We performed a comparison between ActiveBatch by Redwood and BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Managed File Transfer (MFT) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It has helped with scheduling complex jobs with simple scripts."
"ActiveBatch's Self-Service Portal allows our business units to run and monitor their own workloads. They can simply run and review the logs, but they can't modify them. It increases their productivity because they are able to take care of things on their own. It saves us time from having to rerun the scripts, because the business units can just go ahead and log in and and rerun it themselves."
"Using this tool, if there are any huge failures, we immediately get an email notification, and the proper team will be informed, at which time they can act accordingly."
"Managing the workload and monitoring the tasks were very difficult with manual interventions. Now, by using ActiveBatch, the process is automated and it runs tasks on a scheduled basis."
"As far as centralization goes it's nice because we can see all these processes that are tied to this larger process. The commissions, FTP processing, the reporting, the file moves to the business users — all that is right there. It's very easy to read. It's easy to tie it together, visually, and see where each of these steps fits into the bigger picture."
"From a scheduling point of view, it is pretty good."
"The Jobs Library has been a tremendous asset. For the most, that's what we use. There are some outliers, but we pretty much integrate those Jobs Library steps throughout the process, whether it's REST calls, FTP processes, or file copies and moves... That has helped us to build end-to-end workflows."
"ActiveBatch provides summary reports and logs for further analysis and improvements in monitoring servers, which is very handy."
"It saves a lot of time for maintenance."
"The scalability of this solution is very good. The current solution is used wide spread in my company, but I don't have any plans to expand."
"What I like best about BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is that it makes transfers more secure and faster. It has a recovery feature during failed file transfers."
"I am a partner and an implementer for Control-M. Once purchased by my clients, I implement this solution and provide daily support for this scheduling tool."
"The most valuable features of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer are the ease of use and the ability to watch the files as they transfer called Watch File Transfer. There is a separate monitoring window that is useful."
"The most important aspect is the ability to integrate different platforms."
"This solution has a vast amount of features and with every new release, there are lots of new features introduced. The application has high availability—we have multiple customers and it's highly available. On an application level, if something goes down with the primary, then the application goes over to the secondary, so it's very, very easy to do disaster recovery. From an application integration point of view, it has a lot of APIs, rich APIs. Every month, they are releasing new APIs and new updates, like Java, but more than that. Now they are introducing a couple more APIs, which you can use to integrate your controlling environment with any applications you want."
"The most valuable thing is that it works as advertised. We don't take advantage of some of the features like we should because that's not our primary role and responsibility in the environment that we manage. We only want to make sure that a file gets to where it was supposed to go, or we pull in a file and it comes to us correctly."
"An area for improvement in ActiveBatch Workload Automation is its interface or GUI. It could be a little better. There isn't any additional feature I'd like to see in the tool, except for the GUI, everything looks good."
"The user interface can be improved so that it is more appealing and accessible to new users."
"Between version 10 and version 12 there was a change. In version 10, they had each object in its own folder. But on the back end, they saw it at the root level. So when we moved over to version 12, everything was in the same area mixed together. It was incredibly difficult and we actually had to create our own folders and move those objects—like schedules, jobs, user accounts—and manually put those into folders, whereas the previous version already had it."
"Some improvements can be made to the user interface."
"They have some crucial design flaws within the console that still need to be worked out because it is not working exactly how we hoped to see it, e.g., just some minor things where when you hit the save button, then all of a sudden all your job's library items collapse. Then, in order to continue on with your testing, you have to open those back up. I have taken that to them, and they are like, "Yep. We know about it. We know we have some enhancements that need to be taken care of. We have more developers now." They are working towards taking the minor things that annoy us, resolving them, and getting them fixed."
"There is this back and forth, where ActiveBatch says, "Your Oracle people should be dealing with this," and Oracle people say, "No, we don't know anything about ActiveBatch." Then, it all falls back on me as to what happens. Nobody is taking responsibility. This is the biggest failing for ActiveBatch."
"The thing I've noticed the most is the Help function. It's very difficult, at times, to find examples of how to do something. The Help function will explain what the tool does, but we're not a Windows shop at the data warehouse. Our data warehouse jobs actually run on Linux servers. Finding things for Linux-based solutions is not as easy as it is for Windows-based solutions. I would like to see more examples, and more non-Windows examples as well, in the Help."
"The reporting needs improvement. There is a real need for the ability to generate audit reports on the fly. It needs to be a lot easier than what I can do right now. This is a major item for me."
"Its price could be better."
"The solution should improve the out-of-the box conversion tool for migrations so the percentage result isn't so low."
"One can opt for either a job-based license or a job execution-based license, which sometimes can be troublesome. If the job count exceeds a limit, you may need to procure additional licenses from BMC."
"An area for improvement in BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is integration. It should be compatible with more solutions. It should have integrations with newer applications as well."
"We're only using the functionality that we need to use. However, we've had an opportunity to work with one application owner here who wanted to do some transfers in the cloud and things like that. I know that there were some challenges on that, but they finally got all that set up. There was a learning curve though."
"Scalability is something that needs to be improved."
"Its current functionalities can be upgraded."
"There are eight different kinds of dashboards in Workflow Insights, but there could be more because there is third party software that provides more dashboard styles."
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ActiveBatch by Redwood is ranked 5th in Managed File Transfer (MFT) with 35 reviews while BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is ranked 4th in Managed File Transfer (MFT) with 21 reviews. ActiveBatch by Redwood is rated 9.2, while BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of ActiveBatch by Redwood writes "Flexible, easy to use, and offers good automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer writes "Adaptable, useful file transfer, and has helpful technical support". ActiveBatch by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal by Redwood, Redwood RunMyJobs and IBM Workload Automation, whereas BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is most compared with IBM Sterling File Gateway, MOVEit, Axway AMPLIFY Managed File Transfer, Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct and Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT. See our ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer report.
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