We performed a comparison between Control-M and Tidal Automation 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 range of valuable features such as managed file transfer, secure storage for credentials, seamless integration capabilities, role-based administration, collaboration dashboards, efficient scheduling, easy configuration, and accurate forecasting. Tidal Automation also provides valuable features like a job scheduler, a unified and intuitive interface, flexibility in running jobs, effective error handling, role-based access control, and dynamic job scheduling.
Control-M can enhance its microservices and API integration, address bugs in the web interface, streamline the upgrade process, and integrate with third-party tools. Tidal Automation needs improvement in its graphical user interface, pricing model, cloud/hybrid solution, migration process, artificial intelligence capabilities, user interface intuitiveness, initial setup process, security features, and performance scalability.
Service and Support: Control-M's customer service elicits a range of opinions, with some customers commending the prompt and knowledgeable support staff, while others express reservations about slow response times and the desire for more proactive assistance. Tidal Automation's customer service receives widespread acclaim for its responsiveness, expertise, and willingness to assist. The support team is consistently described as experienced and well-versed in the product.
Ease of Deployment: Users found the initial setup for Control-M to be straightforward and easy, with a relatively short deployment time. Learning the system and implementing it was considered manageable. The initial setup for Tidal Automation was also described as straightforward and easy, however, with a longer deployment process. Learning how to use the system was relatively simple, with a slightly steeper learning curve for administrators.
Pricing: The cost of setting up Control-M has garnered diverse feedback, as some users find it costly due to hardware and licensing expenses for each job. Furthermore, pricing and licensing can be perplexing, particularly for smaller businesses. Users perceive the pricing of Tidal Automation as reasonable and predictable, with a transparent and easily comprehensible licensing model.
ROI: Control-M offers advantages such as reduced expenses, enhanced job setup, stability, and efficient data transfers. Tidal Automation delivers cost savings, improved efficiency, and better risk management.
Comparison Results: Control-M emerges as the favored choice compared to Tidal Automation. Users appreciate Control-M's user-friendly and effortless setup process, as well as its comprehensive guides and videos. They also value its capability to automate file transfers and provide a consolidated view for monitoring workflows.
"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."
"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."
"The File Watcher utility, cyclic jobs, and email alert notification are valuable."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The initial setup is largely straightforward."
"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."
"Its compatibility with the new technologies and platforms, like the Google Cloud or Amazon, is the most valuable. Its console allows us to view the duration and execution of a process. It is also very easy to use and easy to implement."
"The multiple scheduling options allow you to do anything you want, whenever you want, and however you want. You can easily be in control when things happen."
"We use the solution for cross-platform and cross-application workloads. That's one of the core reasons we chose it. It's one of a few things in the industry that can be used for cross-platform integration."
"The most valuable feature is the job scheduler, where you can schedule thousands of jobs to execute at specific times."
"Thinking of all the people involved in checking jobs on a daily basis, manually running jobs or auditing them through standalone tools, and trying to connect them. We have saved hundreds of hours weekly, which is substantial."
"Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution."
"With the varied features in the varied adapters provided, we use Tidal Enterprise Scheduler because we want everything to be scheduled in one place. Tidal provides that for us with its tools and varying platforms in our organization. Tidal provides all the connectors to the platforms. This is very useful because we don't want to look for another scheduler for scheduling certain jobs. We don't want to look at those schedules manually between platforms."
"The feature that I find to be valuable, as I'm working with other folks, is the ability to cross-schedule across platforms, and the flexibility that comes with that."
"We wouldn't be able to do many of the complex scheduling that we do today without it. For us, it is a mission-critical app. Because if it doesn't work or has a problem, then SAP doesn't function. It is that critical. So, it's an essential tool for us to manage and run SAP jobs."
"We had a number of different schedulers in this organization and we've been porting everything that was running out of these other, unrelated schedulers into this scheduler. That has afforded us the ability to set up direct dependencies between processes that couldn't talk to one another before. Over the 15 years, we've definitely gained a lot from that. What had been manual controls have become automated controls..."
"I would like to have a web version of Control-M to replace the client. Currently, our support and jobs-creation teams are using the client and that needs to be installed on a PC. It's very heavy, consuming a lot of resources compared to the web portal. I know that they're trying to improve the client with the latest version, but for me, there hasn't been enough improvement yet."
"The documentation could be improved, and I'd also like to see automatic upgrades."
"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."
"We did encounter a few scalability issues. Sometimes, there are too many jobs in our environment on different servers, but that’s not the tool issue, we can simply increase the FS size. However, that requires bank cost; hence the scalability issue."
"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."
"We have some plug-ins like BOBJ, and we need a little improvement there. Other than that, it has been pretty good. I haven't seen any issues."
"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."
"I think it's slightly expensive but at the same time it's a good product."
"Their software installation and update process could use some improvements. I'm pretty sure they're working on that, but that's definitely an area where it could be streamlined a lot. There's still a lot of manual work that you have to do with the schedule when you deploy masters or do the agents."
"There are several improvement points that our team has provided to the vendor."
"The UI might have the potential to provide a more polished and user-centric encounter, promoting seamless engagements and simplifying the navigation process for individuals interacting with the software."
"The GUI, the graphical user interface, gets a little bit busy."
"Tidal Software interface could be more intuitive and user-friendly."
"To better fit their unique needs, the solution should give more customization options."
"The current user interface of Tidal Software is functional. However, it can be improved to make it more intuitive and user-friendly."
"We've had some quirky stuff happen on an occasional basis where a job does not take off. For example, a job we expected to be finished by 3:00 a.m. is sitting there and not executing when we come in in the morning. We have to go all the way back to the dependencies and then we can see that one of the dependencies has become unscheduled, for some reason. No changes were made to the schedule but this prerequisite job has, all of a sudden, become unscheduled. I have brought this up with Tidal's support but they have never had an answer for it."
Control-M is ranked 1st in Workload Automation with 110 reviews while Tidal by Redwood is ranked 2nd in Workload Automation with 37 reviews. Control-M is rated 8.8, while Tidal by Redwood is rated 9.0. 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 Tidal by Redwood writes "Great visibility with a single pane of glass and a low learning curve". Control-M is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Rocket Zena, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence and Camunda, whereas Tidal by Redwood is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs, ActiveBatch by Redwood and Rocket Zeke. See our Control-M vs. Tidal by Redwood report.
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