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AutoSys Workload Automation vs BigFix comparison

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Sponsored
 

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 Scheduler
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
57
Ranking in other categories
Workload Automation (2nd)
AutoSys Workload Automation
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
84
Ranking in other categories
Workload Automation (5th)
BigFix
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
100
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (9th), Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (21st), Patch Management (7th), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (10th), Autonomous Endpoint Management (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Workload Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
AutoSys Workload Automation6.4%
Control-M10.1%
Automic Automation4.5%
Other79.0%
Workload Automation
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
BigFix2.0%
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint6.4%
CrowdStrike Falcon5.5%
Other86.1%
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
 

Featured Reviews

SP
Developer at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
Centralized scheduling has improved automation and reduces manual monitoring for complex workflows
The best features JAMS Scheduler offers are centralized job scheduling, dependency management, and monitoring. I also appreciate the alerts and retry options because they help us handle failures without constantly checking jobs manually. Centralized scheduling makes it easier to manage all our jobs from one place instead of maintaining multiple schedulers or scripts. Dependency management is especially useful for chaining workflows because JAMS Scheduler can automatically trigger the next job only when the required previous step completes successfully. Another useful feature is the monitoring and alerting. If a scheduled job fails or runs longer than expected, we can quickly identify it and take action, which is particularly helpful for production support and reducing manual monitoring. JAMS Scheduler has helped quite a bit with identifying common job failures, missed schedules, dependency issues, and execution errors. The alerts and job history make it easier to identify the failure point and take corrective action without manually checking every workflow. JAMS Scheduler's code-driven automation has been useful for handling more complex scheduling logic and workflows that go beyond simple time-based triggers. It is important for us because we can combine scripts, dependencies, conditions, and parameters to support different production scenarios without creating too much manual intervention.
PK
Assistant VP at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Experience significant automation with robust integration and user-friendly interfaces
There are areas of AutoSys Workload Automation that have room for improvement. They are implementing good enhancements in the R24 release. The web UI needs some improvement. Cloud integrations are limited to 25 or 30 configurable plugins and integrations to the cloud. They can improve in that area. They have separate tools, not AutoSys Workload Automation, such as Atomic and other SaaS-based solutions that can run inside the cloud. AutoSys Workload Automation can be configured in the cloud, but it requires a substantial number of VMs depending on the load. For on-premises deployment, it is a very good solution. They need to increase their footprint in the cloud and improve the web UI. They are making excellent progress in the R24 release.
InderjeetSingh4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
End-to-end automation has simplified patching and software deployment across thousands of servers
There is one feature in BigFix called the automation patch policy that requires enhancement. When an action is initiated through the patch policy, it appears on the console but arrives in chunks. When targeting hundreds of servers from the patch policy, the actions come in chunks such as ten out of six, ten out of nine, or ten out of fifteen. This fragmented approach creates a significant challenge for the patching team to monitor the action status. I would recommend that the development team provide a single action or one to two actions instead of multiple actions requiring individual monitoring. A broad status update could be provided to the client indicating the overall progress of the patch policy implementation rather than requiring monitoring of every individual action. This would reduce the bandwidth required by the team to track multiple actions on the console.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"By using JAMS, my company has seen benefits such as getting to know about Google products and the latest features that are newly launched by Google, and they help me in building my projects portfolio and engaging with knowledge."
"JAMS has helped save IT staff time by automating tasks previously performed with scripts, and its scheduling feature has been particularly useful."
"The dashboard is intuitive."
"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 overall product is fantastic. I love it. It has been a fantastic, solid product. If I have one tiny bit of a problem with it, the support team gets in touch with me right away. I don't know if I've had another service that has been as fantastic as the JAMS support team."
"The most valuable feature is the easily accessible data in the database because we run a lot of SQL scripting against the database."
"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 fact that we no longer need to use Excel spreadsheets is huge. Before JAMS, every group was keeping track of their own batch jobs. Nobody really knew what the other jobs were. So, if jobs failed, other groups wouldn't necessarily know. With JAMS, everything is done through a single scheduler. You can choose who to notify."
"Granular Security enables self-service role-based access."
"After we started using CA Workload Automation, everything became one integrated system and it makes the troubleshooting and monitoring much easier."
"Virtual machine usage: It helped us to schedule the job to run on multiple servers based on the workload."
"The customized views that each individual can create, and views that can be made free-form, makes this very popular with the programmers."
"CA Workload Automation automates across multiple platforms, enables you to tie into audit systems, gives you a lot of visibility as far as workload goes, and allows you to automate it as well."
"It has allowed us to automate many of the functions of our operations staff. For instance, we had production control staff spending two hours a day entering date parms into our daily business processes. And now, CA Workload Automation does it for us."
"In terms of the basic functionality, I found this to be a really excellent tool to work with."
"The best features in AutoSys Workload Automation are its scalability and robustness; it can process a significant amount of jobs within a short period without delays when supported by powerful infrastructure and can communicate with endless agents and scan all 10,000 agent machines within minutes, updating agent statuses in the database quickly."
"It is pretty secure, and it gives extensive vulnerability features as compared to other applications. It supports multiple languages, and the security checks are pretty high as compared to other tools in the market."
"BigFix is a good product with good technical support."
"It is for multiple use cases. A lot of people are looking at it just for security, and that's really endpoint security. The endpoint management part of it in terms of being able to constantly do patching for Windows, Unix, macOS, Cloud, Raspberry, VMware, and all Linux flavors is important, and they are very good at that. They have support for virtually every OS on the market."
"IBM BigFix is one of the easiest client management tools to install."
"Now, the process is centrally controlled, reported, and has an independently formed location (also over Internet)."
"Vulnerability scanning and patch automation."
"BigFix is incredibly fast and accurate in patching, reporting, and remediation."
"BigFix tremendously reduced the amount of work that we had to do on each server in a centralized manner, reduced help desk calls by 60-70%, empowered users with a self-service portal to fix their own problems, and helped us avoid compliance fines in the tens of thousands of dollars by enabling accurate software audits and license verification."
 

