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Stonebranch vs VisualCron 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

Stonebranch
Ranking in Workload Automation
14th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VisualCron
Ranking in Workload Automation
16th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Managed File Transfer (MFT) (16th), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (16th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of Stonebranch is 4.9%, up from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VisualCron is 1.3%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Siddharth Matalia - PeerSpot reviewer
Good GUI and has helpful support but needs a mobile app
This was a migration project where we provided our database, the previous one, and there was a tool that automatically converted the awarded job into Stonebranch. All the conversion was done from the Stonebranch side, and we got a person as well from Stonebranch during migration. There was a person who worked with us a decade back for the AutoSys install as well. He was well aware of our environment, so he helped us a lot. It was easy. It was not that complex. It is much more GUI. That said, we are looking for how the various automation can be done since, through command lines, you can create a number of jobs. While you are creating a single job, it takes 15 minutes with the GUI, however, if you go for the command line, within two or three minutes, your job gets completed. We have built our own solution for automation using some REST API and all those various integrations. It is working for our organization right now. However, we are requesting some kind of solution from Stonebranch. They should have been providing that to us already. For deployment, three or four people were engaged with the setup on their side. To manage everything, they provided us with a person who required help to manage it. Eventually, since it was a cloud platform on their side, if there is some configuration necessary, which they do it. They get a notification, and they fix it very immediately if there is an issue. The response time is very good from their side, and we don't have to worry about maintenance.
Sourav-Dutta - PeerSpot reviewer
It's user-friendly, and I didn't need long to understand the process
We use VisualCron for all our automation needs, like connecting to FileZilla, calling APIs, generating PGP keys, creating encryption files with the PGP key login to Azure, etc. It can automatically log in to SQL Server and execute SQL script jobs in bulk. We had 2,000-3,000 users at my previous…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The ability to monitor tasks that are on the open-system side as well as our mainframe side gives us a one-window view of all our processes."
"Stonebranch performs well, and the graphical representation is excellent. Overall, it requires more technical effort from our teams, but the solution is intuitive, so anybody can use it."
"I can name the aliases on the agent, so if we need a passive environment for an agent, that's one of the nice features. If our primary goes down, I can bring up the passive one and I don't have to change anything in the scheduling world. It will start running from that new server."
"I like the dashboard and the various workflows."
"The support is good from Stonebranch Universal Automation Center."
"I love the Universal Controller. It's been great for us. We host it on-premise... It's High Availability, meaning there's failover from one server to the other if one goes down."
"The interface is very user-friendly and easy to navigate."
"I have found the agents to be so much simpler, when compared to ESP."
"The most valuable feature of VisualCron is its ability to schedule interactive jobs so that you can have interdependencies within the job and interdependencies of a job on another job, and so on."
"'ve only had a few cases where I've had to request support in the past 12 years of use, but the support response time and resolution were was extremely quick."
"What I like about VisualCron is that like its name, it's a very visual tool. In my previous company, there were a lot of scripts for all kinds of services, and through VisualCron, you get to group all flows and get a nice visual overview. VisualCron also has an alerting feature, so you receive alerts from it. VisualCron makes everything clearer and easier to maintain. Every other solution that I was looking for almost always needed a programmer, but with VisualCron, you can do what you need to do without programming skills, so this is another valuable feature of the tool."
"What I found most beneficial from VisualCron is that you can directly connect it with different databases, user accounts, and credentials. You can run queries from one machine to another using the credentials, unlike PowerShell, that's run by the machine itself. With VisualCron, you can directly ask other machines and run requests through user credentials. Suppose you have an AWS or Azure environment. In that case, you can maintain the connection between on-premises and cloud-based machines, which is the type of setup in the organization I'm working for. You can directly call some of the services via VisualCron on your local on-premises machine, and I found that an excellent feature of the tool."
"It has improved our organization with more automation within the business departments and less administration and development in the IT department. Usually, as the IT department, we are the bottleneck for many requirements within the business. With this tool, the business departments are able to perform many task themselves."
"VisualCron is a very powerful program to automate different steps in your business processes. We use it to automate replacing files and inform departments about the replacement."
"We don't have to do any coding. We just plug and play and it works."
"It helped us reduce manual steps."
 

