We performed a comparison between ActiveBatch Workload Automation and Rocket Zena based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: ActiveBatch Workload Automation is highly regarded for its flexibility and wide range of capabilities, including prebuilt tasks, live monitoring, and automatic scheduling. Rocket Zena is commended for its user-friendly design, intuitive interface, diagram functionality, and the ability to schedule jobs across multiple platforms.
ActiveBatch Workload Automation could benefit from enhancements in managed file transfer, transition to a subscription model, cloud aspect, user interface, reliability of triggers, monitoring dashboard, price, documentation, and integration with cloud platforms and DevOps tools. Rocket Zena could improve visibility into connections between applications, monitoring of agents, process limitations, UI loading time, intuitiveness of UI, installation process, task stacking, documentation, distributed platform availability, server communication, and notification feature.
Service and Support: ActiveBatch Workload Automation has been praised for its customer service, as it offers helpful and reliable technical support. However, some customers have expressed concerns regarding the escalation process. Rocket Zena is also known for its positive customer service, with support staff who are knowledgeable and responsive. However, obtaining higher-level support may require more time.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for ActiveBatch Workload Automation was straightforward and uncomplicated, with no significant challenges encountered. However, there was a minor need for additional documentation during the file import process. Setting up Rocket Zena was more varied for users, with some finding it intricate and necessitating comprehension of various components. The integration with SAP posed a particular difficulty.
Pricing: ActiveBatch Workload Automation has a straightforward and quick setup process, with users finding the pricing to be fair and competitive. Rocket Zena is seen as a cost-effective and affordable choice, particularly suitable for smaller businesses.
ROI: ActiveBatch Workload Automation has proven to be highly effective in enhancing net revenue, resulting in noteworthy growth. Rocket Zena offers time-saving benefits and enhances accuracy in job scheduling, thereby reducing stress for engineers and administrators.
Comparison Results: ActiveBatch Workload Automation is highly preferred over Rocket Zena. Users appreciate ActiveBatch's simplicity, versatile features, scalability, and extensive automation capabilities. They find value in the prebuilt jobs, real-time monitoring, and automatic scheduling. ActiveBatch's extensive features and overall ease of use are highly valued.
"Error Handling is one of the best standout features of ActiveBatch."
"The REST API adapters and native integrations for integrating and orchestrating the software stack are very flexible."
"As far as centralization goes it's nice because we can see all these processes that are tied to this larger process. The commissions, FTP processing, the reporting, the file moves to the business users — all that is right there. It's very easy to read. It's easy to tie it together, visually, and see where each of these steps fits into the bigger picture."
"It can connect to a number of third-party/legacy systems."
"ActiveBatch can automate predictable, repeatable processes very well. There is no real trick to what ActiveBatch does. ActiveBatch does exactly what you would expect a scheduling piece of software to do. It does it in a timely manner and does it with very little outside interference and fanfare. It runs when it is supposed to, and I don't have to jump through a bunch of hoops to double check it."
"The software offers real-time monitoring and reporting features that let IT teams keep tabs on the progress of their batch operations and workflows."
"Easy to configure and simple to develop new features."
"The nice thing about ActiveBatch is once we have created a specific job that can be easily be replicated to another job, then minimal changes will have to be made. This makes things nice. Reduction of coding is substantial in a lot of cases. The replication of one job to another is just doing a few minor tweaks and rolling it into production. This decreases our development costs substantially."
"The most valuable feature is the FTP file transfer."
"In the latest upgrade, Zena added a web-based client. The more I use it, the more I like it. It's an excellent interface. They do a good job of steadily improving the solution to make it more useful."
"From a Linux configuration point of view, Rocket Zena is straightforward. It's fairly easy to set up the server and agents once you know how to do it."
"Its FTP feature is very good, as is scheduling any process or task with the Zena client. I have found it to be very helpful. If a task fails, it gives you a prompt."
"I like the whole product, but specifically, I like the license part. It's very easy to acquire a license for this product."
