Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Control-M vs OpCon 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

Control-M
Ranking in Workload Automation
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
121
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (3rd), Managed File Transfer (MFT) (4th)
OpCon
Ranking in Workload Automation
10th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of Control-M is 23.1%, down from 26.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpCon is 1.8%, down from 2.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Jose Rivera Hernandez - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps automate all kinds of jobs and it's worth the price because it saves a lot of time and money
One problem that I had with them when we got SMA Technologies is that sometimes the jobs fail, but they automatically restart. SMA Technologies automatically gets a notification that the job has failed, and they restart it on their end, so now, we have the job restarting twice. There were times when we came into the office in the morning, and we had two files because the job ran twice. I do not know if the system can prevent a job from running the second time. If a job has run successfully, or it is running, it should not run again.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Maintaining and monitoring of workloads have been and continue to be the most valuable feature in our environment."
"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."
"Our ability to integrate with many different solutions has been invaluable. The new approach of the automation API and jobs-as-code is also valuable."
"You can let users access the system and manage jobs: self-service."
"We use Control-M for maintenance on our Oracle and SQL Server databases. It automates maintenance on packages, including standard procedures on the databases themselves, snapshots, checking integrity, verifying the RDBMS of the databases, etc. It ensures they aren't clogged and that they are running smoothly and that there aren't any jobs stuck, eating up the performance of the server or any of the CPU cores."
"The workflow is much easier compared to the ACS services we were using."
"In Helix Control-M, we have the automation API that allows us to customize and do integrations easily in any script, such as Java or Python. It is all integrated within the integration API."
"We are now able to deliver data to our data warehouses and dashboards promptly."
"Where I see it working best is when we are trying to automate jobs."
"The most valuable feature is being able to schedule tasks so that they reliably occur each day, each week, each month, or sometimes several times a day... The scheduler works as it should."
"The whole product is valuable to us because of the integrations that it has with the MCP and the Windows environments. You have to have the agent on each one of them that you want to monitor. The integrations that we have created are along the lines of extracting files and sending them through SFTP to another vendor. Those are the things that were taking a lot of time away from my staff."
"The solution has freed up employees to do more meaningful work as a result of automation. They don't have to sit there and wait for files to download. They don't have to stare at the screen while a process is running. It all runs in the background, doing it for them."
"With a simple click of a button in self-service, the department or the user can complete his/her job."
"Often times there are criteria that cannot be determined by the system, which allows a human to make the determination and use the Self-Service Solution Manager to trigger a job."
"There are a lot of valuable features. The version that we're currently casting, Self Service, is going to be the most valuable to us. It is going to allow us to open up the doors, broaden our automation capability and help other business units to be able to automate a lot of the little things that they do from day to day. I'm really looking forward to being able to help other areas with their automation needs. Self Service is really key."
"It seems like it would scale well."
 

