OpCon vs Tidal by Redwood comparison

SMA Technologies and Tidal Software by Redwood are both solutions in the Workload Automation category. SMA Technologies is ranked #9 with an average rating of 9.1, while Tidal Software by Redwood is ranked #10 with an average rating of 9.3. SMA Technologies holds a 1.9% mindshare in WA, compared to Tidal Software by Redwood’s 3.9% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of SMA Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Tidal Software by Redwood users who would recommend it.

OpCon

Read 59 OpCon reviews

1,764 Views
680 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Tidal by Redwood

Read 37 Tidal by Redwood reviews

2,525 Views
1,207 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

OpCon

Tidal by Redwood

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

Tidal by Redwood and OpCon compete in the enterprise job scheduling and automation space. Tidal excels with robust calendaring and cross-platform capabilities, while OpCon shines in self-service and user accessibility.

Features: Tidal by Redwood is known for its robust calendaring, complex dependency management, and flexible security settings. Users can efficiently monitor processes, manage workloads, and integrate with diverse systems. OpCon stands out with its self-service capabilities, allowing end-users to initiate tasks independently. It supports complex scheduling and automation across platforms, enhancing productivity and reliability in batch-processing tasks.

Room for Improvement: Tidal could improve by enhancing its reporting features and simplifying the promotion of changes between environments. Users note the dual client interface causes inconsistencies, suggesting a unified interface would enhance usability. For OpCon, improvements in Solution Manager and expanded integration capabilities are suggested, particularly with modern UI features and visualization. Non-technical staff would benefit from enhanced ease of use.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tidal by Redwood is predominantly deployed on-premises, occasionally in hybrid and public clouds. Support has improved since transitioning from Cisco to STA, with consistent and knowledgeable service. OpCon also prefers on-premises deployment, providing robust support in North America. There is noted variability in support quality by region, but improvements are ongoing.

Pricing and ROI: Tidal offers a flexible licensing model appreciated for cost predictability and efficient scaling. Users find pricing reasonable for the functionality, reporting satisfactory ROI through automation efficiencies. OpCon is noted for cost-effectiveness compared to hiring additional personnel. Though initially expensive, its productivity and risk reduction benefits justify the investment, leading to solid ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed OpCon vs. Tidal by Redwood Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

OpCon vs. Tidal by Redwood

April 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 851,604 peers since 2012

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

OpCon

Ranking in Workload Automation

9th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Tidal by Redwood

Ranking in Workload Automation

10th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of OpCon is 1.9%, down from 2.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tidal by Redwood is 3.9%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Workload Automation

Featured Reviews

Jose Rivera Hernandez

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.

Read full review

Steve Mikula

IT Scheduling Manager at Paychex, Inc.

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Thus far we have only had a few minor problems, all of which the vendor addressed quickly. We have not encountered any major problems. The product is very stable and reliable."

"Manual processing has been automated 99 percent by OpCon. With new processes, we give it at least two weeks manual so we can write down the details of how to do the steps, then we automate it. Within a month, it has been automated, then it's no longer a manual process."

"It's very scalable. Right now we're barely scratching the surface of what it can do. I've looked at Symitar's instance of OpCon and they're running something like 13,000 jobs a day with all the clients that they have. So it can go from small use cases like ours to enterprise-level."

"The core system is the most valuable part: being able to view the processes that we've never really been able to view as a whole before. That is super-helpful, as is being alerted when issues arise."

"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."

"The most valuable feature of OpCon is its scheduling capability, particularly for automating file transfers with vendors."

"The biggest thing that we like about OpCon is how easy it is to trust it once we put the automation in place. Once we put whatever that job or schedule is, if we have the proper settings and conditions and we understand the components of OpCon in itself, we can go from a manual process to an automated process. We allow our team to get time to rest and have time to handle other things."

"Among the numerous valuable features, one standout capability is the implementation of self-service buttons."

More OpCon pros

"The most valuable feature is the job scheduler, where you can schedule thousands of jobs to execute at specific times."

"We use the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads. The solution’s ability to manage and monitor these workloads is very easy and accurate. We have file dependencies for running jobs. The job does not start until a file exists on a completely different server, then where the job will run. So, it is cross systems."

"Tidal helps administrators and users to see the information that is relevant to them in that single pane of glass. They can see jobs running, they can see job history, and they can see job progression. If you look at alternatives like Airflow and clouds, you'd have to design your own UI to monitor the progress of the different jobs that you've created in Airflow. So Tidal is huge for us."

"Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution."

"By leveraging machine learning algorithms, Tidal Automation can use this data to optimize turbine settings and improve overall efficiency and performance."

"The Graphical Views feature is also very good for helping us to understand a job stream. It's great for providing a visual overview of the status of a workflow, especially the Critical Path view. That is one of our favorites."

"Tidal Automation software provides real-time monitoring and alerts, allowing users to track job progress and identify potential issues before they cause delays or errors."

"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."

More Tidal by Redwood pros

Cons

"The only thing that we have been talking about with the vendor is the Solution Manager tool that we have. It is a great tool. It is getting replaced by another tool that is probably called Enterprise Manager. We just had a few complaints about it. The navigation of that new tool is a little bit more arbitrary than what we have been used to."

"The UI refresh rate is really bad and needs improvement."

"Usage is a little complex. It's not like you can bring somebody in and they can just use it. They have to be trained... As far as complexity goes, it's right up there."

"Licensing would be the first part I would overhaul. Each time a new licensing paradigm comes out, more features are removed and costs are added. They "add" features that are rarely used and increase charges for the number of jobs run. I'm sure someone in finance got a raise for their brilliance but the end-users won't thank them one bit. Expect price hikes and threats when you hold them to account at every opportunity."

"Of course they have a RESTful API within OpCon, but they have that new web services agent that we installed because we have some SOAP APIs and we had to interact with SMA to get things running. Our developers did do some tweaks, but we have now been able to get some test jobs running, and understand how the workflow goes back and forth."

"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 SQL database connections are the only time that we've had issues with reliability and stability of the software."

"The logs are a little daunting to look at the first few times, however, as you begin to understand what you're looking at, it becomes easier."

More OpCon cons

"The UI might have the potential to provide a more polished and user-centric encounter, promoting seamless engagements and simplifying the navigation process for individuals interacting with the software."

"They can do better reporting in terms of production statistics reporting."

"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."

"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."

"My complaint about their pricing model is that every year or every time technology changes or somebody has a new requirement, it usually means that I can schedule that with Tidal, but I would need another adapter. So, every time there is a change, I need a different adapter that I don't have. That's why it is harder to plan for Tidal growth because you have to buy a new adapter every time."

"When we patch to the next version, there is often a little thing that breaks. It has rarely been a big deal, but I always seem to have to follow up on one tiny issue. It would help if they had some better QA testing of their patches."

"To better fit their unique needs, the solution should give more customization options."

"The product’s UI is outdated. They should work on this particular area."

More Tidal by Redwood cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It was substantially less expensive than ASG-Zeke... I would suggest that someone who is only looking at price when evaluating workload automation tools take a very hard look at OpCon because it is well-priced."

"Annually, we pay $29,000. This is for a blanket policy that covers everything, like licensing and support."

"There are different add-ons, like the Self Service or Vision model. It all depends on what agents you have in your environment. We have a mainframe and Windows, and while I think SQL is free, SAP or anything beyond that has different connectors that might need a license."

"If we choose to purchase consulting hours, that is an additional cost. However, we've been lucky enough that we've not used all of our allotted consulting hours. Therefore, that is not something that we have had to purchase a lot of. The last time that we purchased consulting hours was roughly two years ago. We purchased a block of 10 for $2,500. It was $250 per hour."

"While the base pricing is reasonable, the à la carte options are making the overall cost more complicated and potentially problematic."

"The pricing is over $100,000 for our credit union and I believe it's $89,000 for our clients, in total, annually."

"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."

"This solution is certainly not the cheapest, but we win in time."

More OpCon pricing and cost advice

"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 are project, system, and server costs. Some of the things that they are doing is introducing new products. They are introducing what they call their Repository, which is a way for you to move a job. That doesn't cost anything to us, because it is reusing a tool called Transporter. The repository is the successor to Transporter, so we already own it and are sort of grandfathered in. But that new product requires a server and database, so now we have to go out and get a server and database. So, there is a cost there."

"BMC is really expensive. The other solutions are about the same price. I think Tidal is even cheaper than the others, such as CA, Stonebranch, and JAMS."

"Tidal is a low-cost tool and not expensive in comparison to other tools."

"Our licensing model for Tidal is on an annual basis. It is very good and works well for us. Tidal's licensing is very transparent and simple. It lets you know, for the amount you use, that's the price that you pay. So, we buy X number of licenses, and we know that this is where we are. I'm very happy with that. I saw the licensing modules on other platforms, and I didn't like them. Other companies and solutions would calculate the connections, adapters, and instances. I think that's the reason that BMC was pretty expensive: They just didn't understand what our needs are."

