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OpCon vs VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator 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
6.4
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
OpCon
Ranking in Workload Automation
13th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Aria Automation Orch...
Ranking in Workload Automation
16th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of JAMS is 3.1%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpCon is 2.4%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator is 1.4%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
JAMS3.1%
OpCon2.4%
VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator1.4%
Other93.1%
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.
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.
Mayank-Goyal - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Consultant at MBCOM
Have streamlined multi-cloud provisioning and reduced virtual machine delivery time from days to hours
In terms of Orchestrator as a tool there is a lot of room for improvement, specifically in being more developer-friendly though it has come a long way. From that perspective, certain modern features are missing, especially when compared to developer tools such as Visual Studio Code or other code editors. That's essential, considering it's the primary development tool for VMware. In terms of Automation, there should be more features that align with what public cloud interfaces can provide. Not everyone is a developer; therefore, if they can offer out-of-the-box features for the most common scenarios that customers need, it would be highly beneficial for end users.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"JAMS has been a beneficial monitoring tool for our project in terms of being able to deliver data that is essential for users."
"The dashboard is intuitive."
"The most valuable feature is the easily accessible data in the database because we run a lot of SQL scripting against the database."
"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."
"While I appreciate the other features, the agent stands out for its ease of installation and configuration for JAMS monitoring."
"JAMS has improved my organization by taking a myriad of manual processes and allowing us to automate them. It enables our folks to focus more on tasks that require their human intelligence and their creativity and less on just mundane tasks. It increases efficiency, accuracy, and consistency."
"The key benefits about JAMS is having the ability to run long running jobs on-premise as compared to products like Azure Data Factory."
"What my team needs are tools to reliably execute all the jobs, minimize the risks, and support high-availability, and JAMS does the job."
"The end code response allows us to evaluate how a process finished, set the termination/end code appropriately, and then trigger further processing based on how it ended."
"Previously, we would receive a file from a vendor, then we would have to go through and make changes to individual accounts in our core system. There are probably between 10 to 20 accounts any given week. It probably took around five minutes for it to run through the report and make all the changes, and that was if there was nothing complicated with all very straightforward changes. Now, that is done in 30 seconds."
"Using OpCon has brought us better visibility into our world production tasks."
"OpCon has absolutely streamlined our operations."
"The whole product is valuable to us because of the integrations that it has with the MCP and the Windows environments. You have to have the agent on each one of them that you want to monitor. The integrations that we have created are along the lines of extracting files and sending them through SFTP to another vendor. Those are the things that were taking a lot of time away from my staff."
"The solution has streamlined operations. We have written custom jobs to do particular things, but OpCon is definitely the one that manages running them at particular times. Often times, those jobs have to run after hours. So while we still develop and spend time and man-hours writing code, once it's done, OpCon is running that in the afternoons or evenings. This is usually done during off hours when a person would normally be required to be here and do it. Instead, OpCon is available, consistent, reliable and easy to get things in and working quickly once we develop and get them working. OpCon takes care of the entire process, including notifications that we define if something were to happen so we know what to do next. Again, it's simplifies the entire process."
"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."
"Utilizing OpCon has enabled us to achieve almost 98 percent automation throughout the enterprise, streamline operations from six people to one, free staff to grow into new IT roles, and reduce nightly processing from ten hours to two."
"With automation, I can provision a virtual machine in just one to two hours; this is a drastic improvement."
"Primarily, customers are looking for workflows and day-to-day actions, as well as advanced templates."
"The best features of VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator include peace of mind and lesser complexity; simplicity is crucial, and there is no complexity in the system."
 

