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Control-M pros and cons

Vendor: BMC

4.4 out of 5

119 reviews
98% willing to recommend

1,856 followers

Pros & Cons summary

Control-M offers cross-platform support, enabling seamless integration between Linux and Windows jobs, and supports cloud platforms like Amazon, Azure, and Google Cloud for robust enterprise-wide batch automation. However, tech buyers should note limitations in reporting, advanced file transfer flexibility, SQL API integration, and documentation clarity. Despite its strengths in workflow management and cloud adaptability, scalability issues and increased licensing costs may pose significant challenges for extensive job handling across servers.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Control-M enhances automation and orchestration, allowing for different schedules and efficient management of thousands of jobs, significantly reducing manual intervention and error.

It seamlessly integrates with other tools and platforms, including container and cloud solutions, enhancing operational productivity within the ecosystem and meeting service-level agreements.

Control-M enables cross-platform support, allowing Linux, Windows, and various hardware and software dependencies to be managed by a single tool, ensuring efficient batch processing and monitoring.

Advanced features like Batch Impact Manager provide proactive monitoring and SLA management, helping detect issues early and reducing operational risks.

The Automation API in Control-M offers on-demand workflow creation using DevOps tools, increasing customization and flexibility in managing data pipelines and integrations.

CONS

Users experience limitations with Advanced File Transfer, leading to additional licensing expenses.

There is a need for automatic license management and enhanced machine learning capabilities for optimal automation paths.

Finding documentation on the website is reportedly confusing, and overall documentation could be improved.

Control-M reporting capabilities are seen as weak and lacking necessary improvements despite previous updates.

There are challenges with cloud service support; technicians could be more involved, especially with new technologies like AWS.

Control-M Pros review quotes

reviewer1657833

AVP - Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Feb 28, 2023

The File Transfer component is quite valuable. The integration with products such as Informatica and SAP are very valuable to us as well. Rather than having to build our own interface into those products, we can use the ones that come out of the box. The integration with databases is valuable as well. We use database jobs quite a bit.

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reviewer1631958

Maintenance Manager at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

Jul 21, 2021

If they have ad hoc requirements, then they can theoretically schedule their own file transfers with the Self Service. We are trying to push as much work back to the customers or developers that have that requirement, because they prefer to help themselves, if possible. We try empowering them and enabling them through Control-M, especially for file transfers, because it is a much broader base of the business then just with batch scheduling. Typically, with SAP batch scheduling, it would work with dedicated teams. With file transfers, the entire business is involved. There are business users, end users, etc. It definitely needs to be as simple as possible and as managed as well as possible. They need to manage it themselves, if possible, because our team is not growing but the number of customers, applications, and jobs are growing. We need to hand back some of the responsibility to the customer for them to resolve and action it.

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RS

Sr. Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 18, 2021

Technical support is very helpful and available 24/7.

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AL

IT Supply Chain Manager at Alicorp

Mar 31, 2024

First of all, the shift from manual to automation has been valuable. We have a tool that can automate.

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System Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Jun 12, 2022

It gives us the ability to have end-to-end workflows, no matter where they're running.

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RS

Robert-Stinnett

Sr. Automation Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 26, 2022

It has certainly helped speed things up.

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AS

AbhishekSaxena2

Subject Matter Expert at a consumer goods company with 10,001+ employees

Jul 24, 2021

Workload Archiving is a very good feature for us. It helps with our customer requirements in terms of reporting and auditing... Previously, when we didn't have any archive server, we managed the data in Control-M with man-made scripts, and we would pull the data for the last 365 days, or three or four months back. Since we installed the archiving, we have been able to pull the data, anytime and anywhere, with just one click.

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reviewer1631409

Lead Consultant at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 20, 2021

We have a team called pro-mon and they monitor all the jobs for us. A single view for them makes it easy for them to monitor things.

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System Engineer at Community Loans of America, Inc.

Jan 9, 2024

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.

