We performed a comparison between Control-M and Rocket Zena 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 variety of valuable features such as Managed File Transfer, credentials vault, integration capabilities, Role-Based Administration, file transfer integration, collaboration dashboard, scheduling, configuration ease, reporting, workload archiving, and forecasting. Rocket Zena excels in ease of use, user interface, diagram feature, Linux configuration, cross-platform job scheduling, web-based client, whiteboard feature, FTP file transfer, licensing process, technical support, and pricing.
Control-M can enhance its microservices and API integration, address bugs in the web interface, develop a lighter web version, improve reporting capabilities, streamline the upgrade process, and integrate with third-party tools. Rocket Zena needs improvement in providing visibility into connections between applications, monitoring agents, ensuring availability on distributed platforms, enhancing communication between servers and agents, and implementing a notification feature for non-functioning servers.
Service and Support: Control-M's customer service has received both positive and negative feedback from customers. Some customers appreciate the support team's promptness and expertise, while others have concerns about the time it takes to resolve issues. Rocket Zena's customer service has received positive reviews, with customers expressing satisfaction with the fast response time and high-quality support.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for Control-M was considered simple and user-friendly, thanks to the helpful guides and videos provided. However, the need for manual conversion of jobs and scripts added some complexity. The initial setup for Rocket Zena varied among users, with some finding it easier to understand. Although integrating with SAP posed a challenge, once users became familiar with the system, creating use cases became easier.
Pricing: Control-M has received mixed feedback regarding its setup cost, with some users expressing concerns about the expenses associated with hardware and licensing. Rocket Zena is perceived as a cost-effective and affordable alternative, particularly suitable for small businesses.
ROI: Control-M provides reduced overall expenses, increased productivity, centralized connection profiles, and improved automation and workflows. The ROI for Zena is unclear.
Comparison Results: Control-M is highly recommended over Rocket Zena. Users love its simple setup, effortless maintenance, and effective automation. Its standout features include Managed File Transfer, credentials vault, integration abilities, and Role-Based Administration. Users also appreciate its teamwork and unified view dashboard.
"The feature we use most in Control-M is related to the file transfer module. It is quite advanced compared to the other tools like Automate, etc. The new version which has come of same MFT has a lot of advanced features which makes it very easy to work with. There is less need for written programs and more GUI-based stuff."
"Speeds up processes and automated tasks."
"It provides a unified view where you can orchestrate and monitor all your application workloads and data pipelines. That's very important because with cloud, software as a service, edge computing, traditional data center, and legacy apps, there are all these environments. If you don't have that single pane of glass or that one place to look at, you're going to invest a lot of time and resources into tracking things down when they go wrong."
"We are using Control-M for day-to-day operations only. It is helpful for us in our day-to-day operations. It is a key in our financial sector. We are automating via Control-M in our treasury operations, including any evening updates. Control-M makes things easier and faster by helping our treasury operations go without any interruptions."
"The solution is innovative. Specifically for the overseas and time differences, you can feel the efficiency of Batch Impact Manager on jobs, batch processing, and impact management. It works the best on these kinds of issues. It saves us time and money, which is important. We save a lot using Control-M."
"Promotions between environments, as well as local, mass update, versioning, and self-service."
"We can tie together all the workloads across the estate and make the whole process reactive to events."
"It can do anything that I need. We do real-time jobs. We also do jobs that have to run at certain times. I have not been presented with a scheduling need that I was not able to do. It is very flexible and dynamic."
"You can click Ctrl-G and bring a diagram view. You're able to view in a diagram format. The view that it provides is easy, and you can move to the left, up, or down. You can double-click on a certain process. It'll drill into that process and all of its underlying components. You can double-click on an arrow or a component, and it'll bring up a screen that'll have all the variables that are assigned to that particular piece, as well as the values at run time. So, the diagram feature of it, at least for me, is pretty valuable."
"I like the whole product, but specifically, I like the license part. It's very easy to acquire a license for this product."
"From a Linux configuration point of view, Rocket Zena is straightforward. It's fairly easy to set up the server and agents once you know how to do it."
"The most valuable feature is the FTP file transfer."
"We haven't had any problems since we installed it. It runs as expected, we haven't had any critical problems. It helps keeps the business running 24/7."
"In the latest upgrade, Zena added a web-based client. The more I use it, the more I like it. It's an excellent interface. They do a good job of steadily improving the solution to make it more useful."
"I have used other tools with similar capabilities; it's the ease of use."
"I have found the scheduling feature the most valuable. I can map dependencies by using ASG-Zena. It gives a nice, quick visualization as to where things are."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Its installation can be better. Currently, we have to install it manually. The file transfer feature can also be improved. It is not very easy to transfer a file from business to business. In terms of new features, they can include new technologies. It can have API integration."
"Its architecture is old. AutoSys gives more flexibility."
"Consider adding a mobile application for remote management."
"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."
"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."
"Rocket Zena is a mainframe-based job scheduler. I would like it to be more open so that we can use it on a distributed platform."
"In the next release, I would like the user experience to be improved. The user interface should be more appealing to gen-z."
"One area where it could be improved is communication between the different servers. Sometimes there are processes that have already been completed but we get a status notification that they're still active."
"The scheduling mapping is a little disjointed. There is no wizard-type approach. There are a lot of different things that you have to do in completely different areas. They could probably add the functionality for creating all components of a mapping or an OPA schedule. The component creation could be done collectively rather than through individual components."
"In the next release, I would like to have an alert feature to indicate when an agent is down. Rocket Zena is not capable of sending alerts that the agent is down. As of now, you have manually monitor to see when the agent is down."
"Another one that is probably a little bit bigger for me is that when there is an issue or there's an error, it writes on a different screen. I have to find the actual process name and go to a different screen to view the alert that got generated. On that screen, everyone's processes, not just the processes of the folks in my department, are thrown. It takes me a while to find the actual error so that I could go in there and look at the alert. It could be because of the way it was set up, but at least for me, it isn't too intuitive."
"The documentation has room for improvement."
"In the web interface, it stacks the tasks across the top, and they accumulate until you close or clean those out. That seems a little cumbersome. You must right-click and close all tabs constantly to keep the console clean and manage your views."
Control-M is ranked 1st in Workload Automation with 110 reviews while Rocket Zena is ranked 12th in Workload Automation with 9 reviews. Control-M is rated 8.8, while Rocket Zena is rated 8.4. 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 Rocket Zena writes "A continuously evolving, stable solution, with responsive support". Control-M is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence, Automic Workload Automation and Redwood RunMyJobs, whereas Rocket Zena is most compared with Rocket Zeke, IBM Workload Automation, AutoSys Workload Automation and ActiveBatch by Redwood. See our Control-M vs. Rocket Zena report.
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