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Aspera Managed File Transfer vs Control-M comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Aspera Managed File Transfer
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
13th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Control-M
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
120
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (2nd), Workload Automation (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, 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 Control-M is 4.5%, up from 3.0% 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.
Pedro Fuentes - PeerSpot reviewer
Cost-effective, excellent support, and centralized access and control
They have a department that handles requests for enhancements. I talked to Control-M guys back in October or November when they had a gathering here in Atlanta. We talked about not being able to go back in history in Helix Control-M for more than two weeks. We submitted a request for enhancement. They told us that they are working on it, and they are thinking of expanding that to 30 days. We would like to see it expand to 90 days, but they are working on it. In Control-M, we were able to go back 180 days, but that was on-prem. The storage of that data was on our own servers. We know that storage is money, and we do not expect them to store that much of the data, but at least 30 to 60 days seem proper.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Good user interface and ability to set up multiple file transfer jobs."
"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."
"We were able to effectively nullify the China firewall since the China firewall was disrupting our data transfer."
"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."
"We were able to effectively nullify the China firewall since the China firewall was disrupting our data transfer."
"The most valuable features are the GUI console, stability, and workflow."
"First of all, the shift from manual to automation has been valuable. We have a tool that can automate."
"It is simple to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines and to ingest data from different platforms. It integrates well between platforms."
"Maintaining and monitoring of workloads have been and continue to be the most valuable feature in our environment."
"The multiple scheduling options allow you to do anything you want, whenever you want, and however you want. You can easily be in control when things happen."
"Promotions between environments, as well as local, mass update, versioning, and self-service."
"The most valuable features are the managing of file transfers and the product keeping up with technology."
"The most valuable feature is the reporting function. It allows us to pull up reports for specific information that the end-users are looking for."
 

Cons

"If you want to do a file transfer between two countries, and one is not China, then you have other more affordable options."
"If there is any failure in the data transfer and it can automatically detect and reinitiate it, that would be great."
"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."
"Deployment is complex and it was difficult to get support."
"The solution's pricing is high and should be reduced."
"The initial setup was complex, because I wasn't used to it."
"Regarding product design and R&D, the DevOps pipeline could be improved with better capabilities and automation. API security and authentication is another area that could use improvement; users must have static credential passwords, which is a security concern."
"While they have a very good reporting facility, the reports that I'm asked to produce, a lot of times aren't necessarily what we need."
"We did encounter a few scalability issues. Sometimes, there are too many jobs in our environment on different servers, but that’s not the tool issue, we can simply increase the FS size. However, that requires bank cost; hence the scalability issue."
"The Control-M API does not support SQL database-type jobs, where a job has been configured to use the SQL catalog to locate SSIS."
"I would like to have a web version of Control-M to replace the client. Currently, our support and jobs-creation teams are using the client and that needs to be installed on a PC. It's very heavy, consuming a lot of resources compared to the web portal. I know that they're trying to improve the client with the latest version, but for me, there hasn't been enough improvement yet."
"The biggest improvement they could have is better QA testing before releases come out the door."
"Advanced File Transfer (AFT) has limitations that cause us to use a bit more licensing than we feel is appropriate."
 

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."
"It was close to $10,000 to $20,000."
"This is an expensive product compared to other solutions, although I think that it is a good one. We are in a good position with licensing, as we can run 10,000 jobs."
"It works on task-based licensing."
"There are two different types of licenses available. The first is based on the number of jobs that we run per day, and the other is based on the number of agents that we install. My current project has a contract for five years."
"Its pricing is a little bit high. They could provide an enterprise-level license for an unlimited number of jobs. Currently, it is based on the number of jobs, and if you exceed the number of jobs, there are charges. For example, if your license is for 3,000 jobs per day, but you run 3,050 jobs, you will have to pay for the extra 50 jobs. They charge $120 per job. So, it is too costly."
"You must accept that BMC licensing can be very confusing. No one can easily understand how they calculate things, whether it is user-based, job-based, or server-based. The calculation is quite tough. How BMC calculates licensing is not easily available anywhere."
"The product price is reasonable. I rate the pricing an eight."
"You're going to spend a lot of money upfront, but the benefits you're going to get out of it are going to quickly pay for it."
"Its pricing and licensing could be a little bit better. Based on my experience and discussions with other existing customers, everybody feels that the regular Managed File Transfer piece, not the enterprise one, is a little overpriced, especially for folks who already have licensed Advanced File Transfer. We understand that Advanced File Transfer is going away and is going to be the end of life, and there is some additional functionality built into MFT, but the additional functionality does not really correlate with the huge price increase over what we're paying for AFT already. This has actually driven a lot of people to look for alternative solutions."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Insurance Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance 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 with lower bandwidth and in less time.
What needs improvement with Aspera Managed File Transfer?
There are other products of Aspera which come as add-ons, however, we haven't purchased those, like report generation, since that was not our requirement. The features we needed were included in th...
What is your primary use case for Aspera Managed File Transfer?
We have an office in China, and we wanted to transfer data from China to the UK. We have an office in the UK as well.
How does Control-M compare with AutoSys Workload Automation?
Control-M acts as a single, centralized interface for monitoring and managing all batch processes, which is helpful because nothing gets left unattended since it is all visible in one place, and th...
What do you like most about Control-M?
First of all, the shift from manual to automation has been valuable. We have a tool that can automate.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Control M
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Gwinnett County Public Schools, Evonik, Voith, BITMARCK, Oracle
CARFAX, Tampa General Hospital, Navistar, Amadeus, Raymond James, Railinc
Find out what your peers are saying about Aspera Managed File Transfer vs. Control-M and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,651 professionals have used our research since 2012.