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Fortra's Automate vs OpCon comparison

 

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

Fortra's Automate
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (4th), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (7th)
OpCon
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
Workload Automation (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Fortra's Automate and OpCon aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Fortra's Automate is designed for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and holds a mindshare of 2.8%, up 1.6% compared to last year.
OpCon, on the other hand, focuses on Workload Automation, holds 2.2% mindshare, up 1.9% since last year.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Fortra's Automate2.8%
UiPath Platform10.8%
Microsoft Power Automate7.3%
Other79.1%
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Workload Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
OpCon2.2%
Control-M12.1%
AutoSys Workload Automation7.0%
Other78.7%
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Jane Rachma Kiniti - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Project Manager at Labo des histoires
Automate has streamlined workflows and increased efficiency with powerful automation
The best features of the solution are the flexible automation features, it is rich with beautiful connectors, and it is easy to use with little to no coding knowledge required to get started, so anybody can use the tool. The intuitive interface of Automate has an intuitive design, which makes it easy to learn and use even without a strong technical background, and it has a drag-and-drop interface, which makes everything so easy and straightforward. The error handling capabilities in complex automation tasks are powerful, as it handles all types of tasks, whether complex or simple. I've never faced any problems even when dealing with complex tasks, so everything is super smooth and highly reliable, even when dealing with big tasks, as it has never slowed down. Automate's compatibility with existing IT infrastructure has impacted our business operations positively by providing smooth integration with other software that we use, such as Gmail, Jira, and Microsoft 365 apps, which gives us a unified platform instead of having to keep switching from one software to another, saving a lot of time and streamlining the whole workflows. The automated analytics have helped improve our business processes since it has increased our efficiency by automating our everyday tasks, freeing up time for us to focus more on strategic activities such as analyzing data and developing new business strategies. It is also cost-saving. By minimizing manual labor, it decreases human errors that can lead to costly mistakes. By automating the tasks, it helps to save costs, and it also improves our accuracy by reducing these errors to ensure that tasks are done almost perfectly.
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

"Fortra's Automate has effectively replaced the workload of an entire employee, saving us significant time and money."
"The intuitive interface of Automate has an intuitive design which makes it easy to learn and use even without a strong technical background, and it has a drag and drop interface which makes everything so easy and straightforward."
"The ability to connect to websites and pull data is the solution's most valuable feature."
"The feature I prefer most about Fortra's Automate is that it offers no-code or low-code automation, which is essential for me as a cybersecurity analyst because we do not have time to code and automate everything."
"Compared to other vendors, it's the scheduling tool because a lot of vendors want to charge you extra for their enterprise-level license to have a scheduling tool built in to give you the ability to set up regular schedules to run and do certain data checks."
"The most valuable features for my client are timing and scheduling."
"We have found the pricing to be very reasonable."
"Web scraping is quite good since it offers a lot of possibilities."
"ROI has been great."
"OpCon has streamlined our operations, reducing the number of jobs by about 17 percent, optimizing and automating the scheduling of our programs, and enabling us to immediately create tickets in ServiceNow when a job is down using web services."
"OpCon makes my job so much easier."
"Before OpCon, it was a person's job to just manually run a bunch of things, like file transfers, and someone had to set up nightly processing within our system; now, nobody has to do those things, and nobody forgets to do them."
"There are a lot of valuable features. The version that we're currently casting, Self Service, is going to be the most valuable to us. It is going to allow us to open up the doors, broaden our automation capability and help other business units to be able to automate a lot of the little things that they do from day to day. I'm really looking forward to being able to help other areas with their automation needs. Self Service is really key."
"With a simple click of a button in self-service, the department or the user can complete his/her job."
"We haven't freed up a full person's job using it, but there are a good handful of people for whom it has freed up about half of their time. And those employees love it. A lot of tasks are based on certain times, and they're no longer stuck doing those things at those times. We don't have to have anybody coming in early anymore. They can focus on the processing part of their jobs instead of the file moving and downloading."
"The solution has freed up employees to do more meaningful work as a result of automation. They don't have to sit there and wait for files to download. They don't have to stare at the screen while a process is running. It all runs in the background, doing it for them."
 

