We performed a comparison between Appian and Control-M based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Process Automation solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Appian helps you do a lot of things. It's easy to configure and build an application platform, and it offers a lot of features that you find in an RPA solution. It's flexible so you can reuse it for a variety of use cases."
"The initial setup is easy."
"It reduces development time in half making us more efficient."
"The most valuable features are the low coding and low code data."
"Write to Data Store Entity - Saving data in SQL databases is done easily using entities. Entities (CDTs in Appian terminology) define relationships and target schema tables via XSD files."
"The solution's most valuable features are the regular periodic and quarterly updates, they are very useful updates. They keep improving the solution more often, and that helps the platform or code always be up to date with the latest features."
"It provides us with real-time data on all connected systems in terms of how they're integrated with each other and how they are performing in a workflow manner."
"The low code functionality and being able to get applications faster to customers or to the market are valuable."
"I find it very helpful to be able to keep track of all our help desk tickets."
"The initial setup is largely straightforward."
"The product has improved dramatically over the years; it offers a lot in terms of features and capabilities and integration with third-party tools. A wide range of models available with the product is critical in reducing manual and mundane work such as custom script writing. This saves significant amounts of time and, by association, money for the organization."
"Because it's a tool which allows us to do scheduled work, it allows for notifications when jobs aren't running within that scheduled time frame. This improves the opportunity to meet SLAs."
"The File Transfer component is quite valuable. The integration with products such as Informatica and SAP are very valuable to us as well. Rather than having to build our own interface into those products, we can use the ones that come out of the box. The integration with databases is valuable as well. We use database jobs quite a bit."
"Its compatibility with the new technologies and platforms, like the Google Cloud or Amazon, is the most valuable. Its console allows us to view the duration and execution of a process. It is also very easy to use and easy to implement."
"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."
"Our data transfers have improved using Control-M processes, e.g., our monthly batches. When we used to do things manually, like copying files and reports, we used to take three to four days to complete a batch. However, with the automated file transfers and report sharing, we have been able to complete a batch within two and a half days and our reports are on time to users. So, 30% to 40% of the execution time has been saved."
"Architecture of product and scalabiility issues."
"Even though the company has made great improvements in online documentation, featuring rich material which includes case studies of real-life use cases, the material could definitely be better in quality and coverage of use cases."
"A point of improvement would be the SAIL forms. The built-in tool used to generate forms does not have debugging support (to view local variables as they change on live preview, and step-by-step valuation) which is a big drawback for form development. Moreover, the script language used to build SAIL forms does not support inheritance or lambda expressions (functions as arguments of other functions), which makes the code base more verbose."
"Something I would like to see improved is an SQL database connection."
"The biggest areas of improvement would be in facilitating team development, DevOps, and integration with typical tools used in enterprise development (Jenkins, Subversion, etc.)"
"If we could calculate the amount of data that will be realized, it would help us a lot."
"There could be a scope of enhancement for capturing the variety of use cases."
"What could be improved is more on the front end perspective, like the user interface and the mobile application aspect."
"It can definitely expand promotions, so that a single job can be moved. Currently you can only promote a job by promoting the entire table."
"When it comes to supporting cloud services, Control-M is a bit slow. We are not advancing with the technology because we don't have the modules that can interact or use the new application services provided by the cloud technologies."
"You need to pay for extra features if you need them."
"Consider adding a mobile application for remote management."
"A Control-M on-prem license is based on the number of jobs, which is the number of tasks a particular customer wants to have. These tasks have to be run within 24 hours window. For example, if you have a license for 100 jobs, you can run a maximum of 100 jobs in a 24-hour window. If your operations could not run 10 jobs, and they ran only 90 jobs, they just carry over to the next day, but the next day, they will have 110 jobs. Control-M asks you to buy those 10 more licenses because you were out of compliance in terms of the number of licenses. This is something that needs to be indicated in Control-M GUI so that customers know the number of licenses they're going to use in this time window. Their support and documentation should be improved. I am not that satisfied with their customer support. Sometimes, they don't have the answers. Their documentation is very poor. It is not well written, and it is not in a very logical manner. You can use it on Unix, Linux, Windows, and AIX, but it needs some improvement on iSeries. It needs a built-in mechanism inside the system to give you an option to restore from the last point of failure. If a process crashes, the Control-M needs to have a mechanism in iSeries where the process can be restored from the last point of failure."
"It has a slight issue with daylight savings time while advancing the clock in the Spring."
"We have some plug-ins like BOBJ, and we need a little improvement there. Other than that, it has been pretty good. I haven't seen any issues."
"A smartphone interface would be welcome."
Appian is ranked 3rd in Process Automation with 58 reviews while Control-M is ranked 4th in Process Automation with 110 reviews. Appian is rated 8.4, while Control-M is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Appian writes "Low resource consumption, easy setup, and stable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Control-M writes "We have seen quicker file transfers with more visibility and stability". Appian is most compared with Microsoft Power Apps, Camunda, ServiceNow, OutSystems and Pega BPM, whereas Control-M is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Rocket Zena, Automic Workload Automation and ESP Workload Automation Intelligence. See our Appian vs. Control-M report.
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