Comparisons of H-mode regimes were carried out on the Alcator C-Mod and JFT-2M tokamaks. Shapes were matched apart from aspect ratio, which is lower on C-Mod. The high recycling steady H-mode on JFT-2M and enhanced D-alpha (EDA) regime on C-Mod, both of which feature very small or no ELMs, are found to have similar access conditions in q95 − ν* space, occurring for pedestal collisionality ν* ≳ 1. Differences in edge fluctuations were found, with lower frequencies but higher mode numbers on C-Mod. In both tokamaks an attractive regime with small ELMs on top of an enhanced Dα baseline was obtained at moderate ν* and higher pressure. The JFT-2M shape favoured the appearance of ELMs on C-Mod and also resulted in the appearance of a lower frequency component of the quasicoherent mode during EDA.