"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."

"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."

"If you are willing to shop around to other vendors, you can possibly get a good price on your support license."

More Tidal by Redwood pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Workload Automation solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

45%

Financial Services Firm

20%

Government

Real Estate/Law Firm

Financial Services Firm

22%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Computer Software Company

10%

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about OpCon?

My favorite feature is the dashboard feature, which shows jobs that are running, and completed, any failures, and provides dashboard reporting.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with OpCon?

See all answers

What do you like most about Tidal Automation?

Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Tidal Automation?

The price is reasonable in terms of the product’s functionality.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Control-M vs OpCon

Compared 35% of the time

VisualCron vs OpCon

Compared 14% of the time

Automic Automation vs OpCon

Compared 12% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs OpCon

Compared 10% of the time

JAMS vs OpCon

Compared 5% of the time

More OpCon Competitors

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 43% of the time

Control-M vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 23% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 8% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 7% of the time

Automic Automation vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 2% of the time

More Tidal by Redwood Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

OpCon

May 2025

Download OpCon product report

Buyer's Guide

Tidal by Redwood

April 2025

Download Tidal by Redwood product report

Also Known As

No data available

Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler

Overview

OpCon automates batch processing, core system operations, file transfers, and daily processing. Integrated across Unisys, Windows, and cloud systems, OpCon is used in financial institutions, credit unions, and multi-platform environments for job scheduling, report generation, SQL queries, scripting, and FTP processes, handling thousands of jobs daily.

Users value OpCon for comprehensive automation capabilities, particularly the scheduling feature that allows advance planning and streamlined workflows. The self-service functionality enables non-IT staff to manage tasks efficiently. OpCon's integration with core banking systems, robust job management, and error notification system significantly improve operational efficiency. Features like Solution Manager enhance accessibility and control, ensuring process continuity and ease of use.

What are the Key Features of OpCon?

Advanced Scheduling: Allows users to plan and automate workflows efficiently.
Self-Service Functionality: Empowers non-IT staff to manage tasks independently.
Integration with Core Systems: Works seamlessly with core banking systems and other platforms.
Error Notifications: Provides robust error management and notifications for quick resolution.
Solution Manager: Enhances control and accessibility for managing automated processes.

What Benefits Should You Look for in Reviews?

Operational Efficiency: Users often report improved operational performance and reduced manual effort.
Time Savings: Automation of repetitive tasks leads to significant time savings.
Improved Accuracy: Automated systems minimize human error, leading to higher accuracy in processes.
Cost Reduction: Optimized resource usage results in cost savings.
Enhanced Flexibility: Customizable workflows meet unique business requirements.

Users find OpCon complex with a steep learning curve. Desired improvements include better separation of environments, enhanced graphical display, finer user authorization, simpler notification and alerts, more templates, increased web functionality, seamless interface, integration tools, online training, smoother scheduling, better reporting, mobile accessibility, smarter self-service, improved mainframe support, and integration with third-party systems. Pricing model and licensing could be more streamlined.

In financial institutions and credit unions, OpCon is implemented to handle thousands of daily jobs, automate internal processes, and integrate workflows across various platforms. It ensures secure file transfers, generates detailed reports, executes SQL queries, and supports seamless third-party integrations.

SMA Technologies

Tidal Software is a leading provider of enterprise workload automation solutions that orchestrate the execution of complex workflows across systems, applications and IT environments. With a comprehensive portfolio of products and services, Tidal optimizes mission-critical business processes, increases IT cost efficiencies and satisfies legal and regulatory compliance requirements. Hundreds of customers around the world count on Tidal for modernizing their workload automation and driving their digital transformation. Tidal Software is headquartered in Chicago with offices in Houston, London, Minsk, Belarus and Chennai, India. For more information, visit tidalsoftware.com.

Tidal Software by Redwood

Sample Customers

LOHR, Carnival Cruise Lines, Herbalife, Digital Federal Credit Union, Synergent, Frandsen Bank & Trust

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

OpCon vs. Tidal by Redwood

April 2025

Free Report: OpCon vs. Tidal by Redwood

Find out what your peers are saying about OpCon vs. Tidal by Redwood and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our OpCon vs. Tidal by Redwood report.

See our list of best Workload Automation vendors.

We monitor all Workload Automation reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.