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 #8 with an average rating of 9.1, while Tidal Software by Redwood is ranked #11 with an average rating of 9.2. SMA Technologies holds a 1.7% mindshare in WA, compared to Tidal Software by Redwood’s 4.6% 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

1,912 Views
1,721 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Tidal by Redwood

Read 37 Tidal by Redwood reviews

2,380 Views
2,356 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

OpCon

Tidal by Redwood

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 2025

Tidal by Redwood and OpCon compete in the workload automation category. Tidal has the upper hand in enterprise-wide scheduling, while OpCon is particularly effective in financial services due to its advanced automation capabilities.

Features: Tidal by Redwood excels with its holiday-aware job scheduling, segmenting user permissions, and recent client upgrades that enhance security and satisfaction. It offers robust calendaring and cross-platform capabilities to maintain productivity. OpCon shines in automation, especially for financial operations, handling error management effectively and simplifying complex processes with its self-service and integration features.

Room for Improvement: Tidal could improve its reporting capabilities and integration for monitoring long-running jobs. Users mention a learning curve for onboarding and suggest aligning user experience with modern standards. OpCon could enhance its visual interface and improve its entry-level documentation. Optimizations within its graphical interface are also recommended to improve user interaction and handle complex task sequences more efficiently.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tidal operates primarily on on-premise models with partial support for hybrid and cloud environments. It emphasizes responsive customer service post-separation from Cisco. OpCon, also on-premise, is noted for a helpful and knowledgeable support team. Both prioritize extensive after-deployment support, with Tidal focusing on video and technical documentation for better user transition.

Pricing and ROI: Tidal offers a flexible licensing model that is predictable, providing significant ROI through operational savings in scheduling. OpCon, despite a higher initial cost, offers long-term cost benefits by potentially replacing full-time staff with automation solutions, particularly in financial services. Clients of both solutions should consider additional feature costs beyond base deployments, with Tidal praised for transparency in pricing and OpCon delivering ROI through detailed analytics and automation efficiency.

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

Buyer's Guide

OpCon vs. Tidal by Redwood

July 2025

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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

8th

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

11th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of OpCon is 1.7%, down from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tidal by Redwood is 4.6%, up from 3.6% 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.

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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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It seems like it would scale well."

"Having the jobs laid out while attaching dependencies is a nice addition to the program."

"The automation of processes is the most valuable feature. One of the major hurdles for us over the last few years, before we found OpCon, was to make our nightly process happen automatically. Being a bank, we have nightly update processes that have to happen for posting transactions, for example, and it was a huge load off our department to have that automated."

"There's also a self-service solution manager... that allows us to enable staff to run complex automation tasks by clicking a button and entering some information. They don't have to have access to the OpCon environment to kick off those kinds of events."

"We're also starting to use its Self Service and Solution Manager. My team in the data center and some of the development team use the Self Service. Developers are using the Self Service for upon-request jobs for their testing. They used to have to go through us to schedule testing and now they can just go on and kick it off all they want. They have also really appreciated that they have access to view and/or submit jobs."

"The most valuable feature is the automation in general."

"There are three features which are valuable: the automated calendar functions; the notification process for failed jobs or unscheduled events occurring, via email and text messaging; and the ability for the scheduling package to communicate across multiple platforms."

"The stability of this solution is awesome. It's the only product I've ever seen that you can actually build to fix itself if it has a problem. You'll build something and, if you find an issue, you can say, 'Hey, if this happens again, do this to correct it.'"

More OpCon pros

"We wouldn't be able to do many of the complex scheduling that we do today without it. For us, it is a mission-critical app. Because if it doesn't work or has a problem, then SAP doesn't function. It is that critical. So, it's an essential tool for us to manage and run SAP jobs."

"We use the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads. That's the biggest use for us and that's the biggest advantage."

"It has been super stable. There are no complaints on stability. We would not be using it if Tidal wasn't stable."

"Tidal Automation’s most valuable feature is customization. It can work and connect with any app."

"Tidal Automation is very efficient and can quickly automate most manual and repetitive tasks."

"It is intended to enable large-scale automation environments, making it appropriate for companies with complicated processes and big data volumes."

"Thinking of all the people involved in checking jobs on a daily basis, manually running jobs or auditing them through standalone tools, and trying to connect them. We have saved hundreds of hours weekly, which is substantial."

"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..."

More Tidal by Redwood pros

Cons

"There is one feature that has been a difficult problem, and right now, OpCon can't do it. I'm not sure if it should be expected to, but we have tried to get it to where it could start a process on an external database."

"We sometimes have a large number of jobs on the SQL Server and we can experience a very light lag in job starts. The lag can be a few seconds. It's never more than one minute, but sometimes we can experience some lags."

"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'd like to see the product include a view where you can see everything about a specific job on a single screen."

