We performed a comparison between Control-M and Fortra's JAMS based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Control-M offers valuable features such as Managed File Transfer, credentials vault, integration capabilities, Role-Based Administration, file transfer integration, and forecasting. Fortra's JAMS provides job dependency tracking, automation capabilities, warnings and notifications, PowerShell integration, ease of use, centralized management, auditing capability, and extensibility through custom execution methods.
Control-M can improve in areas such as enhancing microservices and API integration, addressing bugs in the web interface, developing a lighter web version, and integrating with third-party tools. Fortra's JAMS could use improvement in terms of intuitiveness, search capability, browser version, source control features, documentation, ACL clarity, connectivity issues, notifications, and compliance with the GPG program.
Service and Support: Control-M's customer service is divisive. Some customers have praised the support team for being prompt and knowledgeable. However, others have expressed their dissatisfaction with the slow response. Fortra's JAMS customer service has been consistently well-reviewed. Customers appreciate the team's responsiveness and expertise.
Ease of Deployment: Users found it easy to install the software for Control-M. Fortra's JAMS had a relatively quick and simple setup process, with users following instructions on the webpage. Some manual conversion of jobs and scripts was required for Control-M, however, once set up, it became the heart of operations. Upgrades and migrations for Control-M were smooth. Some users of Fortra's JAMS had minor challenges during setup but were able to seek assistance from JAMS support.
Pricing: Control-M is seen as having high setup costs due to additional expenses like infrastructure and salaries. Pricing and licensing can be confusing and are important factors for users to consider. In contrast, Fortra's JAMS is praised for its fair and reasonable pricing. It offers unlimited licensing and scalability options, making it a cheaper alternative compared to products like Tivoli and Control-M.
ROI: Control-M has proven to be more cost-effective and efficient, with reduced job duration and improved data management. It also offers centralized connection profiles and automation. Fortra's JAMS has saved time, increased productivity, and provided cost-effectiveness.
Comparison Results: Control-M is the favored choice when comparing it to Fortra's JAMS. Users appreciate Control-M for its user-friendly and efficient setup process, useful integrated guides and instructional videos, seamless agent upgrades with no downtime, and valuable features like Managed File Transfer and Role-Based Administration.
"Self Service for repeatable, low impact workload automation processes."
"Control-M has helped to improve our data transfers because it allows us to monitor the execution of the process. With other technologies, we cannot do that."
"The unified view where you can define, orchestrate, and monitor applications, workflows, and data pipelines is important because we have more than one team working on Control-M. We have a support team, a job-creation team, and a SAP team. We can all work together on it. It avoids anyone from working on his part and not using the latest modifications."
"The solution has the power to reduce resources, which is good for business. It is constantly updated to remain compatible with new technologies such as Amazon, Azure, and Google Cloud. It's very easy to take advantage of the compatibilities."
"The most valuable features are the GUI console, stability, and workflow."
"I find it very helpful to be able to keep track of all our help desk tickets."
"It is simple to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines and to ingest data from different platforms. It integrates well between platforms."
"Control-M is useful to automate all critical and non-critical processes. Using Control-M, we can automate application workflows as well as file transfers involved in application workflows. We can also use it to run batches related to applications. Automating these processes reduces the RTO and RPO, which helps in the case of failures. It also helps us to identify bottlenecks and take corrective measures."
"While I appreciate the other features, the agent stands out for its ease of installation and configuration for JAMS monitoring."
"Being able to create a series of chained jobs, which are basically linked jobs is valuable."
"We also use the solution’s Interactive Agents. If we need to push something to our dealer portal, we can just drop a file in a folder and it goes. Running interactive tasks helps me users focus on business processes since I don’t have to take care of running the jobs manually."
"The alerting in it is really targeted... you can set specific alerting so that if jobs in a given folder fail, certain people are alerted. You can also set security at the folder level, so that only people in those areas can go set them. That means that the alerting and security can be set at a very granular level."
