Control-M vs ServiceNow Orchestration comparison

BMC and ServiceNow are both solutions in the Process Automation category. BMC is ranked #3 with an average rating of 9.0, while ServiceNow is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.7. BMC holds a 4.4% mindshare in PA, compared to ServiceNow’s 4.0% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of BMC users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of ServiceNow users who would recommend it.

Control-M

Read 120 Control-M reviews

4,031 Views
1,565 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

ServiceNow Orchestration

Read 15 ServiceNow Orchestration reviews

2,206 Views
1,589 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Control-M

ServiceNow Orchestration

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Control-M and ServiceNow Orchestration are competitors in the workflow automation and enterprise service management space. Control-M appears to have the upper hand in environments with a need for extensive integration capabilities, particularly for AS400 platforms, while ServiceNow Orchestration stands out in IT service management integration.

Features: Control-M offers virtual terminal automation, high availability, and robust error-handling capabilities, making it ideal for complex batch processing and scheduling. It also provides integration modules, facilitating the seamless connection of diverse platforms and applications. Meanwhile, ServiceNow Orchestration is recognized for its automation in IT operations management and comprehensive integration within widespread IT service management infrastructures, providing a comprehensive enterprise service approach.

Room for Improvement: Control-M users have identified areas for improvement such as output analysis, reporting tools, and more intuitive integration with apps. Challenges include newer version compatibility and simplified integration processes. Users of ServiceNow Orchestration point out integration limitations and the high cost of its modules. Enhancements could include making features more developer-friendly and expanding integration support for third-party tools.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Control-M supports deployment in on-premises, private cloud, and hybrid environments, which is beneficial for diverse business infrastructures. Its customer support is generally well-regarded, although improvements in integration support and community resources are suggested. ServiceNow Orchestration, commonly deployed in public and private clouds, is well-received for effective customer service, although satisfaction is affected by costs and integration challenges.

Pricing and ROI: Control-M is known for high licensing costs based on job or endpoint counts, which poses challenges for smaller businesses yet offers good value through its capabilities and integration features for larger enterprises. ServiceNow Orchestration also entails high costs, with segment-based pricing and additional module expenses leading to varied contract terms. Users justify the expense due to its broad service management capabilities and significant potential ROI through operational efficiencies.

To learn more, read our detailed Control-M vs. ServiceNow Orchestration Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Control-M vs. ServiceNow Orchestration

January 2025

Download the complete report

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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 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)

ServiceNow Orchestration

Ranking in Process Automation

11th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Process Automation category, the mindshare of Control-M is 4.4%, up from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow Orchestration is 4.0%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Process Automation

Featured Reviews

Pedro Fuentes

System Engineer at Community Loans of America, Inc.

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.

Read full review

Dinesh Kumar Raghu

Senior Software Engineer at NewRocket

Fastest upgrading technology in the market currently

In each upgrade, ServiceNow is enhancing its product across various areas. They continuously improve different aspects one by one, ensuring that their service evolves with the changing needs. However, frequent upgrades may negatively impact the performance of instances. Therefore, for now, I don't recommend any additional upgrades. The current version fulfills everyone's requirements, and ServiceNow automatically updates annually, keeping pace with industry standards. They've been performing well, so I see no need for further upgrades, especially considering their consistent updates.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Control-M has helped to improve our data transfers because it allows us to monitor the execution of the process. With other technologies, we cannot do that."

"The solution is innovative. Specifically for the overseas and time differences, you can feel the efficiency of Batch Impact Manager on jobs, batch processing, and impact management. It works the best on these kinds of issues. It saves us time and money, which is important. We save a lot using Control-M."

"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."

"The most valuable features are the Advanced File Transfer and the manage file transfer. They make transferring files securely seamless. It's very easy to set up, get deployed, and have it transferred to and from vendors. As long as we can get our firewall rules implemented at a decent time, it's very easy and seamless to get important files transferred in a secure manner."

"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."

"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."

"It is simple to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines and to ingest data from different platforms. It integrates well between platforms."

"It has certainly helped speed things up."

More Control-M pros

"It's scalable."

"Employee onboarding, de-boarding, and other service-provision features make the process easier and it saves us a lot of time."

"Great with IT processes and business processes."

"Orchestration is commonly utilized by major corporations. The process of linking methods in ServiceNow, known as the RTS chain to parent methods, is executed seamlessly and efficiently. It's quite impressive and significant in its impact."

"The product has a flexible interface for development."

"It is a very stable product, highly affordable."

"There are a lot of ready to use orchestration custom packs."

"The data visualization is good."

More ServiceNow Orchestration pros

Cons

"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."

"Sometimes, with technical support, they will take feedback, but you don't know where that feedback goes or if it proceeds along in the thought process."

"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."

"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."

"An issue we have run into in our lower environments is that Control-M can log you out frequently."

"A lot of the areas of improvement revolve around Automation API because that area is constantly evolving. It is constantly changing, and it is constantly being updated. There are some bugs that are introduced from one version to the next. So, the regression testing doesn't seem to capture some of the bugs that have been fixed in prior versions, and those bugs are then reintroduced in later versions."

"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."

"The response time could be faster when you need a person to answer your questions. There are situations where availability becomes crucial."

More Control-M cons

"It is a highly complex platform to work on."

"There should be connectors to cover at least the top industry applications, and they should be easier to configure in a plug-and-play fashion."

"ServiceNow Orchestration needs to improve multiple aspects in which their event monitoring system is one. The solution lacks event monitoring systems which makes them non-competitive. They need to include improvements in a similar manner that they did in Sweden."

"I would like a user experience module to be added."

