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ESP Workload Automation Intelligence vs Stonebranch 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
6.7
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
ESP Workload Automation Int...
Ranking in Workload Automation
23rd
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Stonebranch
Ranking in Workload Automation
9th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of JAMS is 2.6%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ESP Workload Automation Intelligence is 2.0%, down from 2.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Stonebranch is 4.4%, down from 5.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
JAMS2.6%
Stonebranch4.4%
ESP Workload Automation Intelligence2.0%
Other91.0%
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2770605 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Has streamlined complex job scheduling across scripting languages while reducing manual effort
JAMS could be improved with a web client that is accessible and as fast as a normal website, eliminating the need to RDP to the servers to access the JAMS client. A functionality running on the JAMS server to continuously check the JAMS agents would ensure they are working properly. If an agent is not responding, a feature to restart the service from the job server machine would be beneficial. The upgrade process, particularly when switching from V6 to V7, could be clearer in terms of documentation, ideally with screenshots showing exactly what needs to be done on each screen.
reviewer1609584 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Vice President at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Stable, connects with everything, and has great technical support
The new version is going to have more web services where you could string together various web services so that you can create a workflow across multiple web services, which I don't think is there today. It's not easy to do today. You have to use other tools to accomplish things. However, if the functionality exists, we haven't tested that out yet.
Saktheeswaran Ravichandran - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Modern workload automation has unified job scheduling and reporting across regions and platforms
I feel that Stonebranch can be improved in certain areas. Since I have been a Control-M user for a very long time and have also used Dollar Universe in the past, creating a task or job and then creating a schedule with time triggers and other triggers in different objects feels a bit complicated compared to other tools in the market where everything is laid out in a single pane and scheduling is easy. Here, since we have a task and a time schedule and time trigger separately from the task, I am getting a bit confused becoming accustomed to those concepts, but that can be managed more easily.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Our company is based on data. Everything we do is data-driven, so it has been very valuable having one place where we can process all of the data and do batch schedules with chunks of data."
"JAMS has helped save IT staff time by automating tasks previously performed with scripts, and its scheduling feature has been particularly useful."
"I didn't know about JAMS because I don't have a person with any challenges with the purchase administration. The feature or the user interface is user-friendly because of the readable icons or very descriptive icons. Though I'm a beginning user of JAMS, I had no issues using it."
"The most valuable feature is the easily accessible data in the database because we run a lot of SQL scripting against the database."
"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."
"While I appreciate the other features, the agent stands out for its ease of installation and configuration for JAMS monitoring."
"The product is easy to use."
"Fortra's JAMS helped us centralize job management across our platforms and applications. This is critical because we schedule tasks across multiple applications and operating systems, using triggers and start dates to coordinate their execution."
"The solution can scale."
"We like that it has GUI and is not just a command line."
"I love the Universal Controller. It's been great for us. We host it on-premise... It's High Availability, meaning there's failover from one server to the other if one goes down."
"When it comes to agent technology and compatibility with other vendors, from a platform perspective it was the one vendor that fit all the platforms that we have, from your old platforms - mainframe, NSK, IBM i - to the new ones, going into cloud and container"
"I have found the agents to be so much simpler, when compared to ESP."
"The most valuable feature is the reliability of the agents, because we need them accessible and we need to run stuff. The agent technology and compatibility are top-notch."
"I can name the aliases on the agent, so if we need a passive environment for an agent, that's one of the nice features. If our primary goes down, I can bring up the passive one and I don't have to change anything in the scheduling world. It will start running from that new server."
"The ability to monitor tasks that are on the open-system side as well as our mainframe side gives us a one-window view of all our processes."
"Stonebranch performs well, and the graphical representation is excellent. Overall, it requires more technical effort from our teams, but the solution is intuitive, so anybody can use it."
 