Cons

"The product does not allow the users to cut and paste the job names from the screen."
"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."
"In terms of improvements, I believe JAMS can enhance its user interface for better user experiences."
"JAMS could be improved with a web client that is accessible and as fast as a normal website, eliminating the need to RDP to the servers to access the JAMS client."
"JAMS lacks source control features. Our previous solution had job control language, but JAMS doesn't. When migrating between versions, JAMS doesn't migrate all the data, like job change history, etc. Also, the scheduler doesn't have a way to make jobs invisible, so you can temporarily turn a job off if you decide not to run it today."
"JAMS has built-in reporting. I've never really used it. I tried using it a few years ago and I couldn't figure it out. It was wonky. It could be improved upon."
"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?'"
"Fortra is getting much better with documentation and examples, but there is still room for improvement."
"An area for improvement in AutoSys Workload Automation is that it lacks advanced features or advanced built-in functionalities found in competitors, for example, an advanced workflow feature. Even the handling or notification from AutoSys Workload Automation isn't the best in the industry. Other products have very good workflow-related functionalities such as ActiveBatch that's missing in AutoSys Workload Automation, so I wish the tool had those features."
"I am not sure whether it is our limitation or a tool limitation because we haven't yet explored it, but whenever we look for different types of reporting, we have some limitations in getting those. It could be because of the way we have set it up internally in our enterprise, but it would be helpful if we can customize the reporting features and some of the alerts that can go out. When we connect enterprise systems, each one looks for a different use case, and if we can get different types of reporting, it will be helpful."
"To make it a lot more user-friendly, in order to make it so other people can use it without having to do much training with it; the more user-friendly it is, the easier it is to work with."
"It lacks support and integration with cloud computing platforms."
"I've used this product for a long time, but the GUI to me feels outdated."
"The scalability could be improved upon."
"There is always something that can be improved, but I do like this product."
"Some of the reports are either a bit hard to understand or don’t give you what you might expect to see."
"To make it a ten they should improve the licensing. Second, if they could have one environment for everything it would be nice. For you to install compliance you need to install the server, and then you add the modules. For you to install inventory you install the server and then you add the modules. It's not easy to do. When I was doing it before I learned it, it was not straight forward."
"There is limited support or assistance when creating new deployment tasks."
"BigFix should improve its compatibility with other platforms, such as Linux."
"Technical support is getting better. About five years ago, it was horrible."
"It can be improved speed-wise. They can make it a little bit light. If you do any query for servers in bulk, it can take some time. Similarly, creating a job can take some time."
"I remember doing restarts a few times. So, making sure that it is rock solid from an executable perspective is important."
"BigFix is actually a little bit on the expensive side in Turkey because of the dollar's exchange rate in our currency."
"I'd definitely like to see additional feature parody in the web UI versus the console."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is reasonably priced, and we don't have any add-ons."
"Take advantage of its scalability. You can start small. The initial cost is very reasonable. Once you have started picking up the tool and adopting it, then you can scale up from there and buy more agents."
"There are no additional costs other than the license for Fortra's JAMS which is affordable."
"I haven't been involved in the financial side for several years, but we buy one host and unlimited agents, and we get a reasonable price for that. We're happy with the amount we pay and the scalability it provides."
"It's expensive, to be honest, but it does the job."
"The product is reasonably priced, and we don't have any add-ons."
