We performed a comparison between ActiveBatch Workload Automation and Control-M based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: ActiveBatch Workload Automation is highly praised for its versatility and ease of use. Users appreciate the prebuilt jobs, scheduling, monitoring, and alerting mechanism provided by the software. It is also commended for its scalability and intelligent automation features. Control-M stands out in areas such as Managed File Transfer, credentials vault, integration capabilities, Role-Based Administration, collaboration, and forecasting. Users find the software to be particularly useful for these functionalities.
ActiveBatch improvements include managed file transfer, subscription model transition, cloud aspect, interface, crashes, triggers, monitoring dashboard, price, documentation, help center, setup process, email alerts, lag/stability issues, customization options, and customer support. Control-M needs enhancements in microservices, API integration, web interface, testing/quality assurance, reporting, customization, upgrade process, distributed architecture, third-party tool integration, FTP job logs visibility, and QA testing.
Service and Support: ActiveBatch Workload Automation has been praised for its customer service, with users appreciating the helpful, reliable, and responsive support team. Control-M has received mixed feedback. Some customers have praised the prompt and knowledgeable support team, while others have faced slow response times and a lack of proactive assistance.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for ActiveBatch Workload Automation was smooth and uncomplicated. Nevertheless, there is a minor requirement for additional instructional material when importing files. Control-M had a direct setup procedure, although a few users mentioned a learning curve and the necessity to manually convert jobs and scripts.
Pricing: ActiveBatch Workload Automation is highly regarded for its flexible and reasonably priced setup cost. Users appreciate the ease and speed of the process. Control-M's pricing and licensing elicit varied opinions, with some users considering it costly and perplexing.
ROI: ActiveBatch Workload Automation has proven to be highly effective, leading to substantial financial gains for users. It has resulted in a significant boost in net revenue. Control-M offers a more cost-effective solution, improving overall efficiency and providing advanced automation features.
Comparison Results: ActiveBatch Workload Automation is the preferred product over Control-M according to user reviews. It is praised for its simplicity and ease of use during setup. ActiveBatch offers more versatility and ease of configuration, with prebuilt jobs and a user-friendly interface. Its pricing is considered reasonable and competitive, especially for smaller companies.
"ActiveBatch has reduced work by providing automated workflows across several different applications."
"One of the valuable features is the ability to trigger workflows, one after another, based on success, without having to worry about overlapping workflows. The ability to integrate our BI, analytics, and our data quality jobs is also valuable"
"The automation feature is a very valuable feature as the associates do not have to worry about performing repetitive tasks (i.e. endpoint security scans on a daily basis) that would take several hours to complete on a daily basis."
"Since we are no longer waiting for an operator to see that a job is finished, we have changed our daily cycle from running in eight hours down to about five. We had a third shift-operator retire and that position was never refilled."
"What ActiveBatch allows you to do is develop a more efficient process. It gave me visibility into all my jobs so I could choose which jobs to run in parallel. This is much easier than when I have to try to do it through cron for Windows XP, where you really can't do things in parallel and know what is going on."
"Since I started using this product, I have been able to easily track everything as it mainly monitors, alerts, and looks after all the services - even across platform scheduling - which has helped me immensely."
"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."
"The REST API adapters and native integrations for integrating and orchestrating the software stack are very flexible."
"Most valuable feature would be the ability to detect and notify when a process has not completed successfully."
"Control-M has helped to improve our data transfers because it allows us to monitor the execution of the process. With other technologies, we cannot do that."
"It is simple to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines and to ingest data from different platforms. It integrates well between platforms."
"The initial setup is largely straightforward."
"We used Control-M's Python Client and cloud data service integrations with AWS and, as a feature, it was very customizable. It gave us a lot of flexibility for customizing whatever data maneuver we wanted to do within a pipeline."
"The most valuable features are the managing of file transfers and the product keeping up with technology."
"The integration with ServiceNow is good. When a job ends and there are problems with it, we automatically open an incident in this platform, and the number of the incident is forwarded to Control-M. This means that we have a record of it with the log of the job."
"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."
"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."
"There are very few documents that provide us with detailed information on the troubleshooting of errors that occur during integration with the existing environment."
"They could provide an easier installation guide or technical support to the organizations during the installation process."
"The monitoring dashboard could have been more user-friendly so that in the monitoring dashboard itself we can see the total number of jobs created in the system and how many were currently active/scheduled/chained."
"It does have a little bit of a learning curve because it is fairly complex. You have to learn how it does things. I don't know if it's any worse than any other tool would be, just because of the nature of what it does... the learning curve is the hardest part."
"There are some issues with this version and finding the jobs that it ran. If you're looking at 1,000 different jobs, it shows based on the execution time, not necessarily the run time. So, if there was a constraint waiting, you may be looking for it in the wrong time frame. Plus, with thousands of jobs showing up and the way it pages output jobs, sometimes you end up with multiple pages on the screen, then you have to go through to find the specific job you're looking for. On the opposite side, you can limit the daily activity screen to show only jobs that failed or jobs currently running, which will shrink that back down. However, we have operators who are looking at the whole nightly cycle to make sure everything is there and make sure nothing got blocked or was waiting. Sometimes, they have a hard time finding every item within the list."
"Setting up the software was hard."
"The UI could potentially offer a more refined and user-friendly experience, fostering smoother interactions and facilitating easier navigation for users engaging with the application."
"Its operations and infrastructure can be improved."
"We've also had a few database bugs within our organization. I think we are migrating to OpenJDK rather than just regular Java and that has since shown some issues with our Control-M instance, timing out and causing our jobs to stop running. We are still working with BMC to fine-tune that and get that resolved."
"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."
"Right now, Control-M is the leader in EMA analysis, which is similar to Gartner. However, clients want to invest in a strong technology, and therefore this product needs to keep up with the high expectations set for it."
"Some of the features are not available. We were about to deploy the REST API, but we had some challenges. We had to use a third-party application. So, it should be improved in terms of integrating REST API jobs. That was something that was lacking. The customer was not that happy in terms of getting the desired output. So, we had to use a third-party application called Hangfire. We would like to have more videos on REST API integration, and we would like to have easy integration with the Control-M application through the REST API."
"Regarding product design and R&D, the DevOps pipeline could be improved with better capabilities and automation. API security and authentication is another area that could use improvement; users must have static credential passwords, which is a security concern."
"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."
"The company has been working with BMC on the MFT. There are still some things about MFT which don't work the way that we want with our needs. So, we would like to see that improved."
ActiveBatch by Redwood is ranked 6th in Process Automation with 35 reviews while Control-M is ranked 4th in Process Automation with 110 reviews. ActiveBatch by Redwood is rated 9.2, while Control-M 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 Control-M writes "We have seen quicker file transfers with more visibility and stability". ActiveBatch by Redwood is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal by Redwood, Redwood RunMyJobs, VisualCron and IBM Workload Automation, whereas Control-M is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Rocket Zena, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence and Automic Workload Automation. See our ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Control-M report.
See our list of best Process Automation vendors, best Managed File Transfer (MFT) vendors, and best Workload Automation vendors.
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