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BizTalk Server 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

BizTalk Server
Ranking in Process Automation
16th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Business-to-Business Middleware (9th)
Control-M
Ranking in Process Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
120
Ranking in other categories
Managed File Transfer (MFT) (4th), Workload Automation (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Process Automation category, the mindshare of BizTalk Server is 0.7%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Control-M is 4.4%, up from 3.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Process Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Srinidhi S - PeerSpot reviewer
For production environments, messages are easily stored within the MessageBox database and offers multiple deployment methods
Some room for improvement means... it's legacy. It's an on-premises system, requiring physical servers for deployment. This is different from Azure; you don't need any servers with Azure. If you have a subscription, you can do whatever you want. There are unit restrictions based on the environment (like non-production vs. production) in BizTalk. You need physical servers and databases. In Azure, those are not required – it's all in the cloud. Now, we have the option of integrating accounts and the On-Premises Data Gateway to connect on-premises BizTalk with Azure. But the trend is moving towards Azure. Not everyone wants a hybrid model. Companies are still going with hybrid scenarios, but they want both BizTalk and Azure. See, whatever you can do in BizTalk, you cannot do the same things the same way in Azure. One example is tracking. In BizTalk, especially for production environments, messages are easily stored within the MessageBox database. Support can assist in retrieving them directly. It's not as easy to track in Azure – everyone can potentially access it, and even reprocessing is different. Logic Apps have a preview mode. If a Logic App is stuck at a particular action, you can resubmit from there. Microsoft is still making improvements – I don't know when they'll have general availability for these features. However, tracking and message storage are more complex in Azure. We have to use Azure Blob storage for archiving, whereas in BizTalk, it's a built-in feature of the MessageBox DB. If you need to debug at any point, you can do so easily in BizTalk. This is one aspect influenced by the on-premises nature of BizTalk. Since everything is moving to the cloud, Microsoft will also end support for BizTalk Server 2030 – there won't be any further support. I don't think they'll release any new versions. 2020 was the last, and it's been four years. After the end of support, I think companies currently using BizTalk will move to Azure or another cloud-based integration technology.
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

"The tool's most valuable feature is its integration with the banks. Its messaging and routing capabilities are good."
"The most valuable feature is its reliability and stability. The first version of BizTalk was released in 2000, and many companies still use it. It was stable until 2013 when we had support."
"The most valuable feature of BizTalk Server is that it will turn XML into flexible transactions."
"I rate the tool's stability a nine out of ten."
"Essentially, you can do whatever you like with these systems, and you do not have to take care about the scaling because if one server is overloaded, it just forwards the message to the next server, even if it were designated to a specific server. It weeds out the messages according to the load. If you want to scale it, you just add new servers."
"We can handle a large number of messages without any issues, ensuring that everything runs smoothly."
"BIzTalk's integration with Visual Studio is the most valuable feature of this product."
"Compared to the current solutions I use, like Azure Logic Apps and other cloud services, BizTalk was far better and more reliable."
"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."
"It is an enterprise tool that integrates with all the applications in our organization. It has made our life easier because we don't need to wake up at midnight and do monitoring, etc. It does everything. It also sends precautionary alerts. If a job or activity is running for more than the specified time, it alerts the application team. So, our teams do not need to sit in front of a laptop or any open application to watch the jobs. They can do their other regular activities while Control-M takes care of all the jobs. It notifies them when there is job completion, delay, and error."
"Monitoring is a valuable aspect of it. The monitoring tool is very good, and it is easy for expert and entry level users to use on a short notice."
"Maintaining and monitoring of workloads have been and continue to be the most valuable feature in our environment."
"The initial setup is largely straightforward."
"BIM is helpful because we do not miss any SLAs, as we get to know the issue well in advance. It is the topmost service that has helped us provide better solutions for the business."
"The ability to integrate file transfers has been instrumental in allowing us to accomplish the things we need with Control-M. In our industry, we take a lot of data and either push it down to the stores or retail grocery stores. We take files and push them down to the stores or pull files and information from the stores and bring it back to corporate. So, it's two-way communication with file transfers. One of the bigger things that we do with Control-M is scheduling data moves and moving data from one location to another."
"It has certainly helped speed things up."
 