Cons

"It can be hard to manage the task monitor."
"I have a request regarding our agent on the mainframe. It may time out when communicating to the Universal Controller, when the mainframe is extremely busy. That can cause a task which is running at that time to not see the results of the job that ran on the mainframe. It happens sporadically during times of really busy CPU usage. We're expecting that enhancement from them in the fourth quarter."
"Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics."
"There is a component called the OMS, which is the message broker. We rely on infrastructure, resiliency, and availability for that piece. If that could change to be highly available just as a software component, so that we don't have to provide the high-available storage, etc. for it, that would be a plus. It would just be cheaper to run."
"I would rate Stonebranch somewhere in the middle for ease of setup. It wasn't too straightforward for us because our infrastructure is complex."
"The Universal Controller is decent for the money it costs... It needs some work to have full features, compared to other products that are out there, specifically IBM's Workload Scheduler."
"Occasionally, we have an agent that doesn't come back up after patching. That doesn't happen very often... It's really just a restart of the agent and it comes back up. But that might be one thing that could be improved."
"There is room for improvement with its connectivity with the Microsoft SRS system. It is very weak. They keep telling us it works with it, and technically it does, but it does not provide a lot of visibility. We have lost a lot of visibility migrating to Stonebranch, compared with just running tasks on the SRS server. That's really about the only thing that is a sore point for us."
"VisualCron is software, and you will experience performance degradation when you scale up. VisualCron takes too much memory or CPU power. We have to increase the hardware resources of a specific server or system."
"The documentation is a bit weak."
"VisualCron seems to operate like an efficient machine when it comes to improvements and enhancements and new features. I always appreciate the quick response I get when bringing up an issue or coming up with suggestions. I've mentioned before that it would be great to see a move away from SQLCE and XML configuration files."
"I want to improve the UI in VisualCron, as it's not as user-friendly, particularly when setting up the task scheduler. If you're familiar with the tool, then no problem, but if not, you'll have a problem typing text because sometimes, the cursor points to other places, so there's an issue with text box alignment in VisualCron. That was painful for me when I was just a VisualCron novice, but when you become used to it, there won't be a problem."
"The only problem I face when I use the tool is that it doesn't contain much documentation or it doesn't have many video tutorials on its features."
"VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve."
"Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way."
"An area for improvement in VisualCron is its cluttered interface. It isn't always easy to find all functionalities, so what VisualCron needs is a user interface expert who can improve the interface. There's a learning curve in terms of finding what you need from the interface of VisualCron. The technical support for VisualCron also needs improvement in terms of response time. Currently, there's no live support or hotline you can call to get quick answers, so this is what I'd like to see in the next version of VisualCron. A less cluttered and more streamlined interface, where you don't need to hunt for some of the features, is also what I'd like to see in the next VisualCron update."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When we reviewed this solution against other vendors, Stonebranch blew everybody out of the water in terms of cost."
"Stonebranch is cheaper than Control-M, so many companies are using Stonebranch."
"The price of the solution is at a medium level compared to the competition."
"Outside of licensing fees, there aren't any other costs."
"I don't have pricing information, but I do know it's cheaper than our old legacy system. Other than the standard licensing fees there are no additional costs."
"We are fine with a rather cheap setup. Licensing with VisualCron is fair. You have a simple one-year licence in different sizes. There isn't a licensing jungle with hundreds of options and opt-ins."
"The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."
"VisualCron is correctly priced because it wasn't very cheap, and it wasn't overly expensive, so the price for it was set correctly. When my previous company bought VisualCron, it was €800 per server per year. On a scale of one to five, I would rate the pricing for VisualCron a five because it was just right. The tool was affordable, and it has one of the most competitive pricing in the market."
"ROI is 95 percent."
"ROI is one month."
"The price is a bit high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
25%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Insurance Company
8%
Computer Software Company
27%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Insurance Company
9%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about VisualCron?
The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%.
What needs improvement with VisualCron?
The documentation is a bit weak. The tool must provide a better set of documentation.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Stonebranch Universal Automation Center
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nissan, Coop, United Supermarkets, Groupon, CSC, Orbitz, Johnson & Johnson, BMW, Qantas.
7 Eleven, ABB Sécheron SA, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Amazon Europe Core, Apple, Assa Abloy, Aston Martin, Banco Santander, BMW (Australia)
Find out what your peers are saying about Stonebranch vs. VisualCron and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.