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BMC AMI DevX vs Gen comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 15, 2026

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

BMC AMI DevX
Ranking in Mainframe Application Development
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Software Configuration Management (1st), Debugging (6th), Database Development and Management (16th), Test Data Management (5th), Mainframe Testing Tools (1st), Data Masking (4th), AI Software Development (217th)
Gen
Ranking in Mainframe Application Development
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Mainframe Application Development category, the mindshare of BMC AMI DevX is 29.2%, down from 43.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Gen is 11.5%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Mainframe Application Development Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
BMC AMI DevX29.2%
Gen11.5%
Other59.3%
Mainframe Application Development
 

Featured Reviews

FI
Devops Engineer / Ispw Admin at a insurance company with 201-500 employees
Tight deployment controls have secured production and simplified complex release rollbacks
The best feature of BMC AMI DevX Code Pipeline that impresses me is the fallback functionality. The fallback functionality impresses me because when developers deploy large releases involving multiple components, such as COBOL programs, underlying copy books, and CICS modules, backing out changes would typically become a nightmare. With ISPW, developers can back out the entire release or entire package. If they deployed 100 components and want to back out everything, they can do so with one function and back out all components without worrying about backing out each individual component. They can back out the entire deployment set, which handles everything and brings them back to the previous versions. Developers can also selectively back out a subset of the deployed components. They also have the ability to revert to not just the most previous version but can go back several versions if they choose to do so. This gives them a lot of flexibility.
IR
Consultant
Full packets enable software implementation on the mainframe and client sides
I rate it eight out of 10. It's just very powerful tool, very powerful product to use. Nowadays, there are a couple of mainframe companies, using mainframe products, so to be honest, I'm not recommending it. Of course, if you have mainframe and you have do something in the mainframe that’s different.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"BMC AMI DevX Code Pipeline is a solid product that any company can benefit from if they want to have tight control and a standard way of deploying applications into production in a secure manner."
"It helps our staff work by speeding up their documentation process."
"I like the ability to flow through the source and see what happens to the data as the statements are executed. If there is a fault, it will track the event, and we can then look back to see why it may have caused the fault. You can also reverse engineer your test. You can set it so that you can go backward as well as forward in your test. This is something that I haven't done here at my company. Compuware Xpediter is one of the best debugging tools for mainframe software development. We have currently licensed only the COBOL language for Xpediter, but I know they have other languages, including Assembler, PL/I."
"I like the ability that it has to format copy books in a presentable manner. So, you will be able to see the starting offset in length of each field within the layout."
"With the use of ISPW, we were able to reduce our deployment time for specific applications by utilizing the auto-deploy features."
"The most valuable feature of Topaz is Xpediter, it's more flexible than Xpediter through MVS."
"One of the features that the developers like is that they can retrieve what they need with the tool. They don't have to go through some process or request something be done by another team. They can get the programs they need, compile them, retrieve the JCL and alter the JCL if they need to, and put these programs wherever they need to go for their testing."
"Our intention is to use Topaz for the next generation of mainframe developers to maintain mainframe applications."
"If you want to be the first in market and you have a short time to generate, or to develop your application, and if you're looking for a platform that supports multiple frameworks, multiple platforms such as mainframe, Java, and .Net, or the others, you need a modelling tool, rather than a language or technology."
"If you’re writing a simple barebones COBOL program, it may take 20-30 hours, but with a solution like this it can be done in around four hours."
"It has lived long beyond what people thought was its life expectancy as a product, largely because it is such a quality tool that people can't replace."
"Advantage Gen greatly enhanced productivity as well as development of solutions in mainframes, Client, and server applications."
"The so-called full packets, so you can develop software and systems using these packets, and implement software on the mainframe side and the client side."
"You can easily manage the code, and you can easily find other changes, other group changes, other models, other components."
"Full packets, enable you to develop software and systems using these packets, and implement software on the mainframe side and the client side. You can use the same packets, so it's very powerful."
"Coding on CA Gen is easy."
 

Cons

"One thing I would really like to see some improvement on is the promotion diagnostic messages."
"Technical support has gotten better over the years, though there's always room for improvement."
"When you're setting up the parameters for how ISPW will work in your shop, there are a lot of questions that have to be answered... BMC Compuware should have more in-depth explanations about what the choices in each question mean. If you pick A, what does that mean has to happen? What does that impact? If you pick B, what does that mean? What does that impact?"
"It often doesn't play well with other plugins in the environment."
"The ability to edit source code that has special characters is limited. The ability to incorporate or convert REXX into macros that are usable under the Topaz software is not there. And the REXX macros that I have developed over 40 years of work are useless, so I have a toolbox I can't use or deploy using the Topaz technology, while I can use it under MVS."
"There are some features that are not well documented, so documentation could use a little help, on things like setting up deployment and which structures in the database correspond to which tables."
"The ability to incorporate or convert REXX into macros that are usable under the Topaz software is not there, and the REXX macros that I have developed over 40 years of work are useless, so I have a toolbox I can't use or deploy using the Topaz technology, while I can use it under MVS."
"One thing I would really like to see some improvement on is the promotion diagnostic messages. It invokes utilities "under the covers" to copy components, and it does not echo back any of the error messages from those utilities."
"The product needs to be well marketed, then adopted. I am not seeing many customers using the product."
"The weak side is, I cannot use the DB2 specifications, DB2 comments, easily."
"The world is changing, the technologies are changing - COOL:Gen needs to change as well."
"Personally, I think the tool has taken a turn for the worse."
"Nowadays, there are a couple of mainframe companies, using mainframe products, so to be honest, I'm not recommending it."
"I cannot use DB2 specifications, DB2 comments, easily."
"If I look into the native COBOL language it can be more efficient, and CA Gen adds what seems to be some unnecessary lines of code; it’s not an apples to apples comparison."
"The product needs to be well marketed, then adopted. I am not seeing many customers using the product."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It has saved our developers time and effort when working on documentation, which is now more readable and fluent."
"I like the seat-based licensing much more than MSU-based licensing, and that the cost has been competitive."
"In terms of pricing, there isn't an extra charge for the parts of it we use. It comes with the licenses we purchased for other products, so no complaints there. The licensing is built in with the other products that you purchase from Compuware."
"The price point is great."
"The only thing I would mention related to the licensing and/or the pricing, is that they have some visualization features in there that are licensed by concurrent users. We're starting to trip up on that. We're looking to probably increase the number of concurrent licenses that we have. But those types of licensing strategies, where they license by concurrent users or the number of seats is confusing for some people. They don't understand why it works sometimes and doesn't work other times."
"In general, Compuware tools are very competitive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
32%
Insurance Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
5%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise16
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with BMC Compuware Topaz Enterprise Data?
It's a very complicated tool. Sometimes the customer wants better, faster transaction times. They want the solution to move as fast as possible. We're trying to scale and grow our application with ...
What is your primary use case for BMC Compuware Topaz Enterprise Data?
We do development for our customers and we use Topaz to do backend systems for some Latin American banks. It's for enterprise data. It runs on AWS. I'm working on performance testing to do batch pe...
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Also Known As

File-AID, Data for Db2, Code Debug, Data Studio, Workbench for Eclipse, Code Pipeline
CA Gen
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Helvetia, The IMT Group, Hapag-Lloyd, Royal Bank of Canada, Chunghwa Telecom
Global bank
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC AMI DevX vs. Gen and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
892,611 professionals have used our research since 2012.