Cons

"BizTalk lacks native cloud support. BizTalk doesn't offer in-built support for cloud. We need to use third-party adapters to connect it to cloud services."
"It's an on-premises system, requiring physical servers for deployment. This is different from Azure; you don't need any servers with Azure. If you have a subscription, you can do whatever you want. There are unit restrictions based on the environment (like non-production vs. production) in BizTalk. You need physical servers and databases. In Azure, those are not required – it's all in the cloud."
"The deployment could be simplified."
"It's a complex product because you have many degrees of freedom to connect different parts together. Whether it's sensible or not, is up to you, but the machine does allow it. But because of the vast degrees of freedom, it's complex."
"BizTalk is in the past, Microsoft is not going to evolve it any further or add any new features."
"The product's deployment can be quicker"
"Updating things in BizTalk is a headache."
"BizTalk Server is an outdated legacy system that does not support messaging."
"Advanced File Transfer (AFT) has limitations that cause us to use a bit more licensing than we feel is appropriate."
"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."
"Their technicians should be more involved when we're applying new technology to Control-M, such as cloud. We're working with cloud right now, with AWS, and getting the attention of a technician, sometimes, can take some time. It would be nice if they had somebody assigned to it. Dedicated support."
"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."
"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."
"The history module only contains a maximum of 10 days, but we would like to have access to more. For example, it would be helpful to have 30 days or two months of history available."
"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."
"The infrastructure could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost will depend on the client's requirements."
"BizTalk Server is not freeware. There's a significant licensing cost involved. Be sure you will actually utilize its features fully."
"It was not cheap, but it was affordable."
"The solution is expensive."
"Based on the knowledge, it is relatively cheaper than Azure Identity Services and cloud services in general."
"BizTalk Server is cheap. I would rate its pricing a two out of five."
"The pricing and licensing could be better. However, when I compare Control-M pricing with JAMS, Control-M is still better priced than JAMS enterprise."
"They are expensive. If we were a small company, it would be complicated because we have to have strong sales and operations to be able to afford a tool of this level. Being a large company, the cost-benefit is covered, but it is not within the level of cheap solutions."
"The price is right because of the licensing schema, which is based on nodes and processes. You purchase what you use, no more and no less, and you can grow with time."
"The annual licensing within BMC Control-M is on a per task basis. Three- and five-year contracts are also offered. The customer usually buys a bundle of tasks, e.g., 5,000 tasks, then my team configures Control-M for their usage."
"BMC's price is based on the number of jobs."
"The pricing is reasonable. It's not an exorbitant amount. The licensing is pretty reasonable for the number of jobs that we run."
"We have account based licensing. There are two or three types of licensing. One of them is based on the number of jobs, so we a license close to 4,000 jobs per day. The cost is based on the different modules, which we buy from them. If we a buy a hardware module, which we are presently using and integrating, that is an additional cost, but I'm not sure of the amount. Each module comes with a different cost."
"There are human costs in addition to the standard pricing and licensing of this solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about BizTalk Server?
The tool's most valuable feature is its integration with the banks. Its messaging and routing capabilities are good.
What needs improvement with BizTalk Server?
BizTalk is deployed on-premise. Deployment methodologies are vast in the cloud area. Whereas, if we want to update even a single thing on BizTalk, we need to take the DLL, put it in the system, and...
What advice do you have for others considering BizTalk Server?
When I started my career with BizTalk, people told me the vendor would sunset BizTalk Server, but it didn't happen. Higher versions are still being released. The product will not face the sunset. A...
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

Centrebet, Seoul National University Bundang Hospital, QualCare, Wªrth Handelsges.m.b.H, DTEK, Allscripts, United BioSource, Hogg Robinson
CARFAX, Tampa General Hospital, Navistar, Amadeus, Raymond James, Railinc
Find out what your peers are saying about BizTalk Server vs. Control-M and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.