Cons

"The areas that have room for improvement in Fortra's Automate include the reporting and analytics functionality, where the analytics could be more detailed."
"The OCR for Hebrew text needs to be improved."
"While this solution is continually improving, as it is now, the user interface could use improvement when I compare it to a product like UiPath."
"There is room for improvement regarding cloud functionality; there are a few missing features, and the logging could be better, especially error logging."
"Areas for improvement in Automate would be a more modern web-based workflow designer, an enhanced real-time monitoring dashboard, and built-in API integration tools for REST and SOAP."
"There is room for improvement regarding cloud functionality; there are a few missing features, and the logging could be better, especially air logging. We can go into logging events and create our own task, but it would be nice if this were more detailed."
"I would like to see some better web automation, a wizard like the one in the product WinAutomation would be very nice."
"If Fortra's Automate could add more logging in jobs, that could be helpful."
"It was hard to automate in the beginning because there were a lot of concepts."
"The one area it needs some help in is the mainframe area because that is not its strength. They support the mainframe but it's not something that they are good at."
"What can get complicated is if you're doing anything more than just the built-in jobs. If you're using the more advanced features, troubleshooting becomes extremely complicated."
"I would like OpCon to implement a reporting feature on the dashboard that displays historical data for specific jobs. Ideally, this feature would allow us to view the past seven days or the next seven days, but with a specific focus on highlighting instances where a particular job has historically failed, particularly on Saturdays over the past year."
"I might like to see a little bit more of a seamless user interface. That would be good. They're moving towards a browser-type interface, rather than the Java application that we currently use. Also, a little bit more built-in self-service would be good, rather than a standalone product."
"The calendar interface and the frequency interface is a very powerful, yet complex, section of OpCon in which all our staff have made mistakes. They have implemented what they believed was logically correct and then afterward discovered that their logic was flawed because OpCon did it a different way. That part, which is incredibly useful, is also incredibly dangerous. The interface or the ability to directly do more functions within the frequency definitely has room for expansion. As good as it is, it can be a lot better."
"It is a pricey solution. Comparatively speaking, you can certainly find schedulers which are cheaper."
"We have not explored the possibility, but one of the areas for improvement would be more integration into Active Directory, to where it could do the creation of user accounts and the additional work to integrate third-party systems into payroll systems."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Once you buy the software, you just pay for the support for backend help."
"I believe the price falls within a reasonable range, which significantly influenced our decision regarding the product. This aspect is crucial for any technological solution, especially in our country where enterprises might be hesitant to invest heavily in something untested or uncertain about its practicality and potential returns."
"From a distributor's side, one of the biggest selling points is its price point. Without going into any numbers, compared to UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism, we're significantly cheaper. The main difference is that other competitors usually charge you per process. However, in Automate's case, it's priced per bot. So, a bot can run multiple processes at the same time, but you are only priced for a single bot."
"From a distributor's perspective, one of the biggest selling points of Automate is its price point."
"I like the way this solution is priced because you can buy a license, or you can buy the software outright."
"While solutions like UiPath and Blue Prism cost around $11,000-$12,000 for each license, this product costs around $7,000 and you can keep it forever."
"The cost is a bit high for a small business like ours, but we manage with Fortra's Automate."
"Compared to other products, the pricing model for this solution is much more convenient, flexible, and adaptable to the Portuguese reality."
"Yearly, we're paying about $62,000. OpCon has an all-inclusive feature and module license, but you pay per task."
"OpCon cost us $80,000 in 2017 money, and that included everything: support, installation, onsite assistance during the conversion, etc. It's been a worthwhile investment by far."
"This solution is slightly more expensive than our previous solution. Right now, we are paying about $40,000 a year. However, we think it's well worth the cost to keep things automated, reducing our staff."
"The pricing is over $100,000 for our credit union and I believe it's $89,000 for our clients, in total, annually."
"Annually, we pay $29,000. This is for a blanket policy that covers everything, like licensing and support."
"The total cost of ownership is about the same to our previous product. The costs are relatively similar."
"While the base pricing is reasonable, the à la carte options are making the overall cost more complicated and potentially problematic."
"We currently renewed with one of their new technology bundles. It's around $36,000 annually. We run a query of our SQL in our SQL database to see how many jobs we run. They're charging us per usage and whatever add-ons you want to use with OpCon."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
28%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Outsourcing Company
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise29
Large Enterprise19
 

Questions from the Community

What is your primary use case for HelpSystems AutoMate?
I use Fortra's Automate primarily for RPA-based task automation, including file handling, data extraction, and system-to-system workflows. It helps automate repetitive IT and business processes, re...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortra Automate?
Pricing and licensing for Fortra's Automate are flexible but largely custom or quote-based, which works well for enterprise and managed service provider models. The pricing is a bit on the higher s...
What needs improvement with Fortra Automate?
Fortra's Automate can be improved with enhancements in native cloud integrations for AWS, Azure, and GCP, along with stronger API orchestration to improve hybrid use cases. More granular monitoring...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OpCon?
I am the one who signs the contract. In the beginning, when I started working here, it seemed very expensive, but after I learned everything that it does, I found it worth the price. I would recomm...
What needs improvement with OpCon?
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 fa...
What is your primary use case for OpCon?
In this credit union, we use OpCon for automation. That is the main use of it. We have over 3,000 jobs and schedules that process certain procedures that we have. These procedures touch our core sy...
 

Also Known As

HelpSystems Automate, Automate
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Aldergrove Financial Group, Preferred Health Professionals, Mindbeam Technologies, First Credit Union in British Columbia, Vestcom International, Prime Liberty Benefits, University of Tampa, CNLBancshares, World Precision Instruments, BJ's Restaurants, Globe Pequot Press, Accudata Technologies, Norton Healthcare, Pacific Toxicology Laboratories
LOHR, Carnival Cruise Lines, Herbalife, Digital Federal Credit Union, Synergent, Frandsen Bank & Trust
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893,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.