"The pricing is very fair. We have seen very minimal to no price increases over the years. We are not banging down the door of support all the time either. I would imagine if we were a company that submitted a dozen support tickets a week for the last nine years, then it might be a little different because we would be eating up everybody's time. However, for what we get out of it, the pricing is extremely fair. Back when we were originally looking and brought in JAMS, we were looking at a couple of the other competitive products that were in this space, but the pricing from JAMS was far and away better than what the other competitors could offer for the same functionality."
"It's certainly a lot cheaper than Tivoli and Control-M. In comparison to them, you get a lot more bang for your buck. You get pretty much the whole functionality and more, in some cases, when compared to Control-M, but at a fraction of the price."
"People need to pay attention to how they use their ESP agents on the distributed platform. That's where some of the cost comes in, based on how many you need or how many you use."
"There is an annual license to use AutoSys Workload Automation."
"The return on investment would be very high because doing things manually without this product would be extremely expensive."
"I certainly think the pricing is worth the value."
"The price of this solution is reasonable and there is an annual license required."
"CA pricing has been a problem, and not looked upon favorably here at all."
"I don't have information on the exact licensing cost of AutoSys Workload Automation because that's managed by the tools and financing teams. For agents, it's close to $4,00, but for the server setup, it's usually a one-time license initially, and it's AMC which is paid every year and comes close to $8,000 to $10,000."
"We paid to use the solution monthly."
"The tool's price continues to go up. The cost per endpoint can vary, ranging from approximately 30 to 80 dollars per year. Compared to other products, pricing is in the middle. You need to buy an additional database license, but most users already have it."
"The price is reasonable, but our customers find it expensive."
"So, the pricing is slightly more expensive than the others. I have to keep buying licenses every time I add a new device."
"The price is very fair."
"There's not much big cost. We only have to pay the agents' cost for the server, and for the systems."
"I can estimate the reduced cost of servers maintenance to approximatively $500,000."
"You are charged per server and per workstation when using BigFix. ManageEngine is a lot cheaper than BigFix. There are some additional costs, such as support."
"It might be about $23 a client."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
30%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
5%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise30
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise79
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise68
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JAMS?
My experience with pricing for JAMS Scheduler was good. The pricing was reasonable, and the vendor only charged us fo...
What needs improvement with JAMS?
JAMS Scheduler can be improved by sectioning off credentials and also the web functionality and setting that up.
What is your primary use case for JAMS?
My main use case for JAMS Scheduler is to trigger integrations as well as send out alerts and reports. For sending al...
How does Control-M compare with AutoSys Workload Automation?
Control-M acts as a single, centralized interface for monitoring and managing all batch processes, which is helpful b...
What needs improvement with AutoSys Workload Automation?
There are areas of AutoSys Workload Automation that have room for improvement. They are implementing good enhancement...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BigFix?
I rate the price for BigFix as medium, neither low nor high.
What needs improvement with BigFix?
There is one feature in BigFix called the automation patch policy that requires enhancement. When an action is initia...
What is your primary use case for BigFix?
My current use case involves being one of the products and one of the clients implementing this tool.
 

Also Known As

No data available
CA Workload Automation, CA Workload Automation AE
Tivoli Endpoint Manager
 

Interactive Demo

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Teradata, Arconic, General Dynamics, Yum!, CVS Health, Comcast, Ghiradelli, & Boston’s Children’s Hospital
Gaumont, Mercantil do Brasil, CCEE, Hanwha Life
US Foods, Penn State, St Vincent's Health US Foods, Sabadell Bank, SunTrust, Australia Sydney, Stemac, Capgemini, WNS Global Services, Jebsen & Jessen, CenterBeam, Strauss, Christian Hospital Centre, Brit Insurance, Career Education Corporation
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC, JAMS Software, Broadcom and others in Workload Automation. Updated: November 2026.
921,523 professionals have used our research since 2012.