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ActiveBatch by Redwood vs BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Aspera Managed File Transfer
Sponsored
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
13th
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
ActiveBatch by Redwood
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
6th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (6th), Workload Automation (6th)
BMC Control-M Managed File ...
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
5th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Managed File Transfer (MFT) category, the mindshare of Aspera Managed File Transfer is 3.5%, up from 2.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ActiveBatch by Redwood is 1.8%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is 4.8%, up from 4.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed File Transfer (MFT)
 

Featured Reviews

Michele Illiano - PeerSpot reviewer
Beneficial quick protocol, powerful, but limited use cases
Aspera Managed File Transfer should be packaged into another solution. Explaining to customers you need to have multiple solutions from multiple vendors for their use cases can get complicated for them to understand. The best way to propose a suite is to have an integrated suite where the customer could choose to license part of it. This solution could be one solution not two choices between 10 or 12 different solutions. The main feature of Aspera Managed File Transfer is the communication protocol, which is fast. There are a lot of different clients that are offering features related to these fast protocols. It's possible to create one unique suite that can handle this base protocol. It will be quite easy to propose to the customers.
Shubham Bharti - PeerSpot reviewer
Flexible, easy to use, and offers good automation
Occasionally, I find myself contemplating if there is room for improvement in the user interface (UI), and envisioning that with certain enhancements. 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. New users might encounter a minor setback due to the absence of readily accessible training videos, which could have otherwise proven to be an invaluable resource in aiding their initial familiarization with the platform, potentially hindering their seamless onboarding process and delaying their ability to harness the software's full range of capabilities to its utmost potential.
Alan Arnold - PeerSpot reviewer
Stable, straightforward to deploy, and works as advertised
The most valuable thing is that it works as advertised. We don't take advantage of some of the features like we should because that's not our primary role and responsibility in the environment that we manage. We only want to make sure that a file gets to where it was supposed to go, or we pull in a file and it comes to us correctly. There are some GUI interfaces that we take a look at that tell us the number of transfers and the servers that are being utilized the most for capacity management and performance management. That's about it.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Aspera Managed File Transfer is an optimal solution for customers who want to transfer large files to remote sites with lower bandwidth and in less time."
"The main feature of Aspera Managed File Transfer is that it's an incredibly fast protocol, you can use all the bandwidth available. If I need to send large amounts of data this is the fastest protocol on the market. I have been using it for some minor projects and it is very powerful."
"Good user interface and ability to set up multiple file transfer jobs."
"It can connect to a number of third-party/legacy systems."
"One of the most valuable features of this solution is the versatility of the prebuilt jobs."
"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."
"ActiveBatch can automate predictable, repeatable processes very well. There is no real trick to what ActiveBatch does. ActiveBatch does exactly what you would expect a scheduling piece of software to do. It does it in a timely manner and does it with very little outside interference and fanfare. It runs when it is supposed to, and I don't have to jump through a bunch of hoops to double check it."
"For developers, it is easy to orchestrate the workflows and the integration has been very easy."
"The automation feature is a very valuable feature as the associates do not have to worry about performing repetitive tasks (i.e. endpoint security scans on a daily basis) that would take several hours to complete on a daily basis."
"From a scheduling point of view, it is pretty good."
"There are hundreds of pre-built steps."
"The most valuable feature is the automation process."
"It has a nice dashboard for loading up the file transfers, so it's easy to follow the success or failure rates of the operations."
"The scalability of this solution is very good. The current solution is used wide spread in my company, but I don't have any plans to expand."
"The most valuable thing is that it works as advertised. We don't take advantage of some of the features like we should because that's not our primary role and responsibility in the environment that we manage. We only want to make sure that a file gets to where it was supposed to go, or we pull in a file and it comes to us correctly."
"Dashboard and recovery are the features I found most valuable in the solution."
"Our customers find the self-service feature the most valuable. Control-M offers great value to businesses by providing an option to see different flows and control and orchestrate the sequence of the execution. It is easy to use and integrate with different solutions. It is a good solution that is easy to implement and deliver."
"Its stability and the feature list are rich compared to other tools in the market."
"The solution is stable."
 

