We performed a comparison between ActiveBatch Workload Automation and Control-M 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 praised for its versatility and ease of use. Users appreciate the prebuilt jobs, scheduling, monitoring, and alerting mechanism provided by the software. It is also commended for its scalability and intelligent automation features. Control-M stands out in areas such as Managed File Transfer, credentials vault, integration capabilities, Role-Based Administration, collaboration, and forecasting. Users find the software to be particularly useful for these functionalities.
ActiveBatch improvements include managed file transfer, subscription model transition, cloud aspect, interface, crashes, triggers, monitoring dashboard, price, documentation, help center, setup process, email alerts, lag/stability issues, customization options, and customer support. Control-M needs enhancements in microservices, API integration, web interface, testing/quality assurance, reporting, customization, upgrade process, distributed architecture, third-party tool integration, FTP job logs visibility, and QA testing.
Service and Support: ActiveBatch Workload Automation has been praised for its customer service, with users appreciating the helpful, reliable, and responsive support team. Control-M has received mixed feedback. Some customers have praised the prompt and knowledgeable support team, while others have faced slow response times and a lack of proactive assistance.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for ActiveBatch Workload Automation was smooth and uncomplicated. Nevertheless, there is a minor requirement for additional instructional material when importing files. Control-M had a direct setup procedure, although a few users mentioned a learning curve and the necessity to manually convert jobs and scripts.
Pricing: ActiveBatch Workload Automation is highly regarded for its flexible and reasonably priced setup cost. Users appreciate the ease and speed of the process. Control-M's pricing and licensing elicit varied opinions, with some users considering it costly and perplexing.
ROI: ActiveBatch Workload Automation has proven to be highly effective, leading to substantial financial gains for users. It has resulted in a significant boost in net revenue. Control-M offers a more cost-effective solution, improving overall efficiency and providing advanced automation features.
Comparison Results: ActiveBatch Workload Automation is the preferred product over Control-M according to user reviews. It is praised for its simplicity and ease of use during setup. ActiveBatch offers more versatility and ease of configuration, with prebuilt jobs and a user-friendly interface. Its pricing is considered reasonable and competitive, especially for smaller companies.
"One of the most valuable features is the job templates. If we need to create an FTP job, we just drag over the FTP template and fill out the requirements using the variables that ActiveBatch uses. And that makes it reusable. We can create a job once but use it for many different clients."
"I found ActiveBatch Workload Automation to be a very good scheduling tool. What I like best about it is that it has very less downtime when managing many complex scheduling workflows, so I'm very impressed with ActiveBatch Workload Automation."
"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."
"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."
"It can connect to a number of third-party/legacy systems."
"There are hundreds of pre-built steps."
"One of the most valuable features of this solution is the versatility of the prebuilt jobs."
"From a scheduling point of view, it is pretty good."
"We can set up automated email notifications to the programmers or the whole team for a particular job. It helps save time because we're not consistently looking at the job to see if it has ended or failed."
"The File Watcher utility, cyclic jobs, and email alert notification are valuable."
"Before Control-M, we didn't have a centralized view and could not view what happened in the past to determine what will happen in the future. The Gantt view that we have in Control-M is like a project view. It is nice because we sometimes have some application maintenance that we need to do. So, in a single console, we can hold the jobs for the next hour or two. We can release that job when it is finished. This is a really nice feature that we didn't have before. It is something really simple, but we didn't previously have a console where we could say, "For the next two hours, what are the jobs that we will run? And, hold these jobs not to run." This is really important."
"Control-M has helped us resolve issues 70% to 80% faster. It provides us with alerts instead of having someone go to that particular server and check the logs to determine where the issue is. We can simply click on the alert information, then everything is in front of us. This provides us with time savings, human effort savings, and process savings."
"Control-M has enabled true enterprise batch automation, which combined with the other BMC Control products on our mainframe platform, allows us to run a 24/7 site with the lights out."
"We used Control-M's Python Client and cloud data service integrations with AWS and, as a feature, it was very customizable. It gave us a lot of flexibility for customizing whatever data maneuver we wanted to do within a pipeline."
"The pressure on our operations and our maintenance has been reduced."
"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."
"Any product is going to have some room for improvement, no matter what. I see the company has already ventured into AWS and they're constantly trying to improve the managed file transfer which they have recently improvised. I think they bought a software called JSCAPE and they're trying to improve it, which is good. I am not sure if JSCAPE would be part of the base product but currently, you have to buy a separate license for it, which doesn't make sense. If it was Microsoft, ServiceNow, or integrating with other software vendors, I would understand but JSCAPE is now in-house and I'm not sure if they can justify having a separate license for JSCAPE. I would probably expect them to be packaging JSCAPE into the base product. They did switch over from a perpetual license model to a subscription model, which hurt the company a little bit. Nobody is offering the perpetual model anymore. As long as the transition is fair for both the companies, I think it should be fine and not burn us out."
"A nice thing to have would be the ability to comfortably pass variables from one job to another. That was one of the things that I found difficult."
"Providing some detailed training materials could be very helpful for new users who have very limited technical information about the tool."
"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."
"As more organizations are moving towards a cloud-based infrastructure, ActiveBatch could incorporate more capabilities that support popular cloud platforms, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud."
"Whenever there is an overload, we are seeing crashes happening."
"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 documentation is very limited, and it can be improved."
"The response time could be faster when you need a person to answer your questions. There are situations where availability becomes crucial."
"The company has been working with BMC on the MFT. There are still some things about MFT which don't work the way that we want with our needs. So, we would like to see that improved."
"We've also had a few database bugs within our organization. I think we are migrating to OpenJDK rather than just regular Java and that has since shown some issues with our Control-M instance, timing out and causing our jobs to stop running. We are still working with BMC to fine-tune that and get that resolved."
"The stability of Control-M has Not been great. A big thing we've been trying to work on with BMC is observability. Modern applications should be observable and resilient, but we're finding that sometimes Control-M is not very resilient and many times Control-M is not very observable."
"I am unsure if Control-M is compliant with Microsoft Azure environment integrations. We have some clients in Azure environments. Specifically, in Canada, government agencies and nonprofits mostly use Microsoft Azure."
"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 biggest improvement they could have is better QA testing before releases come out the door."
"A smartphone interface would be welcome."
ActiveBatch by Redwood is ranked 6th in Process Automation with 35 reviews while Control-M is ranked 4th in Process Automation with 110 reviews. ActiveBatch by Redwood is rated 9.2, while Control-M is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of ActiveBatch by Redwood writes "Flexible, easy to use, and offers good automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Control-M writes "We have seen quicker file transfers with more visibility and stability". ActiveBatch by Redwood is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal by Redwood, Redwood RunMyJobs, VisualCron and IBM Workload Automation, whereas Control-M is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Rocket Zena, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence and Automic Workload Automation. See our ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Control-M report.
See our list of best Process Automation vendors, best Managed File Transfer (MFT) vendors, and best Workload Automation vendors.
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