Cons

"I'm not sure if they have fixed it in a newer version, but there is no global search in the version I have. If I have multiple sub-folders that are named for business units, like HR or IT, and I have to search for a job, I cannot search from the top. I have to go to the HR folder to search for a particular job, or to the IT folder."
"The biggest area with room for improvement is the area that my organization benefits the most from using JAMS, and that is in custom execution methods. I happen to have a very good C# developer. Ever since we got JAMS, he has spent a lot of time talking to JAMS developers, researching the JAMS libraries, and creating custom execution methods. He's gotten very good at it. He is now able to create them and maintain them very easily, but that knowledge was hard-won knowledge. It was difficult to come by, and if I should ever lose this developer, then I would be hard-pressed to find anyone who could create JAMS custom execution methods quite as well as he can since there really isn't all that much help, such as documentation or information, available on how to create custom execution methods."
"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."
"They recently switched to subscription-based pricing, which increased."
"To improve JAMS, it should resolve the issues with the JD Edwards application and the need for the SSH agent in the current version, which has been a problem for a while."
"One thing that I know that the JAMS people said that they were working on that would be huge for us is a search capability so that you could search for tasks. It may be available in version 7 or in a future release of 7. I think that's on their roadmap. But right now, for us to do a search, we have to search through database queries."
"The cost has definitely gone up tremendously. That is where I do know, as much as the feature sets are there, and if the newly acquired company is going to be doing a pushback, they might just say, 'Do we still need to pay this much? Or at that point, should we look into an alternative?'"
"All my machines at work are Macs. JAMS client is a Windows-based thing. It is all built on .NET, which makes perfect sense. However, that means in order for me to access it, I need to connect to a VPN, then log onto one of our Azure VMs in order to access the JAMS client. This is fine, but if for some reason I am unable to do so, it would be nice to be able to have a web-based JAMS client that has all the exact same functionality in it. There are probably a whole bunch of disadvantages that you would get with that as well, but that is definitely something that would make life easier in a few cases."
"It's not something you can just quickly grab, try, run, and play with. You have to get the knowledge and train yourself. It was easy for me, but I also took the time to throw myself into it. There is a learning curve to a certain extent. You have to learn the rules."
"In our environment, OpCon is much more expensive than it used to be a year ago."
"The process of getting automations done and the process of testing them is a little complicated."
"It would be nice to go to a fully thin client."
"The UI refresh rate is really bad and needs improvement."
"Some additional logging-information reporting would also help. They have all the information there but you still have to search around and look back. It's not right there for you, where you click and can get the reporting. You have to know the system and do some additional searches. So reporting is another area that they can build on by simplifying it."
"It does not have the ability to interact with third-parties via the web/Internet. We have certain processes where we have to interact with a third-party on a website, and unfortunately OpCon just cannot do that."
"The biggest area where there is room for improvement would be integration with their code. They've got a function for embedded scripts and it would be nice if that worked with a code or versioning management system, like GitLab."
"Some students, especially beginners, may find the learning curve to be steep due to a lack of requisite knowledge in backend languages like YAML, Python, or JavaScript."
"VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator is a very solid and acceptable product, but after the transition to Broadcom, prices are very high."
"There are areas of VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator that have room for improvement, specifically in being more developer-friendly."
"I would like to see improvements related to AI integration, which could make understanding from a language perspective easier."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing model for JAMS is straightforward and based on the number of agents, not the number of jobs you run. It's cheap and fairly simple."
"Fortra's JAMS pricing structure has deteriorated significantly since its acquisition by Fortra."
"JAMS is priced competitively compared to similar solutions and offers flexible licensing options to cater to user needs."
"This is a good product at a fair price."
"In the end, you'll find that it's really worth the price. There is some sticker shock, but it's worth every dime."
"JAMS is close to the lower end of the pricing models for enterprise scheduling solutions. They are much cheaper than Control-M, as well as some other products that I've used. I also don't know of another solution where you can actually get true, unlimited licensing, where you can have as many instances and as many agents as you want."
"Our licensing is pretty cheap because we have a state solution. So, we pay only $1,000 a year."
"There are no additional costs other than the license for Fortra's JAMS which is affordable."
"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."
"I believe our cost is about $150,000 annually."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"While the overall cost is reasonable, I'm interested in exploring options for making the managed automation solution, specifically the mass solution, more cost-effective."
"It's definitely worth the cost."
"I have seen some contracts, and it seems that Control-M is a lot more expensive than OpCon, but I do not know the pricing of OpCon. Control-M seems to be four or five times more expensive than OpCon."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
16%
Construction Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
5%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
17%
Construction Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise23
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise29
Large Enterprise19
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JAMS?
I was not really involved in the pricing, setup cost, and licensing at that level. I am more involved in the technica...
What needs improvement with JAMS?
To improve JAMS, it should resolve the issues with the JD Edwards application and the need for the SSH client connect...
What is your primary use case for JAMS?
My main use case for JAMS is to install, set up, and configure for customers working with JD Edwards application. A s...
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 aft...
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...
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 ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator?
Currently, I find the pricing to be on the expensive side. After the Broadcom acquisition, the licenses skyrocketed i...
What needs improvement with VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator?
In terms of Orchestrator as a tool there is a lot of room for improvement, specifically in being more developer-frien...
What is your primary use case for VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator?
My use case for VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator or now known as VCF Operations Orchestrator which is part of VCF ...
 

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
LOHR, Carnival Cruise Lines, Herbalife, Digital Federal Credit Union, Synergent, Frandsen Bank & Trust
1. VMware 2. Dell Technologies 3. Cisco Systems 4. IBM 5. Hewlett Packard Enterprise 6. Microsoft 7. Oracle 8. Amazon Web Services 9. Google Cloud 10. Intel 11. Accenture 12. Fujitsu 13. Hitachi Vantara 14. NetApp 15. Red Hat 16. SAP 17. Siemens 18. T-Systems 19. Verizon 20. AT&T 21. Vodafone 22. Orange 23. BT Group 24. Deutsche Telekom 25. Ericsson 26. Nokia 27. Samsung 28. Sony 29. Toshiba 30. Panasonic 31. LG Electronics 32. Philips
Find out what your peers are saying about OpCon vs. VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.