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JAMS vs Tidal by Redwood comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 22, 2026

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
Ranking in Workload Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Tidal by Redwood
Ranking in Workload Automation
18th
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 June 2026, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of JAMS is 3.0%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tidal by Redwood is 3.8%, down from 3.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
JAMS3.0%
Tidal by Redwood3.8%
Other93.2%
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.
JG
Batch Production Manager at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
Its versatility, ease of use, scalability, and cost-effectiveness make it a 10/10 and the best of the breed
The company is not really big. One of the areas that they are working on is improving the process of migrating jobs from the lower environment to the upper environment. They had used a tool called Transporter, which was a little difficult to use, but they've now released a new tool in August, which I've not yet used, to do that. It's probably called Repository or something like that, but it's a tool for migrating jobs from the lower environment to the upper environment. That's where they needed to improve, and it looks like they may have, but I haven't tried the tool yet. They can do better reporting in terms of production statistics reporting.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The feature or capability to import a job is most valuable. We can import an existing job from different platforms, and all the configurations get migrated as well without modifying the code, job schedule, etc."
"The planning capabilities are most valuable."
"The most valuable feature is the easily accessible data in the database because we run a lot of SQL scripting against the database."
"JAMS positively impacts my organization because it helps make it easier to manage JD Edwards scheduled jobs and fills the gap that the JD Edwards application has with scheduling, resolving a lot of those issues."
"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."
"The code-driven automation for more complex scheduling requirements frees up time because it's really easy to use... It's almost like a stand-alone software that we can't live without."
"The built-in triggers are great."
"The scheduling and execution of jobs are the most valuable features. The scheduling is important because if there is a task we want to execute at 4:00 AM, there's no way we will have someone who can manually run the job. In addition, we execute 100 to 200 jobs per day, and manual intervention is not an option."
"Tidal Workload Automation Software provides the ability to quickly adapt to changing business requirements."
"You will enjoy the features of it; it is a great tool."
"It does a very good job of managing cross-platform, cross-application workloads."
"The best feature of Tidal Workload Automation Software is its ease of integration with other systems, including ERP, CRM, and BI tools."
"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..."
"The core of the product is great and I would certainly recommend it."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"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."
"Right now there's not much of an Azure integration with JAMS at the moment directly because we run separate pipelines."
"JAMS doesn't allow us to implement SOC controls. We are a company that trades stocks on the New York Stock Exchange, so all our transactions are audited. It has a feature that saves the file for only a month but doesn't segregate the data between finance and SOC-related compliance."
"JAMS notifications for hung jobs could be improved."
"The error messages from JAMS often need clarification, hindering our ability to resolve issues swiftly."
"The documentation is not super... It's not as quick and slick as I'd like it to be."
"All my machines at work are Macs. JAMS client is a Windows-based thing."
"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."
"We've had some quirky stuff happen on an occasional basis where a job does not take off. For example, a job we expected to be finished by 3:00 a.m. is sitting there and not executing when we come in in the morning. We have to go all the way back to the dependencies and then we can see that one of the dependencies has become unscheduled, for some reason. No changes were made to the schedule but this prerequisite job has, all of a sudden, become unscheduled. I have brought this up with Tidal's support but they have never had an answer for it."
"For the most part, the drill-down and the logging are really good. But if we take an Informatica job, for example: We have the ability, and the operators have the ability, to actually drill down and see, at a session level, where the failure is. There is, unfortunately, no way to extract that into an actual output email or failure email. It's not that that information is not available, but extracting it into an email would be a nice-to-have."
"With the client, we have had certain issues. The user interface for Tidal is a little slow."
"With the client, we have had certain issues. The user interface for Tidal is a little slow. A lot of people would love this tool if they had a faster user interface. The drill-down functionality should be much quicker than what it is pulling out now. If I fill out some data, then it takes awhile to get that data back onto the screen. It's not as fast as we were expecting."
"From an administrative point of view, I wouldn't give really high marks to the solution. I actually entertained getting the JAWS application at one point. One of the shortcomings with the scheduler is the reporting capabilities. At least at the time, JAWS was the best that they had for a third-party integration. I think they've got things in the pipeline to help alleviate that gap."
"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."
"It takes a lot of time to learn the product. I have admins and developers who are working on the products for the last three to four years and still don't know all the functionalities. Tidal has really great things about it, but people are focused on their day-to-day job and the solution is not intuitive."
"The solution needs more advanced reporting and data visualization capabilities to enable deeper analysis of job performance and trends."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our licensing is pretty cheap because we have a state solution. So, we pay only $1,000 a year."
"It was $10,000 for the first year. Then, there is a maintenance cost for licensing every year that we get billed $5,000 for every year."
"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."
"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."
"JAMS is relatively inexpensive, with additional costs only incurred for tags, other services, and optional support renewals."
"The pricing of JAMS has not been an issue for us, as it has allowed us to save time."
"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."
"There are no additional costs other than the license for Fortra's JAMS which is affordable."
"We are satisfied with the pricing of Tidal. It's in the moderate range and it feels very achievable for us."
"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."
"This solution is a bit expensive in the current world where everybody is trying to cut down on certain things."
"The licensing model's flexibility is awesome. The way it's licensed for us is that it's licensed per master and then per agent. We have an enterprise agreement, so we have unlimited agents, and we have it on 500 devices."
"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."
"The new prices that we've received seem reasonable and comparable to the marketplace."
"They work with you on licensing. So, it has been great. Everybody has different licensing, but I've had good luck with the licensing. They've been very accommodating. You basically need to buy a license for each physical server, but then you're allowed an unlimited number of virtual servers."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Construction Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Performing Arts
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise20
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise38
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JAMS?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the pricing was acceptable. I have gone with JAMS licensing for years now, and I am happy to have it.
What needs improvement with JAMS?
I am fine with what JAMS offers and have nothing to suggest for improvement. JAMS' code-driven automation is not widely used in the present environment, because I use my internally built framework ...
What is your primary use case for JAMS?
My main use case for JAMS is scheduling, which is the primary usage. I am mainly using JAMS for scheduling various jobs of all kinds. I onboarded JAMS when I developed our custom framework of compo...
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Also Known As

No data available
Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler
 

Interactive Demo

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Teradata, Arconic, General Dynamics, Yum!, CVS Health, Comcast, Ghiradelli, & Boston’s Children’s Hospital
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Find out what your peers are saying about JAMS vs. Tidal by Redwood and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.