Cons

"The monitoring of the JAMS product and its performance is an area of concern for me."
"The client is horrible. Every time JAMS puts out a survey on what they can improve, I always say, "The client: When you are setting up jobs, it is quite horrible." The response has been, "Well, we are just using the Windows foundation," and I am like, "Why isn't it only your product?" We can get around it now that we know its quirks, but it is not the most user-friendly of tools out there. The UI is completely unintuitive. We had to go and open up a support ticket with JAMS just to get something back. It is not user-friendly at all."
"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."
"JAMS could be improved with a web client that is accessible and as fast as a normal website, eliminating the need to RDP to the servers to access the JAMS client."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The only thing that they could improve on is the fact that they don't have a browser version of JAMS. They've got all the bits and pieces there if you want to build your own web version of it. It does come with a web client, but it's pretty clunky. They could improve on that."
"The new version is going to have more web services where you could string together various web services so that you can create a workflow across multiple web services, which I don't think is there today."
"It's not available on the cloud, so they should take that due to safety, security, and scalability."
"It can be hard to manage the task monitor."
"Occasionally, we have an agent that doesn't come back up after patching. That doesn't happen very often... It's really just a restart of the agent and it comes back up. But that might be one thing that could be improved."
"I feel that Stonebranch can be improved in certain areas."
"It would be ideal if they had the exact same features as the CA Workload Automation DE series. It would be helpful to have calendaring options."
"I have a request regarding our agent on the mainframe. It may time out when communicating to the Universal Controller, when the mainframe is extremely busy. That can cause a task which is running at that time to not see the results of the job that ran on the mainframe. It happens sporadically during times of really busy CPU usage. We're expecting that enhancement from them in the fourth quarter."
"I would rate Stonebranch somewhere in the middle for ease of setup. It wasn't too straightforward for us because our infrastructure is complex."
"There is a component called the OMS, which is the message broker. We rely on infrastructure, resiliency, and availability for that piece. If that could change to be highly available just as a software component, so that we don't have to provide the high-available storage, etc. for it, that would be a plus. It would just be cheaper to run."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In the end, you'll find that it's really worth the price. There is some sticker shock, but it's worth every dime."
"Our licensing is pretty cheap because we have a state solution. So, we pay only $1,000 a year."
"Take advantage of its scalability. You can start small. The initial cost is very reasonable. Once you have started picking up the tool and adopting it, then you can scale up from there and buy more agents."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"This is a good product at a fair price."
"JAMS is relatively inexpensive, with additional costs only incurred for tags, other services, and optional support renewals."
"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 pricing of JAMS has not been an issue for us, as it has allowed us to save time."
Information not available
"Outside of licensing fees, there aren't any other costs."
"When we reviewed this solution against other vendors, Stonebranch blew everybody out of the water in terms of cost."
"I don't have pricing information, but I do know it's cheaper than our old legacy system. Other than the standard licensing fees there are no additional costs."
"Stonebranch is cheaper than Control-M, so many companies are using Stonebranch."
"The price of the solution is at a medium level compared to the competition."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
45%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
7%
Insurance Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Insurance Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise18
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise23
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about JAMS?
I find the historical tracking feature of JAMS invaluable for reviewing past events.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JAMS?
They recently switched to subscription-based pricing, which increased. The price is fair considering the functionalit...
What needs improvement with JAMS?
As far as we are using JAMS version 6, it looks good and there is nothing major to add about it. Everything is functi...
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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Stonebranch Universal Automation Center?
My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing of Stonebranch has been that it is a very affordable tool, ...
What needs improvement with Stonebranch Universal Automation Center?
Stonebranch can be improved by making it more familiar to other tech geeks. We can add various other features such as...
What is your primary use case for Stonebranch Universal Automation Center?
My main use case for Stonebranch is for job scheduling and to see the workflows and for troubleshooting any failures....
 

Also Known As

No data available
CA Workload Automation ESP
Stonebranch Universal Automation Center
 

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
Sandvik, DHL, Landmark Group, SAIF
Nissan, Coop, United Supermarkets, Groupon, CSC, Orbitz, Johnson & Johnson, BMW, Qantas.
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC, Broadcom, JAMS Software and others in Workload Automation. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.