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reviewer1629438

Director at a performing arts with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jul 19, 2021

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.

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Control-M Cons review quotes

reviewer1657833

AVP - Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Feb 28, 2023

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.

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reviewer1631958

Maintenance Manager at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

Jul 21, 2021

The high availability that comes from BMC with its supplied Postgres database is very limited. Even using your customer-supplied Postgres database is problematic. We have engaged with them regarding this, but it is difficult. My company doesn't want to do this and BMC doesn't want to do that. We just need to find some middle ground to get the proper high availability. We're also moving away, like the rest of the world, from the more expensive offerings, like Oracle. We are trying to use Postgres, which is free. The stability is good. It is just that the high availability configuration is not ideal. It could be better.

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RS

Sr. Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 18, 2021

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.

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Free Report: Control-M Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Control-M. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.

823,795 professionals have used our research since 2012.

AL

IT Supply Chain Manager at Alicorp

Mar 31, 2024

Whenever I pull an S4HANA job to the Helix Control-M tool, it pulls it naturally with all the steps. A job can have several steps, and in this case, it is very easy to control the steps taken. However, in the case of the SaaS IBP tool, it can pull the job but cannot identify the steps. So, when I want to take an action in a step, I have to split the job.

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System Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Jun 12, 2022

The stability of Control-M has Not been great. A big thing we've been trying to work on with BMC is observability. Modern applications should be observable and resilient, but we're finding that sometimes Control-M is not very resilient and many times Control-M is not very observable.

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RS

Robert-Stinnett

Sr. Automation Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 26, 2022

They can improve their interface.

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AS

AbhishekSaxena2

Subject Matter Expert at a consumer goods company with 10,001+ employees

Jul 24, 2021

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.

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reviewer1631409

Lead Consultant at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 20, 2021

With earlier versions, the support was not accurate or delivered in a timely manner. What would happen is that I would be in production mode and I would have an issue and would want to get someone on a call to see what was happening. But they would always say, “Hey, provide the log first and then we'll review and we'll get back to you." I feel that when a customer asks about a production issue, they should jump onto the call to see what is going on, and then collect the logs.

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System Engineer at Community Loans of America, Inc.

Jan 9, 2024

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.

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reviewer1629438

Director at a performing arts with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jul 19, 2021

We develop software. More frequently, we are working with microservices and APIs, using our integration tool, MuleSoft. While Control-M is really a good tool to integrate with other tools, it is important for them to continue improving their microservices and API.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 87)

Product Categories

Product Categories

Process Automation

Managed File Transfer (MFT)

Workload Automation

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Process Automation

Managed File Transfer (MFT)

Workload Automation

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Camunda vs Control-M

Appian vs Control-M

Pega Platform vs Control-M

IBM BPM vs Control-M

SnapLogic vs Control-M

ServiceNow Orchestration vs Control-M

ActiveBatch by Redwood vs Control-M

vCenter Orchestrator vs Control-M

OpenText Operations Orchestration vs Control-M

BizTalk Server vs Control-M

Temporal vs Control-M

BMC TrueSight Orchestration vs Control-M

Rundeck vs Control-M

Oracle Process Cloud Service vs Control-M

Azure Automation vs Control-M

See all alternatives

Related questions

99

How does Control-M rank in the Workload Automation market compared with other products?

560

What licensing options are there for Control-M?

6

What are some of the ways in which Control-M can be useful to my company?

19

Can Control-M integrate with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform and other similar services?

29

Can Control-M's Application Integrator track job status and retrieve output for executing steps, especially in the context of custom integrations?

137

What is the biggest difference between Oracle DAC Scheduler and Control-M?

128

How does Control-M compare with AutoSys Workload Automation?

49

How would you compare Stonebranch Universal Automation Center vs Control-M?

27

Can Control-M emulate all the functionalities of TWS in a distributed environment?

195

Which is the best Workflow Automation Platform with microservices?