Cons

"I would like to see them adopt more cloud. Most companies don't have a single cloud, meaning we have data sources that come from different cloud providers. That may have been solved already, but supporting Azure would be an improvement because companies tend not to have only AWS and GCP."
"The infrastructure updates could use improvement. Some of the previous updates that we have run to get to version nineteen were troublesome. So, a more seamless upgrade path for the infrastructure components would be useful. I don't know if they have replaced that in version 20 or if version 20 has an easier path, but I would like to see the upgrade from one version to the next version be a little smoother."
"With earlier versions, the support was not accurate or delivered in a timely manner. What would happen is that I would be in production mode and I would have an issue and would want to get someone on a call to see what was happening. But they would always say, “Hey, provide the log first and then we'll review and we'll get back to you." I feel that when a customer asks about a production issue, they should jump onto the call to see what is going on, and then collect the logs."
"They could enhance the product's data flow, job processing speed, and efficiency."
"Control-M reporting isn't that good. It is very limited. We would like the ability to create our own reports as well as the ability to publish dashboards in the cloud, which would help us. Improved reporting will help us determine statuses and get the answers that we need. However, I personally think BMC is not focusing on the reporting. I have even visited the BMC office in India, and asked, "Why haven't you improved the reporting?""
"The reporting tool still needs a lot of improvement. It was supposed to get better with the upgrade, and it really didn't get better. It needs help, because it's such a useful thing to have. It needs to be more powerful and easier to use."
"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."
"There is definitely room for improvement. Version 9.0.20 actually comes with a web-based interface, but there are still a lot of things unavailable with it. There will eventually be more inclusions added into the web interface, but there is still a long way to go."
"Stability is an area for improvement. There are FTP agents that run on the MCP and they are there so that we can transfer a file from the MCP to the Windows environment or vice versa. Sometimes, and nobody has been able to figure out why, it just goes down, and all of my jobs that need it are hanging or failing... It would be very helpful if they could figure out what in the world is happening with that FTP client that's on the MCP."
"The initial setup is very complex, but that's not necessarily something that needs to be improved. I'm told that in the next version they're improving the upgrade process. So that's in the works already."
"I believe there's room for improvement, and while I think it's something they are considering, I would welcome seeing OpCon integrate with a broader range of systems and third-party products."
"The products are extremely powerful and capable. Anytime you have such capability, the programming/configuration that goes into making it work can be complicated."
"It would be nice to go to a fully thin client."
"I would like to see them improve the Solution Manager for the web application. It's the future for us. Our customers need a lot of functionality, but there isn't that functionality within Solution Manager. So they have to develop and improve it."
"I'd like to see the product include a view where you can see everything about a specific job on a single screen."
"The solution has quite a learning curve for beginners. It's challenging. I wouldn't rate it as super-easy to automate processes. It's medium-weight. I've used more complex software, but I've used simpler software."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It depends. It's packaged in such a way that you can buy the base model without all of the fancy stuff. You can try and keep your price similar to competitors. I guess it's natural throughout the world. It doesn't matter whether you're buying cell phones or something else. The best cell phone will always be more expensive."
"Licensing costs are around $3000 a year."
"Control-M isn't cheap, but this is an enterprise model."
"Initially, our licensing model was based on the number of jobs per day. That caused some issues because we were restricted to a number. So at our renewal time we said, 'We want to convert from number of jobs to number of endpoints.' That cost us extra money but it gave us additional capabilities, without worrying about the number of jobs."
"The pricing of Control-M is reasonable."
"The cost of the hardware is high. Because you need to license each job, it is costly."
"The pricing is reasonable. It's not an exorbitant amount. The licensing is pretty reasonable for the number of jobs that we run."
"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."
"Annually, we pay $29,000. This is for a blanket policy that covers everything, like licensing and support."
"It's definitely worth the cost."
"Our annual maintenance costs are $45,000. The initial cost is separate."
"The cost is just shy of $20,000. That's for two licenses annually, production, and failover. It is a pricey solution. Comparatively speaking, you can certainly find schedulers which are cheaper. In some cases, you can find ones that are free or use free solutions. However, OpCon is by far the superior quality product, and you pay for that. This also has a cost savings associated with an FTE, so you can more than outweigh the cost of the solution if you were to reduce the staff that you have onsite. Plus, this means that you don't need to have someone during irregular hours."
"Cost depends on your environment. We are doing stuff now with failover and recovery, so we have boosted our costs."
"The pricing is over $100,000 for our credit union and I believe it's $89,000 for our clients, in total, annually."
"Our license is for 1000 jobs. Including support, the license and upgrades are 2000 euros a month."
"Scaling is pricey."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Workload Automation solutions are best for your needs.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
44%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Government
5%
Real Estate/Law Firm
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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.
What do you like most about OpCon?
My favorite feature is the dashboard feature, which shows jobs that are running, and completed, any failures, and provides dashboard reporting.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OpCon?
I am the one who signs the contract. In the beginning, when I started working here, it seemed very expensive, but after I learned everything that it does, I found it worth the price. I would recomm...
What needs improvement with OpCon?
One problem that I had with them when we got SMA Technologies is that sometimes the jobs fail, but they automatically restart. SMA Technologies automatically gets a notification that the job has fa...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Control M
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CARFAX, Tampa General Hospital, Navistar, Amadeus, Raymond James, Railinc
LOHR, Carnival Cruise Lines, Herbalife, Digital Federal Credit Union, Synergent, Frandsen Bank & Trust
Find out what your peers are saying about Control-M vs. OpCon and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.