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AutoSys Workload Automation vs BigFix 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 Scheduler
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
Workload Automation (3rd)
AutoSys Workload Automation
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
84
Ranking in other categories
Workload Automation (5th)
BigFix
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
100
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (9th), Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (23rd), Patch Management (8th), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (11th), Autonomous Endpoint Management (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Workload Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
AutoSys Workload Automation6.4%
Control-M10.3%
Automic Automation4.8%
Other78.5%
Workload Automation
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
BigFix1.8%
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint6.5%
CrowdStrike Falcon5.7%
Other86.0%
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
 

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.
PK
Assistant VP at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Experience significant automation with robust integration and user-friendly interfaces
There are areas of AutoSys Workload Automation that have room for improvement. They are implementing good enhancements in the R24 release. The web UI needs some improvement. Cloud integrations are limited to 25 or 30 configurable plugins and integrations to the cloud. They can improve in that area. They have separate tools, not AutoSys Workload Automation, such as Atomic and other SaaS-based solutions that can run inside the cloud. AutoSys Workload Automation can be configured in the cloud, but it requires a substantial number of VMs depending on the load. For on-premises deployment, it is a very good solution. They need to increase their footprint in the cloud and improve the web UI. They are making excellent progress in the R24 release.
InderjeetSingh4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
End-to-end automation has simplified patching and software deployment across thousands of servers
There is one feature in BigFix called the automation patch policy that requires enhancement. When an action is initiated through the patch policy, it appears on the console but arrives in chunks. When targeting hundreds of servers from the patch policy, the actions come in chunks such as ten out of six, ten out of nine, or ten out of fifteen. This fragmented approach creates a significant challenge for the patching team to monitor the action status. I would recommend that the development team provide a single action or one to two actions instead of multiple actions requiring individual monitoring. A broad status update could be provided to the client indicating the overall progress of the patch policy implementation rather than requiring monitoring of every individual action. This would reduce the bandwidth required by the team to track multiple actions on the console.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like how you can add new execution methods on the fly. It isn't overly complex to add Python script support to an execution method in the JAMS system. The scheduling is excellent. You can schedule a maintenance window and take that resource unit out of everything. It halts all of the jobs."
"JAMS has improved our productivity immensely because everything flows. I don't think we could operate at our current staffing levels without it."
"The user-friendly and adaptable scheduler allows us to manage various scheduling scenarios."
"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."
"The planning capabilities are most valuable."
"We have over 50 jobs running daily to manage all the integration of our systems and we don’t have to monitor these jobs; they just run, JAMS centralizes the management of jobs in our environment, has streamlined our monitoring, saves us about four hours a week in troubleshooting time, and has helped free up about eight hours a week of IT staff time."
"It's worth its weight in gold and we cannot get rid of it now."
"It has definitely drastically improved our capabilities to scale our automation. Before JAMS, there were a lot of manual processes. We had a couple of operators who spent all day doing that. A lot of the time with human intervention and human processes, it is as good as the person who may be following a procedure and human error is a big problem."
"It is very valuable for us when we are trying to arrange or orchestrate jobs into a system. It is helpful for triggering jobs for a scheduled task."
"CA ESP is a solid product and very easy to use."
"Easy configuration and integration with SAP."
"We have not encountered any stability issues with the supported versions."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the functions are easy to use."
"The really nice thing is that, as the business grows, we're not seeing the infrastructure grow."
"The most valuable feature of AutoSys Workload Automation is batch processing."
"The best features in AutoSys Workload Automation are its scalability and robustness; it can process a significant amount of jobs within a short period without delays when supported by powerful infrastructure and can communicate with endless agents and scan all 10,000 agent machines within minutes, updating agent statuses in the database quickly."
"The solution has many useful features; its main advantage is simplicity—you can do everything from one console, regardless of the task, and it supports many operating systems and is scalable to up to 250,000 clients."
"The BigFix features that have proven most effective include inventory, software delivery, software distribution, software catalog, and both software and hardware management."
"I recommend BigFix to others."
"Switching to BigFix has alleviated that to a great degree and is now allowing our company to think ahead about how we can incorporate other pieces of BigFix that other solutions don't have integrated natively, so we can get five or six product sets out of BigFix as opposed to just a single product set on a solution that didn't even work to begin with."
"The use of fast query has been extremely valuable providing insight in real time of the endpoints."
"It's easy to use, not complicated."
"The patch management and the BigFix Inventory have been the most valuable features."
"DOWNLOADING-PATCHES; It has also helped to reduce network traffic when it comes to downloading patches. By only having to download the patch once to the central location and then utilizing the relay structure to then download the patch to a specific site and then everything gathering at local, it greatly reduces the bandwidth of multiple endpoints."
 

