We performed a comparison between Control-M and Rocket Zena based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Control-M offers a variety of valuable features such as Managed File Transfer, credentials vault, integration capabilities, Role-Based Administration, file transfer integration, collaboration dashboard, scheduling, configuration ease, reporting, workload archiving, and forecasting. Rocket Zena excels in ease of use, user interface, diagram feature, Linux configuration, cross-platform job scheduling, web-based client, whiteboard feature, FTP file transfer, licensing process, technical support, and pricing.
Control-M can enhance its microservices and API integration, address bugs in the web interface, develop a lighter web version, improve reporting capabilities, streamline the upgrade process, and integrate with third-party tools. Rocket Zena needs improvement in providing visibility into connections between applications, monitoring agents, ensuring availability on distributed platforms, enhancing communication between servers and agents, and implementing a notification feature for non-functioning servers.
Service and Support: Control-M's customer service has received both positive and negative feedback from customers. Some customers appreciate the support team's promptness and expertise, while others have concerns about the time it takes to resolve issues. Rocket Zena's customer service has received positive reviews, with customers expressing satisfaction with the fast response time and high-quality support.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for Control-M was considered simple and user-friendly, thanks to the helpful guides and videos provided. However, the need for manual conversion of jobs and scripts added some complexity. The initial setup for Rocket Zena varied among users, with some finding it easier to understand. Although integrating with SAP posed a challenge, once users became familiar with the system, creating use cases became easier.
Pricing: Control-M has received mixed feedback regarding its setup cost, with some users expressing concerns about the expenses associated with hardware and licensing. Rocket Zena is perceived as a cost-effective and affordable alternative, particularly suitable for small businesses.
ROI: Control-M provides reduced overall expenses, increased productivity, centralized connection profiles, and improved automation and workflows. The ROI for Zena is unclear.
Comparison Results: Control-M is highly recommended over Rocket Zena. Users love its simple setup, effortless maintenance, and effective automation. Its standout features include Managed File Transfer, credentials vault, integration abilities, and Role-Based Administration. Users also appreciate its teamwork and unified view dashboard.
"The pressure on our operations and our maintenance has been reduced."
"We can tie together all the workloads across the estate and make the whole process reactive to events."
"It has multiple features. You can plan your execution in Control-M. It provides one single window where you can define workflows regardless of geographic boundaries and platforms. A batch process can be executed from this single window. It provides insights into your processes. Your business people will know what process they are running and what is the state of the process. Instead of knowing that they're not going to meet the SLA the next morning, the business people immediately know the changes in their process. Control-M is very easy. I can tell a non-technical person that this is how it works, and he would be able to easily understand it. Business people can understand the methodology of Control-M and the intuitive features that it has. It has a fantastic graphical user interface and is easy to understand. You just have to drag and drop but in a very intuitive way. Monitoring features are also good. It has different color coding schemes, which can help you to understand the status of your workflow. An operator who is not that technical and is just monitoring the status of the application can see by color-coding the status of a process. If anything goes wrong or a process is stuck, it gives you a hint. You can just right-click and see the logs and the output. Even if the system is not right there in the data center and is located somewhere else, you can monitor it right from there and see the workflows."
"The scheduling feature and scheduling tool are the most valuable features. I like the scheduling services that we have in Control-M, which are very beneficial to our organization because they are automating things. There is also less manual work. We can schedule a task without any manual interruptions."
"The ability to dynamically predict batch run time is so valuable."
"Technical support is very helpful and available 24/7."
"Because it's a tool which allows us to do scheduled work, it allows for notifications when jobs aren't running within that scheduled time frame. This improves the opportunity to meet SLAs."
"Control-M is useful to automate all critical and non-critical processes. Using Control-M, we can automate application workflows as well as file transfers involved in application workflows. We can also use it to run batches related to applications. Automating these processes reduces the RTO and RPO, which helps in the case of failures. It also helps us to identify bottlenecks and take corrective measures."