"The flow rate for releases and updates is very, very slow and does not meet customers' objectives for scalability."

"The automatic remediation needs enhancement, particularly integrating ServiceNow with tools like SolarWinds and Logic Monitor. It is functional, but it needs improvement."

"From my space, the only thing that I can say is the spinning up with Google Cloud Services."

"There is still room for more integrations. Or, it would be nice to bundle multiple products together rather than selling everything as a model as that turns out to be a bit costly."

More ServiceNow Orchestration cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"Pricing varies depending on which components and modules you are using."

"It is a little bit expensive."

"This product saves hours in a day based on my experience working here versus other companies with manually operations."

"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."

"In our environment, pricing depends on the total number of maximum jobs that can run, which is fine. Therefore, if the number of jobs increases, then the licensing fees will increase."

"The license model is based on the number of jobs we run on the SaaS application or the number of executions, unlike the on-premise model options. If we have a handful of jobs, it's always good to consider Control-M, but if it's a large number of jobs, Control-M might not be a great option."

"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."

More Control-M pricing and cost advice

"In terms of price, this solution is at the higher end of what you'll find."

"This is an expensive product, but it is the best in the market considering the features and lack of competitors."

"The cost of the solution is based on the number of plugins, conductors and integrations used and is charged annually. The licensing cause has been increasing gradually which makes it difficult to access. Initially offer free features but over the time the charges rise which make it an expensive solution with limited features. Along with that, the integration issues persist and require additional middle where and internet connectivity for effective usage."

"ServiceNow doesn't give a clear cost indication. They have different contracts with different organizations and it's all about negotiation, so you don't know how they are doing at the cost level."

"Pricing is custom to every customer."

"It is quite expensive because we've had some customers come back and say it's quite pricey because in order for them to go ahead with Orchestration, they must have already been paying for Discovery, service mapping, and a few other things."

"It is not very expensive."

"The solution is costly and orchestrations are very expensive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

28%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Control-M?

Pricing is generally affordable, though some features cost a bit more.

See all answers

What do you like most about ServiceNow Orchestration?

The interface of the solution is very user friendly and it is easily accessible via a simple URL. This makes it easier to complete the UI based tasks but using other features require expertise in l...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ServiceNow Orchestration?

Pricing is custom to every customer.

See all answers

What needs improvement with ServiceNow Orchestration?

I remember last time I said there is no need for improvement. It's fine. Due to the limited scope, I cannot comment further. However, it should be integrated with AI and messaging or chatting featu...

See all answers

Comparisons

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Control-M

Compared 17% of the time

IBM Workload Automation vs Control-M

Compared 8% of the time

Automic Automation vs Control-M

Compared 8% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Control-M

Compared 6% of the time

HCL Workload Automation vs Control-M

Compared 2% of the time

More Control-M Competitors

Camunda vs ServiceNow Orchestration

Compared 56% of the time

IBM BPM vs ServiceNow Orchestration

Compared 6% of the time

Microsoft System Center Orchestrator vs ServiceNow Orchestration

Compared 4% of the time

Temporal vs ServiceNow Orchestration

Compared 4% of the time

BIC Process Execution vs ServiceNow Orchestration

Compared 3% of the time

More ServiceNow Orchestration Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Control-M

February 2025

Download Control-M product report

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow Orchestration

January 2025

Download ServiceNow Orchestration product report

Also Known As

Control M

No data available

Overview

Control-M is used for enterprise workload automation, orchestrating finance, retail, healthcare, and supply chain processes. It handles batch job scheduling, managed file transfers, cloud integrations, and compliance auditing across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.

Organizations leverage Control-M to efficiently monitor and manage business-critical processes like payroll, HR, SAP, Informatica, and database tasks. It enhances visibility, security, and error resolution. Automating and optimizing workflows in data centers, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, Control-M supports diverse technological environments. The platform's robust capabilities make it suitable for effective centralized management of applications and data pipelines, ensuring enhanced collaboration and scalability.

What are Control-M's most important features?

Integration capabilities: Seamlessly integrates with various systems
Automation API: Facilitates automation through APIs
Managed File Transfer: Simplifies secure file transfers
GUI console: Intuitive graphical user interface
Role-based administration: Provides access control
Single-pane view: Centralized monitoring dashboard
Scheduling options: Flexible job scheduling
Workflow orchestration: Coordinates complex workflows
Reporting: Generates insightful reports
Monitoring: Tracks and manages tasks
Forecasting: Predicts future workloads
Self-service portal: Empowers users with self-service tools
Plugins: Extends functionality through additional plugins

What are the benefits or ROI of using Control-M?

Enhanced visibility: Centralized view of all processes
Ease of use: User-friendly interface
Error reduction: Minimizes manual errors
Improved collaboration: Facilitates teamwork
Scalability: Supports growth and scale
Support: Comprehensive customer support

Control-M is implemented in industries like finance to handle payroll and HR tasks, in retail for inventory management and supply chain processes, and in healthcare for compliance auditing and patient data processing. Organizations benefit from streamlined workflows and automated processes across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments, ensuring efficient and secure operations.

BMC

ServiceNow is the fastest-growing enterprise cloud software company in the world above $1 billion (2018 revenue was $2.6 billion, up 36% year over year). We deliver digital workflows that create great experiences and unlock productivity to approximately 5,400 enterprise customers worldwide, including almost 75% of the Fortune 500.

ServiceNow

Sample Customers

CARFAX, Tampa General Hospital, Navistar, Amadeus, Raymond James, Railinc

experian, BEACHBODY, HealthPartners, Banosoft

Buyer's Guide

Control-M vs. ServiceNow Orchestration

January 2025

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