We performed a comparison between Control-M and Rocket Zena 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 a variety of valuable features such as Managed File Transfer, credentials vault, integration capabilities, Role-Based Administration, file transfer integration, collaboration dashboard, scheduling, configuration ease, reporting, workload archiving, and forecasting. Rocket Zena excels in ease of use, user interface, diagram feature, Linux configuration, cross-platform job scheduling, web-based client, whiteboard feature, FTP file transfer, licensing process, technical support, and pricing.
Control-M can enhance its microservices and API integration, address bugs in the web interface, develop a lighter web version, improve reporting capabilities, streamline the upgrade process, and integrate with third-party tools. Rocket Zena needs improvement in providing visibility into connections between applications, monitoring agents, ensuring availability on distributed platforms, enhancing communication between servers and agents, and implementing a notification feature for non-functioning servers.
Service and Support: Control-M's customer service has received both positive and negative feedback from customers. Some customers appreciate the support team's promptness and expertise, while others have concerns about the time it takes to resolve issues. Rocket Zena's customer service has received positive reviews, with customers expressing satisfaction with the fast response time and high-quality support.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for Control-M was considered simple and user-friendly, thanks to the helpful guides and videos provided. However, the need for manual conversion of jobs and scripts added some complexity. The initial setup for Rocket Zena varied among users, with some finding it easier to understand. Although integrating with SAP posed a challenge, once users became familiar with the system, creating use cases became easier.
Pricing: Control-M has received mixed feedback regarding its setup cost, with some users expressing concerns about the expenses associated with hardware and licensing. Rocket Zena is perceived as a cost-effective and affordable alternative, particularly suitable for small businesses.
ROI: Control-M provides reduced overall expenses, increased productivity, centralized connection profiles, and improved automation and workflows. The ROI for Zena is unclear.
Comparison Results: Control-M is highly recommended over Rocket Zena. Users love its simple setup, effortless maintenance, and effective automation. Its standout features include Managed File Transfer, credentials vault, integration abilities, and Role-Based Administration. Users also appreciate its teamwork and unified view dashboard.
"The best part about this product is that it has a lot of features. Control-M doesn't limit us and we can use it for a lot of things."
"If they have ad hoc requirements, then they can theoretically schedule their own file transfers with the Self Service. We are trying to push as much work back to the customers or developers that have that requirement, because they prefer to help themselves, if possible. We try empowering them and enabling them through Control-M, especially for file transfers, because it is a much broader base of the business then just with batch scheduling. Typically, with SAP batch scheduling, it would work with dedicated teams. With file transfers, the entire business is involved. There are business users, end users, etc. It definitely needs to be as simple as possible and as managed as well as possible. They need to manage it themselves, if possible, because our team is not growing but the number of customers, applications, and jobs are growing. We need to hand back some of the responsibility to the customer for them to resolve and action it."
"As soon as you have an issue, a ticket is created and the tech support is quite responsive."
"It has multiple features. You can plan your execution in Control-M. It provides one single window where you can define workflows regardless of geographic boundaries and platforms. A batch process can be executed from this single window. It provides insights into your processes. Your business people will know what process they are running and what is the state of the process. Instead of knowing that they're not going to meet the SLA the next morning, the business people immediately know the changes in their process. Control-M is very easy. I can tell a non-technical person that this is how it works, and he would be able to easily understand it. Business people can understand the methodology of Control-M and the intuitive features that it has. It has a fantastic graphical user interface and is easy to understand. You just have to drag and drop but in a very intuitive way. Monitoring features are also good. It has different color coding schemes, which can help you to understand the status of your workflow. An operator who is not that technical and is just monitoring the status of the application can see by color-coding the status of a process. If anything goes wrong or a process is stuck, it gives you a hint. You can just right-click and see the logs and the output. Even if the system is not right there in the data center and is located somewhere else, you can monitor it right from there and see the workflows."
"It has a very good GUI. We can search for a job very easily. The web interface, user account creation, and access control are very good. From an access control point of view, we can provide access to as many users as we want. A second group of users can be given a certain number of features, according to the requirements. The web interface is very easy for end users to login and use. A lot of features have been added, e.g., adding jobs. They can add jobs to their stuff, whatever they want, then get it validated by the scheduling team and work it into production."
"There is a batch monitoring tool called Batch Impact Manager, which proactively warns when processing is behind and SLAs are in jeopardy of being missed."
"The feature we use most in Control-M is related to the file transfer module. It is quite advanced compared to the other tools like Automate, etc. The new version which has come of same MFT has a lot of advanced features which makes it very easy to work with. There is less need for written programs and more GUI-based stuff."
"The solution is innovative. Specifically for the overseas and time differences, you can feel the efficiency of Batch Impact Manager on jobs, batch processing, and impact management. It works the best on these kinds of issues. It saves us time and money, which is important. We save a lot using Control-M."