"I have found the scheduling feature the most valuable. I can map dependencies by using ASG-Zena. It gives a nice, quick visualization as to where things are."
"The most valuable feature is the FTP file transfer."
"Its FTP feature is very good, as is scheduling any process or task with the Zena client. I have found it to be very helpful. If a task fails, it gives you a prompt."
"In the latest upgrade, Zena added a web-based client. The more I use it, the more I like it. It's an excellent interface. They do a good job of steadily improving the solution to make it more useful."
"We haven't had any problems since we installed it. It runs as expected, we haven't had any critical problems. It helps keeps the business running 24/7."
"From a Linux configuration point of view, Rocket Zena is straightforward. It's fairly easy to set up the server and agents once you know how to do it."
"I have used other tools with similar capabilities; it's the ease of use."
"I like the whole product, but specifically, I like the license part. It's very easy to acquire a license for this product."
"I would like to see more auditing capabilities. Right now, it has the basics and I've been trying to set those up to work with what our auditors are looking for."
"Integration with some applications and platforms is complex and requires development. We have done some integration with the application integrator, but it was more like a manual solution. This is an area that can be improved."
"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."
"After we complete FTP jobs, those FTP jobs will be cleared from the Control-M schedule after the noon refresh. So, I struggle to find out where those jobs are saved. Then, we need to request execution of the FTP jobs again. If there could be an option to show the logs, which have been previously completed, that would help us. I can find all other job logs from the server side, but FTP job logs. Maybe I am missing the feature, or if it is not there, it could be added."
"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."
"With the current version update, I'm not sure why we needed a separate database upgrade. Why not put it all in one package? Previously, you could do it either via a manual upgrade or an in-place upgrade but it wasn't separate."
"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."
"The MFT applications should have more functionality and flexibility within that tool. Having more flexibility with that tool for handling the one to many or many to one concept. Like being able to take data from one source and push it to many locations or pull data from many locations and bring it back into a single source. That's why we still use our TPS program for the file transfers just because we don't have some of those capabilities available to us within MFT."
"Rocket Zena is a mainframe-based job scheduler. I would like it to be more open so that we can use it on a distributed platform."
"In the next release, I would like the user experience to be improved. The user interface should be more appealing to gen-z."
"In the web interface, it stacks the tasks across the top, and they accumulate until you close or clean those out. That seems a little cumbersome. You must right-click and close all tabs constantly to keep the console clean and manage your views."
"The scheduling mapping is a little disjointed. There is no wizard-type approach. There are a lot of different things that you have to do in completely different areas. They could probably add the functionality for creating all components of a mapping or an OPA schedule. The component creation could be done collectively rather than through individual components."
"In the next release, I would like to have an alert feature to indicate when an agent is down. Rocket Zena is not capable of sending alerts that the agent is down. As of now, you have manually monitor to see when the agent is down."
"The documentation has room for improvement."
"One area where it could be improved is communication between the different servers. Sometimes there are processes that have already been completed but we get a status notification that they're still active."
"Another one that is probably a little bit bigger for me is that when there is an issue or there's an error, it writes on a different screen. I have to find the actual process name and go to a different screen to view the alert that got generated. On that screen, everyone's processes, not just the processes of the folks in my department, are thrown. It takes me a while to find the actual error so that I could go in there and look at the alert. It could be because of the way it was set up, but at least for me, it isn't too intuitive."
Control-M is ranked 1st in Workload Automation with 110 reviews while Rocket Zena is ranked 12th in Workload Automation with 9 reviews. Control-M is rated 8.8, while Rocket Zena is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Control-M writes "We have seen quicker file transfers with more visibility and stability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Rocket Zena writes "A continuously evolving, stable solution, with responsive support". Control-M is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence, Automic Workload Automation and Redwood RunMyJobs, whereas Rocket Zena is most compared with Rocket Zeke, IBM Workload Automation, AutoSys Workload Automation and ActiveBatch by Redwood. See our Control-M vs. Rocket Zena report.
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