Cons

"Fortra is getting much better with documentation and examples, but there is still room for improvement."
"The monitoring of the JAMS product and its performance is an area of concern for me."
"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."
"To improve JAMS, it should resolve the issues with the JD Edwards application and the need for the SSH agent in the current version, which has been a problem for a while."
"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."
"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."
"For scalability, I would rate it as seven because when we have a huge volume, sometimes the tool is not so responsive."
"When looking at a folder in JAMS with many jobs, it would be good to have better information in the list display of what's inside those jobs. We get some information, but other important details are missing."
"Deploying those solutions and integrating with them was a little challenge at this point of time."
"To make it a lot more user-friendly, in order to make it so other people can use it without having to do much training with it; the more user-friendly it is, the easier it is to work with."
"I'd like to see automation pushed even further, giving us greater looks into other systems."
"With requirements, they have "always" and "skip" on them. That would be nice, for them to have it on triggers also."
"They could do better supporting it. They have too many of the same type of products, so sometimes it doesn't get as much attention as it should."
"There should be easier migrations from a different bus scheduler."
"I've used this product for a long time, but the GUI to me feels outdated."
"When we started the new product and we introduced it, we started getting some new alarm types and the agent went offline."
"Dynamic messaging needs improvement because one of the things that we deal with a lot is the messaging when pushing releases out."
"It can be improved speed-wise. They can make it a little bit light. If you do any query for servers in bulk, it can take some time. Similarly, creating a job can take some time."
"The scalability of the web UI product doesn't scale to the size that we need for our implementation so it needs to expand."
"Implementing a business solution with BigFix has some issues, primarily concerning the time required for distribution to clients if there are too many."
"I would like to see the Self Service section made more user-friendly."
"It's not perfect, but it's close."
"Needs to improve Network Access Protection (NAP) technologies to prevent computers with vulnerabilities from gaining access to networks."
"The product lacks AI, ML, and IIT."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."
"In the end, you'll find that it's really worth the price. There is some sticker shock, but it's worth every dime."
"Fortra's JAMS pricing structure has deteriorated significantly since its acquisition by Fortra."
"JAMS is priced competitively compared to similar solutions and offers flexible licensing options to cater to user needs."
"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."
"Definitely check how many single processes you want to run and count them as jobs. That is how you would work out your pricing on JAMS. For example, if you're running a number of commands and you can put them all into one script and run that script, you can count that as one job."
"Validate how many agents you need beforehand."
"There is an annual license to use AutoSys Workload Automation."
"The price of this solution is reasonable and there is an annual license required."
"The return on investment would be very high because doing things manually without this product would be extremely expensive."
"The pricing needs to be improved. Some of my client's complained that it was too expensive."
"We paid to use the solution monthly."
"People need to pay attention to how they use their ESP agents on the distributed platform. That's where some of the cost comes in, based on how many you need or how many you use."
"It is overpriced."
"There's not much big cost. We only have to pay the agents' cost for the server, and for the systems."
"We have a subscription-based contract with BigFix."
"The price of BigFix is better than the solutions. You are able to pay monthly or annually. There are not any hidden costs with BigFix. There is an additional cost for the SQL database."
"Its price is very reasonable."
"When purchasing, buying with other IBM tools provided us with a very good discount in pricing."
"The product is less costly when compared to other solutions, and this is a good solid solution for what we have paid."
"You get what we call the Platform Edition, which you get for free. The patch service is maybe $0.50 per workstation per month. Then there's the basic server cost, which is about $1.50 per server per month. You also get into Lifecycle which does power management, OSD remote control, and those types of things, and that might be about 10 times the price - which works out to about $13 per server and, maybe $5 per workstation per month."
"You are charged per server and per workstation when using BigFix. ManageEngine is a lot cheaper than BigFix. There are some additional costs, such as support."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Construction Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
33%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise23
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise79
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise68
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JAMS?
I was not really involved in the pricing, setup cost, and licensing at that level. I am more involved in the technica...
What needs improvement with JAMS?
In terms of improvements, I believe JAMS can enhance its user interface for better user experiences. I would like to ...
What is your primary use case for JAMS?
My primary use case for JAMS is enterprise workload automation and batch job orchestration. I use it to schedule and ...
How does Control-M compare with AutoSys Workload Automation?
Control-M acts as a single, centralized interface for monitoring and managing all batch processes, which is helpful b...
What needs improvement with AutoSys Workload Automation?
There are areas of AutoSys Workload Automation that have room for improvement. They are implementing good enhancement...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BigFix?
I rate the price for BigFix as medium, neither low nor high.
What needs improvement with BigFix?
There is one feature in BigFix called the automation patch policy that requires enhancement. When an action is initia...
What is your primary use case for BigFix?
My current use case involves being one of the products and one of the clients implementing this tool.
 

Also Known As

No data available
CA Workload Automation, CA Workload Automation AE
Tivoli Endpoint Manager
 

Interactive Demo

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Teradata, Arconic, General Dynamics, Yum!, CVS Health, Comcast, Ghiradelli, & Boston’s Children’s Hospital
Gaumont, Mercantil do Brasil, CCEE, Hanwha Life
US Foods, Penn State, St Vincent's Health US Foods, Sabadell Bank, SunTrust, Australia Sydney, Stemac, Capgemini, WNS Global Services, Jebsen & Jessen, CenterBeam, Strauss, Christian Hospital Centre, Brit Insurance, Career Education Corporation
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC, Broadcom, JAMS Software and others in Workload Automation. Updated: August 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.