"You can click Ctrl-G and bring a diagram view. You're able to view in a diagram format. The view that it provides is easy, and you can move to the left, up, or down. You can double-click on a certain process. It'll drill into that process and all of its underlying components. You can double-click on an arrow or a component, and it'll bring up a screen that'll have all the variables that are assigned to that particular piece, as well as the values at run time. So, the diagram feature of it, at least for me, is pretty valuable."
"In the latest upgrade, Zena added a web-based client. The more I use it, the more I like it. It's an excellent interface. They do a good job of steadily improving the solution to make it more useful."
"I have found the scheduling feature the most valuable. I can map dependencies by using ASG-Zena. It gives a nice, quick visualization as to where things are."
"Its FTP feature is very good, as is scheduling any process or task with the Zena client. I have found it to be very helpful. If a task fails, it gives you a prompt."
"We haven't had any problems since we installed it. It runs as expected, we haven't had any critical problems. It helps keeps the business running 24/7."
"From a Linux configuration point of view, Rocket Zena is straightforward. It's fairly easy to set up the server and agents once you know how to do it."
"I have used other tools with similar capabilities; it's the ease of use."
"I like the whole product, but specifically, I like the license part. It's very easy to acquire a license for this product."
"A lot of businesses are using ServiceNow, which is another tool. I would like there to be some integration with ServiceNow or other third-party tools as well as have easily available integrations. Right now, we need to write scripts. Apart from that, if there were some integrations with an ITSM tool, then that would be good. Because at the end of the day, most of our clients are using different ITSM tools. I know that BMC Remedy is easy to integrate with Control-M. However, if there was availability for Jira as well as other ITSM and DevOps tools, that would be a good improvement."
"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."
"The main area that could be improved would be documentation, just like every other software product out there!"
"Sometimes, with technical support, they will take feedback, but you don't know where that feedback goes or if it proceeds along in the thought process."
"Everybody's biggest gripe is the reporting capability option. It is a gripe because there is a lot of information in Control-M, but the solution doesn't have a good reporting tool to extract that information. Now, if you want all that information, you need to rely on another third-party BI tool to extract the information out of Control-M."
"After we complete FTP jobs, those FTP jobs will be cleared from the Control-M schedule after the noon refresh. So, I struggle to find out where those jobs are saved. Then, we need to request execution of the FTP jobs again. If there could be an option to show the logs, which have been previously completed, that would help us. I can find all other job logs from the server side, but FTP job logs. Maybe I am missing the feature, or if it is not there, it could be added."
"They really need to work on improving the web interface, as there are still a lot of bugs... In general, they need to do a lot of work on shoring up their testing and quality assurance. A lot of bugs seem to make it into the product."
"Advanced File Transfer (AFT) has limitations that cause us to use a bit more licensing than we feel is appropriate."
"The scheduling mapping is a little disjointed. There is no wizard-type approach. There are a lot of different things that you have to do in completely different areas. They could probably add the functionality for creating all components of a mapping or an OPA schedule. The component creation could be done collectively rather than through individual components."
"In the next release, I would like to have an alert feature to indicate when an agent is down. Rocket Zena is not capable of sending alerts that the agent is down. As of now, you have manually monitor to see when the agent is down."
"Another one that is probably a little bit bigger for me is that when there is an issue or there's an error, it writes on a different screen. I have to find the actual process name and go to a different screen to view the alert that got generated. On that screen, everyone's processes, not just the processes of the folks in my department, are thrown. It takes me a while to find the actual error so that I could go in there and look at the alert. It could be because of the way it was set up, but at least for me, it isn't too intuitive."
"One area where it could be improved is communication between the different servers. Sometimes there are processes that have already been completed but we get a status notification that they're still active."
"In the next release, I would like the user experience to be improved. The user interface should be more appealing to gen-z."
"The documentation has room for improvement."
"Rocket Zena is a mainframe-based job scheduler. I would like it to be more open so that we can use it on a distributed platform."
"The UI is not intuitive, and it would be nice if there was a web interface."
Control-M is ranked 1st in Workload Automation with 110 reviews while Rocket Zena is ranked 12th in Workload Automation with 9 reviews. Control-M is rated 8.8, while Rocket Zena is rated 8.4. 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 Rocket Zena writes "A continuously evolving, stable solution, with responsive support". Control-M is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence, Automic Workload Automation and Redwood RunMyJobs, whereas Rocket Zena is most compared with Rocket Zeke, IBM Workload Automation, AutoSys Workload Automation and ActiveBatch by Redwood. See our Control-M vs. Rocket Zena report.
See our list of best Workload Automation vendors.
We monitor all Workload Automation reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
