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Control-M vs Temporal 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 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)
Temporal
Ranking in Process Automation
7th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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.
AbhishekDash - PeerSpot reviewer
Orchestrates infrastructure tasks like deployment, deletion, and management
Temporal focus on developers rather than business users. In contrast to older workflow orchestration engines like Camunda, which are more business-oriented and strongly emphasize UI and workflow authoring, Temporal is geared toward developers. It provides extensive capabilities for building complex workflows. A standout feature of Temporal is its handling of long-running workflows, a significant advantage over many other solutions. Temporal excels in managing distributed transactions and application state durability, especially in microservice environments where transactions might fail due to network issues. Temporal simplifies these challenges by managing retries, fail-safes, and circuit breakers. As a result, developers don't need to implement these features manually; Temporal handles them implicitly, though it also allows for tuning based on specific needs.

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 enabled true enterprise batch automation, which combined with the other BMC Control products on our mainframe platform, allows us to run a 24/7 site with the lights out."
"Promotions between environments, as well as local, mass update, versioning, and self-service."
"It integrates seamlessly with other tools within our ecosystem."
"Before Control-M, we didn't have a centralized view and could not view what happened in the past to determine what will happen in the future. The Gantt view that we have in Control-M is like a project view. It is nice because we sometimes have some application maintenance that we need to do. So, in a single console, we can hold the jobs for the next hour or two. We can release that job when it is finished. This is a really nice feature that we didn't have before. It is something really simple, but we didn't previously have a console where we could say, "For the next two hours, what are the jobs that we will run? And, hold these jobs not to run." This is really important."
"Technical support is very helpful and available 24/7."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"It gives us the ability to have end-to-end workflows, no matter where they're running."
"The Automation API has opened up a world of possibilities for us, including the ability to create workflows on-demand using traditional DevOps tools."
"The initial setup is easy."
"Temporal focus on developers rather than business users."
"It's easy to get started and user-friendly."
"The most valuable feature is its ability to manage and automate workflows without manual intervention efficiently."
"Temporal provides visibility into workflow progress and analytics and supports scheduled tasks with customizable settings, making it very convenient."
"It is very useful for long-running workflows."
"What I like best about Temporal is its durable execution, which means you don't need to write many boilerplate code for critical pieces, especially for retries. It also has great observability and a nice dashboard to see issues without digging into logs. The interface for viewing activities is excellent, with good tracing that shows how long activities took and what ran, making it almost perfect for debugging."
"When some jobs take a lot of time and fail midway, the solution’s retry feature automatically causes them to retry."
 

Cons

"Right now, Control-M is the leader in EMA analysis, which is similar to Gartner. However, clients want to invest in a strong technology, and therefore this product needs to keep up with the high expectations set for it."
"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."
"They can improve their interface."
"It can definitely expand promotions, so that a single job can be moved. Currently you can only promote a job by promoting the entire table."
"Their technicians should be more involved when we're applying new technology to Control-M, such as cloud. We're working with cloud right now, with AWS, and getting the attention of a technician, sometimes, can take some time. It would be nice if they had somebody assigned to it. Dedicated support."
"I'm currently working on the SaaS version, but I've also worked on the on-prem versions before. There is a handful of features that haven't been added to the SaaS version, and the BMC knows that. It's a matter of time before they prioritize the missing pieces and bring them into the SaaS version."
"I think it's slightly expensive but at the same time it's a good product."
"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."
"One area where I think Temporal could improve is its dashboard, particularly in event tracking. Currently, the dashboard doesn't show a time-based view of events, meaning it doesn't display when an event started or went through the retry process. If this feature could be added in a future release, it would significantly enhance monitoring capabilities. Other than that, Temporal's overall performance is quite impressive, and we're confident we can migrate to the Temporal workflow."
"Configuring workflows can be improved —the solution could offer more options, but it's not a must-have."
"While the tool can be a bit daunting initially, especially if you're not used to async programming models, it's generally a pleasure. There's always room for improvement, though. I've noticed some limitations with the .NET SDK regarding dynamic workflows, but this might have been improved in recent versions. Overall, I think Temporal could be more open about implementing features in a more—.NET-friendly way, especially in how you add workers and clients."
"One issue is that we don't have enough resources in the community to get answers when we face problems. We once had a cross-cluster persistence issue, which we solved using different keys. I think Temporal is good right now, but I'm part of the community and will let you know if I think of any improvements."
"I don't like the limitations on data flow, particularly the difficulty of passing large amounts of data between different activities."
"Temporal's debugging is a bit complex."
"We previously faced issues with the solution's patch system."
"One area for the product improvement is the learning curve."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing varies depending on which components and modules you are using."
"The pricing of Control-M is reasonable."
"The pricing is moderate, not too low or too high compared to other solutions."
"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."
"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."
"The cost of the hardware is high. Because you need to license each job, it is costly."
"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."
"You must accept that BMC licensing can be very confusing. No one can easily understand how they calculate things, whether it is user-based, job-based, or server-based. The calculation is quite tough. How BMC calculates licensing is not easily available anywhere."
"Temporal is open-source and free to use, which is great. We didn't have to pay for any premium features."
"The tool is open source under the MIT license, so there are no hidden fees. You can freely use everything on their GitHub and Docker images."
"The savings weren't as big as we initially expected, but they were pretty great from a developer's perspective."
"It is worth the price."
"Temporal is a free, open-source tool."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
19%
Retailer
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Temporal?
Temporal OSS is expensive in infrastructure, but it brings back the reliability that companies need.
What needs improvement with Temporal?
The actual user interface is still in its early stages. It’s very basic. Users don’t really have a complex permission model yet. Users don’t really have ways to automate things like, for example, p...
What is your primary use case for Temporal?
We [my company] use it to run a large workload. We have a set of security scans we want to perform, and we distribute them over a full day, that’s over 24 hours. We use it to orchestrate all the st...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Control M
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CARFAX, Tampa General Hospital, Navistar, Amadeus, Raymond James, Railinc
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Control-M vs. Temporal and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
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