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 8.7, while ServiceNow is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.3. BMC holds a 4.5% mindshare in PA, compared to ServiceNow’s 4.1% 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 121 Control-M reviews

3,737 Views
1,531 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

ServiceNow Orchestration

Read 16 ServiceNow Orchestration reviews

2,130 Views
1,563 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Control-M

ServiceNow Orchestration

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

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: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Control-M vs. ServiceNow Orchestration

April 2025

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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

121

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

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Process Automation category, the mindshare of Control-M is 4.5%, up from 3.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow Orchestration is 4.1%, 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

ShaheenKapery

Solutions Architect at Altron

Easy to integrate, stable solution and incredibly good customer service

It is a long setup. It was customized to our company's requirements. Bearing in mind that there is not just an IT team. You've got an IT team consisting of end-users, consulting, and user support sides. Install support, ServiceNow support, application support, and so on. What ServiceNow does is it's really good at getting the tickets to the right person. That's the power of it. There's no issue with it. But you need to set that up in advance. You need to know the structure and who is responsible for each task. The initial setup does take a long time, and the organization might face some issues. But once you've got that resolved, it's amazing.

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

"The unified view where you can define, orchestrate, and monitor applications, workflows, and data pipelines is important because we have more than one team working on Control-M. We have a support team, a job-creation team, and a SAP team. We can all work together on it. It avoids anyone from working on his part and not using the latest modifications."

"Control-M provides us with a unified view, where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all our application workflows and data pipelines. It also provides the ability to filter. So, if I don't want to see everything, I can also narrow it down or open ViewPoint. This is very important since we have thousands of jobs to monitor. If we did not have this ability, it would be very difficult to see what is going on."

"Control-M is excellent when it comes to building, scheduling, managing, and monitoring production workflows. Those workflows are of very high importance to our operations."

"It is very stable. We hardly get calls in respect to issues on Control-M, particularly on version 9.0.19."

"Promotions between environments, as well as local, mass update, versioning, and self-service."

"I find it very helpful to be able to keep track of all our help desk tickets."

"I would definitely recommend Control-M to every institute because it is extremely helpful to manage every task without any manual error."

"Ability to handle files remotely through the advanced file transfer feature."

More Control-M pros

"The data visualization is good."

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

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

"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 solution effectively automates business processes."

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

"The iTerm suite is also crucial for visibility and optimization."

"Great with IT processes and business processes."

More ServiceNow Orchestration pros

Cons

"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."

"Everybody's biggest gripe is the reporting capability option. It is a gripe because there is a lot of information in Control-M, but the solution doesn't have a good reporting tool to extract that information. Now, if you want all that information, you need to rely on another third-party BI tool to extract the information out of Control-M."

"The Control-M API does not support SQL database-type jobs, where a job has been configured to use the SQL catalog to locate SSIS."

"The report form and display function are weak; they are not very powerful."

"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."

"Finding documentation on the website can be a bit confusing."

"There should be an expansion in storing more data as it currently provides data storage for only up to 60 days."

"Consider adding a mobile application for remote management."

More Control-M cons

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

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

"The third-party integrations are challenging when the tools are not from ServiceNow partners. This presents issues when integrating solutions from other vendors."

"The deployment requires awareness among the project staff."

"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."

"Efficiency of some features could be improved."

"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."

"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."

More ServiceNow Orchestration cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is not bad. The company can afford it, and it pays for itself. We have those jobs running automatically."

"The product price is reasonable. I rate the pricing an eight."

"The cost is basically $100 a job, give or take."

"This is now from my previous years as support for banks and big companies. If it's not enterprise scale, I find that it's too expensive for smaller companies. You really have to be quite big and need to have a dedicated support staff to run it, then you'll be fine. What we've seen at smaller companies, it's too expensive because they want to automate everything. Now, stuff that can literally run once a day for the rest of their lives is costing them $3 a job a day. It becomes too expensive, eventually. They are not seeing the return on investment because it's not business critical. Nobody is going to die or they're going to lose money if that job didn't run exactly at 11 minutes past 4:00. It's definitely for bigger enterprise companies, especially banks or healthcare providers. We have had an instance where Control-M was unavailable due to external factors for 20 minutes and there was a loss of almost a million euros because the solution involved logistics."

"Control-M isn't cheap, but this is an enterprise model."

"It is a little bit expensive."

"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."

"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."

More Control-M pricing and cost advice

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

"It is not very expensive."

"Pricing is custom to every customer."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

28%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

13%

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?

It is a little bit expensive.

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?

The cost of ServiceNow Orchestration is considered medium; it is expensive but powerful. I would rate the pricing experience as a six out of ten.

See all answers

What needs improvement with ServiceNow Orchestration?

The third-party integrations are challenging when the tools are not from ServiceNow ( /products/servicenow-reviews ) partners. This presents issues when integrating solutions from other vendors.

See all answers

Comparisons

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Control-M

Compared 16% of the time

Automic Automation vs Control-M

Compared 9% of the time

IBM Workload Automation vs Control-M

Compared 7% 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 54% of the time

IBM BPM vs ServiceNow Orchestration

Compared 7% of the time

Temporal vs ServiceNow Orchestration

Compared 6% of the time

BIC Process Execution vs ServiceNow Orchestration

Compared 4% of the time

Microsoft System Center Orchestrator vs ServiceNow Orchestration

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Control-M

April 2025

Download Control-M product report

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow Orchestration

March 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

April 2025

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