"It makes everything that we want to do so much easier. We have had a number of instances in the past where we have had developers who have been working on a project, and even though we have had JAMS for all these years, they will create some SQL Server Agent job, or something like that, to run a task. When it is in code review and development is complete, the question always comes around, "Can JAMS do this?" The answer has always been, "Yes." Pretty much anything we have ever developed could be run by JAMS."
"JAMS is easier to use and cheaper than our previous solution. The installation is more straightforward, and JAMS has a graphical user interface, so it's more accessible."
"The most valuable feature for us is that it's DR-ready. With respect to disaster recovery, it has the built-in capability for failover to our DR site. If all of the required ports are open, it can be done seamlessly."
"I like how you can add new execution methods on the fly. It isn't overly complex to add Python script support to an execution method in the JAMS system. The scheduling is excellent. You can schedule a maintenance window and take that resource unit out of everything. It halts all of the jobs."
"I would like to see automatic license management. And probably more importantly, some kind of machine learning to help identify the optimum automation path."
"One feature I would like to include is in the middle of the monitoring domain. In the monitoring domain, if I have to update a number of jobs, the only way to do it is by manually clicking on each job. I would like a feature that allows me to do a mass update in the jobs, which I feel is still lacking."
"The MFT applications should have more functionality and flexibility within that tool. Having more flexibility with that tool for handling the one to many or many to one concept. Like being able to take data from one source and push it to many locations or pull data from many locations and bring it back into a single source. That's why we still use our TPS program for the file transfers just because we don't have some of those capabilities available to us within MFT."
"The documentation could be improved, and I'd also like to see automatic upgrades."
"I've never been very successful when researching ways to utilize Batch Impact Manager. It's a tool to set up dummy jobs in your job flow and it's supposed to come back to you and say, 'Okay, for this job flow, you are 50 percent complete at a certain point in time'...I would like things like Batch Impact Manager to be a little more user-friendly, out-of-the-box."
"Advanced File Transfer (AFT) has limitations that cause us to use a bit more licensing than we feel is appropriate."
"I'm not sure how the solution fits together with our business modernization initiatives, as there are things outside of my area, even though Control-M is the scheduling tool of the company. They may use other things, e.g., Big Data."
"Control-M reporting is a bit of a pain point right now. Control-M doesn't have robust reporting. I would like to see better reporting options. I would like to be able to pull charts or statistics that look nicer. Right now, we can pull some data, but it is kind of choppy. It would be nicer to have enterprise-level reporting that you can present to managers."
"The product does not allow the users to cut and paste the job names from the screen."
"Fortra is getting much better with documentation and examples, but there is still room for improvement."
"JAMS handles exceptions fairly well but there are some areas where it might improve a little bit. It has to do with being able to automatically handle exceptions, out-of-the-box, rather than having to code them."
"We have had a lot of people working from home who can't always connect to the JAMS server. We use VPN, as most companies do, and we have it set up so that everybody can access the JAMS server. But many times, our people cannot access it... JAMS could do a better job of telling you what the problem is when you try to log in to the server."
"It is important to receive notifications if a charged job fails and SQL is halted. JAMS does not provide halted notifications by default, which is a critical feature that needs to be added."
"The only thing that they could improve on is the fact that they don't have a browser version of JAMS. They've got all the bits and pieces there if you want to build your own web version of it. It does come with a web client, but it's pretty clunky. They could improve on that."
"It does validations when you try to delete an object and if there are any dependencies in place, the deletion process will not proceed... there is no information provided as to what it was that caused the validation to fail... it's quite a tedious process to find which object is getting in the way."
"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."
Control-M is ranked 1st in Workload Automation with 110 reviews while Fortra's JAMS is ranked 5th in Workload Automation with 27 reviews. Control-M is rated 8.8, while Fortra's JAMS is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Control-M writes "We have seen quicker file transfers with more visibility and stability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Fortra's JAMS writes "We can scale up our organization's scheduling and automation without having to add staff to the department". Control-M is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Rocket Zena, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence and Automic Workload Automation, whereas Fortra's JAMS is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal by Redwood, Redwood RunMyJobs and VisualCron. See our Control-M vs. Fortra's JAMS report.
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