We performed a comparison between Control-M and Stonebranch Universal Automation Center 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 capabilities such as Managed File Transfer, credentials vault, integration capabilities, Role-Based Administration, file transfer integration, collaboration, scheduling, ease of configuration, web interface, reporting, workload archiving, and forecasting. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center is commended for its strong performance, graphical representation, intuitive interface, job dependencies, rerun function, GUI, task monitor, stability, scalability, and reliable technical support.
Control-M could improve its microservices and API integration, fix bugs in the web interface, develop a lighter web version, enhance reporting capabilities, and improve support and documentation. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could benefit from cloud availability, improved analytics, easier task monitoring, and a mobile app for job hour calculation. Collaborating with the vendor for future releases would also be helpful.
Service and Support: Control-M's customer service has received mixed feedback, with some customers commending the prompt and knowledgeable support team. However, others believe there is room for improvement. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center's customer service has garnered high praise. Users describe support as very good and always available to help.
Ease of Deployment: Control-M's initial setup was simple and aided by useful guides and videos. Upgrades were seamless and caused minimal disruption. While customization and migration posed some challenges, Control-M proved adaptable and offered assistance. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center's setup was rated as mediocre in terms of ease. The infrastructure's complexity led to complications and necessitated the relocation of certain components.
Pricing: The opinions on setup cost for Control-M vary, with some users expressing concern about the expense associated with hardware and licensing for each job. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center is seen as a more cost-effective option compared to its competitors, leading to its popularity among companies.
ROI: Control-M has proven to be more cost-effective than Stonebranch Universal Automation Center, resulting in improved productivity, decreased downtime, and streamlined processes.
Comparison Results: Control-M is highly preferred over Stonebranch Universal Automation Center. Users appreciate Control-M for its user-friendly setup process, stability, easy maintenance, and smooth upgrades. They find its Managed File Transfer, credentials vault, integration capabilities, role-based administration, and dashboard collaboration features to be valuable.
"The ability to dynamically predict batch run time is so valuable."
"The best part about this product is that it has a lot of features. Control-M doesn't limit us and we can use it for a lot of things."
"Because it's a tool which allows us to do scheduled work, it allows for notifications when jobs aren't running within that scheduled time frame. This improves the opportunity to meet SLAs."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the reporting function. It allows us to pull up reports for specific information that the end-users are looking for."
"We are now able to deliver data to our data warehouses and dashboards promptly."
"We have a better picture of our auditability. When someone comes to us, and asks for sources, "How did the deltas occur?" We can provide answers quickly, or at least quicker than what we used to. We are actually sure of the information that we provide, where before it was like, "Hmm, I think it comes from over there. Let me double check, but it gets really convoluted over here and I think that is where it comes from." Now, if it is within the Control-M environment, it has a straightforward answer that we can provide with confidence."
"As soon as you have an issue, a ticket is created and the tech support is quite responsive."
"The tasks are incredibly capable, and as long as you name them with a nice, uniform naming convention, they are very useful. You can create some interesting workflows through various machines, or you can just have it kick off single tasks. All in all, I really like the Universal Task. You can do some mutually exclusive stuff, such as an "A not B" kind of thing. It has a lot of capabilities behind the scenes."
"I love the Universal Controller. It's been great for us. We host it on-premise... It's High Availability, meaning there's failover from one server to the other if one goes down."
"When it comes to agent technology and compatibility with other vendors, from a platform perspective it was the one vendor that fit all the platforms that we have, from your old platforms - mainframe, NSK, IBM i - to the new ones, going into cloud and container"
"We like that it has GUI and is not just a command line."
"The Universal Agent is the most valuable feature. Being agent-based and being able to go across multiple technology stacks, which is what our workflows do, Stonebranch gives us the ability to bridge those disparate technologies. It enables us to remove the dependency-gap with the agent so we know the status of the workflow at each step."
"The support is good from Stonebranch Universal Automation Center."
"The ability to monitor tasks that are on the open-system side as well as our mainframe side gives us a one-window view of all our processes."
"The features are upgraded, and every six months they're releasing patches."
"Finding documentation on the website can be a bit confusing."
"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."
"There is definitely room for improvement. Version 9.0.20 actually comes with a web-based interface, but there are still a lot of things unavailable with it. There will eventually be more inclusions added into the web interface, but there is still a long way to go."
"I am unsure if Control-M is compliant with Microsoft Azure environment integrations. We have some clients in Azure environments. Specifically, in Canada, government agencies and nonprofits mostly use Microsoft Azure."
"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."
"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."
"For installing or upgrading the PeopleSoft and SAP plugins, currently there is no way to do it via Control-M Configuration Manager. So, we are installing or upgrading the plugins, like PeopleSoft and SAP, manually. If BMC could provide an option via Control-M Configuration Manager to upgrade these plugins, it probably would reduce a lot of manual work as well as ease our work. This is one improvement that I personally want to see, because it would help our way of working."
"The history module only contains a maximum of 10 days, but we would like to have access to more. For example, it would be helpful to have 30 days or two months of history available."
"It's not available on the cloud, so they should take that due to safety, security, and scalability."
"I would rate Stonebranch somewhere in the middle for ease of setup. It wasn't too straightforward for us because our infrastructure is complex."
"It can be hard to manage the task monitor."
"I have a request regarding our agent on the mainframe. It may time out when communicating to the Universal Controller, when the mainframe is extremely busy. That can cause a task which is running at that time to not see the results of the job that ran on the mainframe. It happens sporadically during times of really busy CPU usage. We're expecting that enhancement from them in the fourth quarter."
"It can't handle negative written codes."
"One hiccup we've had is due to the fact that we have other internal scheduling tools. We're able to talk to them, but we have trouble with some of the networking between them, so we're still trying to work out the kinks there."
"Occasionally, we have an agent that doesn't come back up after patching. That doesn't happen very often... It's really just a restart of the agent and it comes back up. But that might be one thing that could be improved."
"The Universal Controller is decent for the money it costs... It needs some work to have full features, compared to other products that are out there, specifically IBM's Workload Scheduler."
Control-M is ranked 1st in Workload Automation with 110 reviews while Stonebranch is ranked 16th in Workload Automation with 26 reviews. Control-M is rated 8.8, while Stonebranch is rated 8.8. 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 Stonebranch writes "Allowed us to develop workflows without having to train and develop very specialized skillsets". Control-M is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Rocket Zena, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence and Tidal by Redwood, whereas Stonebranch is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence, IBM Workload Automation and VisualCron. See our Control-M vs. Stonebranch report.
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