is priced competitively compared to similar solutions and offers flexible licensing options to cater to user needs."
"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."
"JAMS is close to the lower end of the pricing models for enterprise scheduling solutions. They are much cheaper than Control-M, as well as some other products that I've used. I also don't know of another solution where you can actually get true, unlimited licensing, where you can have as many instances and as many agents as you want."
"Its price is way up there with BMC. It is a little bit on the expensive side."
"You do not need any humans to start jobs, so you can save a lot of money."
"The cost of the solution depends on the number of systems that are being orchestrated."
"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."
"Automatic is heavily integrated in our organization. The cost to change would be a huge factor for us, and we have not found any other product that is better out there."
"The solution seems expensive to me, but it does the job well."
"Automic Automation is costly."
"Pricing is competitive compared to other major vendors."
"ROI is one month."
"VisualCron is correctly priced because it wasn't very cheap, and it wasn't overly expensive, so the price for it was set correctly. When my previous company bought VisualCron, it was €800 per server per year. On a scale of one to five, I would rate the pricing for VisualCron a five because it was just right. The tool was affordable, and it has one of the most competitive pricing in the market."
"The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."
"ROI is 95 percent."
"We are fine with a rather cheap setup. Licensing with VisualCron is fair. You have a simple one-year licence in different sizes. There isn't a licensing jungle with hundreds of options and opt-ins."
"The price is a bit high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
24%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise67
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JAMS?
I believe the pricing and licensing were fair. I was not here when that process took place and do not know exactly, b...
What needs improvement with JAMS?
When it comes to improvements for JAMS, I think upgrading and migrating some of the current processes could benefit f...
What is your primary use case for JAMS?
Our main use case for JAMS is to automate our data pump backups for our PeopleSoft Oracle system, as well as run a my...
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...
What do you like most about VisualCron?
The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%.
What needs improvement with VisualCron?
The documentation is a bit weak. The tool must provide a better set of documentation.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Automic Dollar Universe
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Teradata, Arconic, General Dynamics, Yum!, CVS Health, Comcast, Ghiradelli, & Boston’s Children’s Hospital
ING, Adidas, 84.51, ESB
7 Eleven, ABB Sécheron SA, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Amazon Europe Core, Apple, Assa Abloy, Aston Martin, Banco Santander, BMW (Australia)
Find out what your peers are saying about Automic Automation vs. VisualCron and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.