"You can click Ctrl-G and bring a diagram view. You're able to view in a diagram format. The view that it provides is easy, and you can move to the left, up, or down. You can double-click on a certain process. It'll drill into that process and all of its underlying components. You can double-click on an arrow or a component, and it'll bring up a screen that'll have all the variables that are assigned to that particular piece, as well as the values at run time. So, the diagram feature of it, at least for me, is pretty valuable."
"We haven't had any problems since we installed it. It runs as expected, we haven't had any critical problems. It helps keeps the business running 24/7."
"I have used other tools with similar capabilities; it's the ease of use."
"The UI could potentially offer a more refined and user-friendly experience, fostering smoother interactions and facilitating easier navigation for users engaging with the application."
"They have some crucial design flaws within the console that still need to be worked out because it is not working exactly how we hoped to see it, e.g., just some minor things where when you hit the save button, then all of a sudden all your job's library items collapse. Then, in order to continue on with your testing, you have to open those back up. I have taken that to them, and they are like, "Yep. We know about it. We know we have some enhancements that need to be taken care of. We have more developers now." They are working towards taking the minor things that annoy us, resolving them, and getting them fixed."
"The user interface can be improved so that it is more appealing and accessible to new users."
"Some improvements can be made to the user interface."
"A cloud option is not provided as a free feature, making it a costly solution for smaller organizations."
"The thing I've noticed the most is the Help function. It's very difficult, at times, to find examples of how to do something. The Help function will explain what the tool does, but we're not a Windows shop at the data warehouse. Our data warehouse jobs actually run on Linux servers. Finding things for Linux-based solutions is not as easy as it is for Windows-based solutions. I would like to see more examples, and more non-Windows examples as well, in the Help."
"I have faced struggles to understand, set up the tool, and implement it in my early days as a new user."
"It does have a little bit of a learning curve because it is fairly complex. You have to learn how it does things. I don't know if it's any worse than any other tool would be, just because of the nature of what it does... the learning curve is the hardest part."
"In the next release, I would like the user experience to be improved. The user interface should be more appealing to gen-z."
"Rocket Zena is a mainframe-based job scheduler. I would like it to be more open so that we can use it on a distributed platform."
"The UI is not intuitive, and it would be nice if there was a web interface."
"In the next release, I would like to have an alert feature to indicate when an agent is down. Rocket Zena is not capable of sending alerts that the agent is down. As of now, you have manually monitor to see when the agent is down."
"In the web interface, it stacks the tasks across the top, and they accumulate until you close or clean those out. That seems a little cumbersome. You must right-click and close all tabs constantly to keep the console clean and manage your views."
"Another one that is probably a little bit bigger for me is that when there is an issue or there's an error, it writes on a different screen. I have to find the actual process name and go to a different screen to view the alert that got generated. On that screen, everyone's processes, not just the processes of the folks in my department, are thrown. It takes me a while to find the actual error so that I could go in there and look at the alert. It could be because of the way it was set up, but at least for me, it isn't too intuitive."
"The scheduling mapping is a little disjointed. There is no wizard-type approach. There are a lot of different things that you have to do in completely different areas. They could probably add the functionality for creating all components of a mapping or an OPA schedule. The component creation could be done collectively rather than through individual components."
"The documentation has room for improvement."
ActiveBatch by Redwood is ranked 4th in Workload Automation with 35 reviews while Rocket Zena is ranked 12th in Workload Automation with 9 reviews. ActiveBatch by Redwood is rated 9.2, while Rocket Zena is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of ActiveBatch by Redwood writes "Flexible, easy to use, and offers good automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Rocket Zena writes "A continuously evolving, stable solution, with responsive support". ActiveBatch by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal by Redwood and Redwood RunMyJobs, whereas Rocket Zena is most compared with Control-M, Rocket Zeke, IBM Workload Automation and AutoSys Workload Automation. See our ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Rocket Zena report.
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