Cons

"Aspera Managed File Transfer should be packaged into another solution. Explaining to customers you need to have multiple solutions from multiple vendors for their use cases can get complicated for them to understand."
"The solution's pricing is high and should be reduced."
"Deployment is complex and it was difficult to get support."
"It could be easier to provide dashboards on how many jobs are running at the same time; more monitoring."
"A cloud option is not provided as a free feature, making it a costly solution for smaller organizations."
"Except for the GUI, everything looks good."
"ActiveBatch UI could use a little more help, and video tutorials would be greatly appreciated for user guides."
"There are some issues with this version and finding the jobs that it ran. If you're looking at 1,000 different jobs, it shows based on the execution time, not necessarily the run time. So, if there was a constraint waiting, you may be looking for it in the wrong time frame. Plus, with thousands of jobs showing up and the way it pages output jobs, sometimes you end up with multiple pages on the screen, then you have to go through to find the specific job you're looking for. On the opposite side, you can limit the daily activity screen to show only jobs that failed or jobs currently running, which will shrink that back down. However, we have operators who are looking at the whole nightly cycle to make sure everything is there and make sure nothing got blocked or was waiting. Sometimes, they have a hard time finding every item within the list."
"The user interface can be improved so that it is more appealing and accessible to new users."
"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."
"There is this back and forth, where ActiveBatch says, "Your Oracle people should be dealing with this," and Oracle people say, "No, we don't know anything about ActiveBatch." Then, it all falls back on me as to what happens. Nobody is taking responsibility. This is the biggest failing for ActiveBatch."
"We're only using the functionality that we need to use. However, we've had an opportunity to work with one application owner here who wanted to do some transfers in the cloud and things like that. I know that there were some challenges on that, but they finally got all that set up. There was a learning curve though."
"BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer has a scheduler and what they do is capture the steps based on the script, and then they put it into the Control-M job, or task. Any system that has the script behind it the solution can do it."
"Password vaulting would be a feature that should be included."
"An area for improvement in BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is integration. It should be compatible with more solutions. It should have integrations with newer applications as well."
"We have some issues on the SAP side of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer...So, there are some stability issues when it comes to SAP side."
"There are eight different kinds of dashboards in Workflow Insights, but there could be more because there is third party software that provides more dashboard styles."
"I would love to see REST API integration and more plugins for Google Cloud Platform compared to AWS and Azure."
"The solution should improve the out-of-the box conversion tool for migrations so the percentage result isn't so low."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Aspera Managed File Transfer is not an inexpensive solution. I am not aware of many competitors to determine how affordable the price is overall."
"ActiveBatch is currently redesigning themselves. In the past, they were a low cost solution for automation. They had a nice tool that was very inexpensive. With their five-year plan, they will be more enhancement-driven, so they're trying to improve their software, customer service, and the way that their customers get information from them. In doing that, they're raising the price of their base system. They changed from one pricing model to another, which has caused some friction between ActiveBatch and us. We're working through that right now with them. That's one of the reasons why we're why we were evaluating other software packages."
"It allows for lower operational overhead."
"The pricing was fair. There are additional costs for the plugins. We have the standard licensing fees for different pieces, then we have the plugins which were add-ons. However, we expected that."
"I like ActiveBatch Workload Automation's licensing model because they're not holding you down on an agentless model or agent model, where every server needs to have an agent. That's the main selling point of the solution and I hope they stay that way."
"The price was fairly in line with other automation tools. I don't think it's exorbitantly expensive, relatively speaking."
"If you compare ActiveBatch licensing to Control-M, you're looking at $50,000 as opposed to millions."
"I don't think we've ever had a problem with the pricing or licensing. Even the maintenance fees are very much in line. They are not excessive. I think for the support that you get, you get a good value for your money. It's the best value on the market."
"Currently, we are paying approximately $7,000 yearly, which includes support."
"Yearly licenses are based on the number of jobs."
"I switched to this solution within the last year. I switched from the servers payment package to the job payment package, and it is very expensive."
"This solution is very expensive compared to others in the market. Previously it was the only solution in our country to offer this kind of functionality. However, technology has caught up and many competitors offer the same at a lower price."
"I rate the solution's price a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is low or really affordable, and ten is high or really expensive. It is a really expensive tool."
"It was a little bit pricey. They were proud of the product. A particular module was not free. However, BMC was able to negotiate that particular module into our whole contract itself without having to negotiate an individual price for that module. All that was included in a one-time negotiation, and we've signed a five-year contract on that."
"Apart from the standard license, if we avail any additional features, there's an extra cost. For example, Workload Archiving is an additional feature from the standard product, so we pay extra for that."
"BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is expensive."
"BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer has reasonable pricing. What you pay for is the task or job, and as it's a module, it's complimentary, so you save about twenty percent of the job cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
8%
Insurance Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
10%
Insurance Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
32%
Computer Software Company
10%
Insurance Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Aspera Managed File Transfer?
Aspera Managed File Transfer is an optimal solution for customers who want to transfer large files to remote sites wi...
What needs improvement with Aspera Managed File Transfer?
The solution's pricing calculation needs revision to be more competitive
What advice do you have for others considering Aspera Managed File Transfer?
Aspera Managed File Transfer has superior technology. Overall, I rate Aspera Managed File Transfer a nine out of ten.
What do you like most about ActiveBatch Workload Automation?
Managing the workload and monitoring the tasks were very difficult with manual interventions. Now, by using ActiveBat...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ActiveBatch Workload Automation?
I'd advise users to start by knowing what the actual requirement is and thoroughly assess the automation needs. New u...
What needs improvement with ActiveBatch Workload Automation?
After upgrades we are facing a few issues and errors triggered, so focusing on this would be appreciated. Some of the...
What do you like most about BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer?
It is a highly scalable solution...I rate the product's initial setup a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is d...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer?
We are not paying separately for MFT. It comes included with the contract, license, and software package. In addition...
What needs improvement with BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer?
Improvements could be made in naming conventions, such as adding dates and timestamps to filenames after replacing th...
 

Also Known As

No data available
ActiveBatch
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Gwinnett County Public Schools, Evonik, Voith, BITMARCK, Oracle
Informatica, D&H, ACES, PrimeSource, Sub-Zero Group, SThree, Lamar Advertising, Subway, Xcel Energy, Ignite Technologies, Whataburger, Jyske Bank, Omaha Children's Hospital
British Sky Broadcasting
Find out what your peers are saying about ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.