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AutoSys Workload Automation vs Tidal by Redwood comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 2025

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

AutoSys Workload Automation
Ranking in Workload Automation
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
82
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Tidal by Redwood
Ranking in Workload Automation
12th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of AutoSys Workload Automation is 11.0%, down from 17.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tidal by Redwood is 4.2%, up from 3.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Antony Askew - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps us manage complex workloads, reduce our workload failure rates, and save us time
The visibility and control features are somewhat limited. This is a recognized weakness, but thee vendor is currently revamping the user interface to address it. While the current UI is a bit outdated, it's undergoing improvement. AutoSys Workload Automation has some areas for improvement, particularly in housekeeping and product maintenance. These tasks are currently quite manual and labor-intensive for our team. Additionally, the reporting and forecasting functionalities could be more robust. One area for improvement with AutoSys Workload Automation is that it comprises several distinct tools configured to work together. This necessitates familiarity with multiple tools for effective solution management. Consequently, it can sometimes lack a sense of cohesiveness as a unified solution.
Steve Mikula - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The web UI is beneficial and the granular security policies allow us to cover all of our audit requirements."
"The scheduling feature allows us to know when jobs are going to run and makes sure they run in the order needed."
"We use technical support all the time. We would be lost without them. They're fantastic. Really good job. We're able to reach the right person to help us out right away."
"This solution enables us to improve our daily processing times. We can do everything faster than before we used this solution."
"​It scales very well. We can add jobs and remove jobs. We do not have problems maintaining the product across multiple environments and multiple servers.​"
"Inherit Dependencies feature reduces scheduling errors for holiday processing."
"The actual scheduling of our jobs has helped us tremendously. Before it was all done manually, and we've totally automated the whole functionality, so there's no longer a case where somebody didn't run something."
"The most valuable features of AutoSys Workload Automation are the file transfer protocol and file watcher. The solution has a user-friendly user interface. It is very simple to use. You have a scope of all your jobs, jobs are what you call tasks that you will automate in the solution. It lets you monitor everything in these jobs."
"With other tools, you do not have the ability to schedule jobs on their own. You need to create a group and then assign everything to that group. Only then will the job be able to execute. In Tidal, you can schedule a single job and there is no need to create a group. That's what I like the most."
"The job dependency is something that you cannot have in a regular, simple cron job or simple scheduler dependency. The event-driven jobs are core for us, as we really need that. Therefore, we really need Tidal with its ability to run thousands of jobs per day."
"It's the most efficient tool in doing repetitive tasks and saves a lot of time with minimum possibility of error."
"We use the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads. That's the biggest use for us and that's the biggest advantage."
"We had a number of different schedulers in this organization and we've been porting everything that was running out of these other, unrelated schedulers into this scheduler. That has afforded us the ability to set up direct dependencies between processes that couldn't talk to one another before. Over the 15 years, we've definitely gained a lot from that. What had been manual controls have become automated controls..."
"With the varied features in the varied adapters provided, we use Tidal Enterprise Scheduler because we want everything to be scheduled in one place. Tidal provides that for us with its tools and varying platforms in our organization. Tidal provides all the connectors to the platforms. This is very useful because we don't want to look for another scheduler for scheduling certain jobs. We don't want to look at those schedules manually between platforms."
"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."
"Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution."
 

Cons

"CA Workload Automation is not part of CA's strategic vision going forward."
"There is a difference between a web interface and the thick client interface. We particularly like a thick client interface, and it has gone away."
"Some support issues need to be addressed, but not through email, through personal contact via phone or WebEx."
"Documentation and cross-application externals could be improved."
"Quick search feature and job analysis could be improved."
"We see improvement possibilities in the processing provision of predefined evaluations or individual objects, or in the Self Service portal, which can be used by any user to monitor objects or start objects."
"​CA installation processes are never anything but complex.​"
"The WCC could be improved."
"I'm still hoping with Explorer to be able to see end-to-end job streams. That's not really something that's easy to see today in the web client. However, I haven't worked with Explorer yet. One of the things that we have found frustrating is not being able to see an end-to-end job stream across multiple applications within Tidal. We use jobs for that right now, but I have high hopes that we'll be able to see that in Explorer."
"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."
"Tidal's adaptability and user-friendliness could be increased by integrating it with additional programmes and platforms."
"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 Software interface could be more intuitive and user-friendly."
"Their software installation and update process could use some improvements. I'm pretty sure they're working on that, but that's definitely an area where it could be streamlined a lot. There's still a lot of manual work that you have to do with the schedule when you deploy masters or do the agents."
"The drill-down into details using the Graphical Views feature is a bit difficult and not that helpful. If you want to go into the details, you have to go to the Job Activity. Graphical Views is not that easy for getting that kind of information."
"The solution needs more advanced reporting and data visualization capabilities to enable deeper analysis of job performance and trends."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"CA pricing has been a problem, and not looked upon favorably here at all."
"Validate how many agents you need beforehand."
"There is an annual license to use AutoSys Workload Automation."
"The return on investment would be very high because doing things manually without this product would be extremely expensive."
"I don't have information on the exact licensing cost of AutoSys Workload Automation because that's managed by the tools and financing teams. For agents, it's close to $4,00, but for the server setup, it's usually a one-time license initially, and it's AMC which is paid every year and comes close to $8,000 to $10,000."
"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."
"The pricing needs to be improved. Some of my client's complained that it was too expensive."
"It is overpriced."
"If you are willing to shop around to other vendors, you can possibly get a good price on your support license."
"Right now, we are in a good position with the licensing model that we have with the Tidal vendor. So, we won't have any issues. even if we double in our current production. Initially, Tidal provided us some specs where if you have these number of jobs, then you come under this category. They usually provide a range of jobs from 2,000 to 10,000. You can use these specs for your infrastructure. Whether you have 2,000 or 8,000 jobs, Tidal should support it."
"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."
"The solution enables admins and users to see the information relevant to them, but this is bundled as an add-on that we would have to pay for."
"Our annual maintenance cost is competitive for what we have and what they do."
"...it is a pretty affordable scheduler tool that lets us do a lot. You get a lot of bang for the buck... The licensing model is hugely flexible."
"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."
"There have been pricing increases, but with the reduction that our company obtained from Tidal this year, the pricing has become very acceptable for this type of product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
47%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
6%
Insurance Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Insurance Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 because nothing gets left unattended since it is all visible in one place, and th...
What do you like most about AutoSys Workload Automation?
The most valuable aspects of AutoSys Workload Automation are its performance, scalability, and ease of getting started for new users.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AutoSys Workload Automation?
The solution is costly. The pricing is based on the number of users, which for me, translates to approximately $120,000 to $130,000 for a license period of two to three years.
What do you like most about Tidal Automation?
Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Tidal Automation?
The price is reasonable in terms of the product’s functionality.
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...
 

Also Known As

CA Workload Automation, CA Workload Automation AE
Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Gaumont, Mercantil do Brasil, CCEE, Hanwha Life
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about AutoSys Workload Automation vs. Tidal by Redwood and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.