"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."

"Stability is an area for improvement. There are FTP agents that run on the MCP and they are there so that we can transfer a file from the MCP to the Windows environment or vice versa. Sometimes, and nobody has been able to figure out why, it just goes down, and all of my jobs that need it are hanging or failing... It would be very helpful if they could figure out what in the world is happening with that FTP client that's on the MCP."

"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."

"There are some limitations in the actual jobs that are created and how you're able to rename files. Suppose you're bringing in, say, 10, 15, or 20 reports from a core system, and you're using an "asterisk character" to identify files. For example, if you're grabbing files that start with this, end with this, but the characters in between could be different, it has to retain that same name in the destination. It won't allow you to rename them with a date stamp or the like."

More OpCon cons

"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."

"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."

"One of the weaknesses of the product is, when something happens, it's difficult to find out the root cause. There are a lot of logs you can take a look at in Tidal. Sometimes, they are useful, but other times, they're not. That is mostly relegated to the administrative team. Users for the most part don't see that and don't know anything about that. They just know they have a problem, then it's up to the administrative team to see what happened and figure out the problem."

"I don't know if Tidal wants to get into the business of monitoring long-running jobs, but that could be a feature for the future: a job launching and monitoring tool. Using Tidal for monitoring doesn't seem like a good fit, but if they could offer something that did that as an add-on or include it, it might be helpful."

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

"The job failure alerts can be updated with more details for better troubleshooting."

"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."

More Tidal by Redwood cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"Scaling is pricey."

"Our annual maintenance costs are $45,000. The initial cost is separate."

"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."

"The pricing is very reasonable."

"Compared to AutoSys and ISE, OpCon was a lot cheaper to put in. AutoSys is hundreds of thousands of dollars to just install it because they don't have an interface into our system. You have to teach them what your system does."

"It is at a decent price for the work that it does for us."

"The pricing is reasonable."

More OpCon pricing and cost advice

"I have had no issues with the licensing."

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

"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."

"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."

"We pay maintenance annually through Blue House of about $9,000. That's for our two environments: production and test."

"The new prices that we've received seem reasonable and comparable to the marketplace."

"We are satisfied with the pricing of Tidal. It's in the moderate range and it feels very achievable for us."

"This solution is a bit expensive in the current world where everybody is trying to cut down on certain things."

More Tidal by Redwood pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

45%

Financial Services Firm

17%

Non Profit

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

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 29% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs OpCon

Compared 11% of the time

IBM Workload Automation vs OpCon

Compared 11% of the time

VisualCron vs OpCon

Compared 10% of the time

Automic Automation vs OpCon

Compared 5% of the time

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MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 31% of the time

Control-M vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 20% of the time

Automic Automation vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 9% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 9% of the time

AppWorx Workload Automation vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 2% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

OpCon

August 2025

Download OpCon product report

Buyer's Guide

Tidal by Redwood

July 2025

Download Tidal by Redwood product report

Also Known As

No data available

Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler

Overview

OpCon enhances automation with features like auto-scheduling and Corelation KeyStone integration, empowering users with self-service capabilities. Its intuitive interface and flexibility boost productivity, providing reliable automation and efficient file transfers.

OpCon is a powerful automation platform known for streamlining operations through features like auto-scheduling and robust integration capabilities. It facilitates seamless automation, allowing users to execute tasks without direct environment access and simplifies job dependencies. Users benefit from self-service capabilities, which enable easy task execution by non-IT staff, reducing errors and human intervention. With its modern interface, OpCon supports efficient file transfers and integrates effectively with multiple systems, enhancing productivity. While offering significant scalability, OpCon users suggest improvements in web functionality, script-writing, and graphical displays, along with enhancements in user authorization and notification systems. There is also a need for better template management, clearer logging, improved mobile accessibility, and expanded training resources.

What are OpCon's Key Features?

Auto-scheduling: Efficiently automates task scheduling.
Corelation KeyStone Integration: Allows for automation without direct environment access.
Self-service Capabilities: Enables non-IT users to execute tasks with ease.
Modern Interface: Simplifies job dependencies and task management.
File Transfers: Supports secure and efficient file management.
Flexibility: Integrates with diverse systems to boost productivity.

What ROI Can Users Expect?

Increased Productivity: Automation reduces manual task dependency.
Error Reduction: Streamlined processes minimize human intervention.
Scalability: Supports growing business needs effectively.
Time Savings: Frees up resources for strategic initiatives.

OpCon is widely used in industries like financial services, where automation and scheduling tasks are critical. Financial institutions rely on OpCon for core processing tasks, including reporting, automated workflows, and vendor file exchanges. The platform handles high volumes of jobs across platforms, ensuring efficient operations and reducing reliance on manual processes.

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

July 2025

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