We performed a comparison between Appian and Control-M based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Process Automation solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Low code development: Code can be developed pretty quickly which leads to less turnaround time for automation of business processes."
"The solution's most valuable features are the regular periodic and quarterly updates, they are very useful updates. They keep improving the solution more often, and that helps the platform or code always be up to date with the latest features."
"SAIL (Self-Assembling Interface Layer), a scripting language provided by Appian. It is the equivalent of JS and CSS. It allows creation of complex UIs which are also responsive. With SAIL, we have a single language for both the UI logic and its appearance. UI components can be built as reusable components and used in multiple UI interfaces."
"It has good integrations. We were looking for out-of-the-box integration with both on-prem and publicly accessible data sources. We needed integration with the cloud, OData, our REST API feed, and then on-prem passthrough to go to a SQL database or on-prem APIs through Azure local deployment, etc."
"The process models provide self-documenting systems."
"What stands out are the speed of the product, the quick, easy development, and visual diagramming."
"It is really simple to create a new app, and I like the data-centric aspect of the BPM tool."
"Write to Data Store Entity - Saving data in SQL databases is done easily using entities. Entities (CDTs in Appian terminology) define relationships and target schema tables via XSD files."
"The reporting is top-notch. I haven't found any other applications on the market that can replicate what Control-M offers. The alerting is very good, and I think their service monitoring is the best in the industry."
"I find Control-M for SAP and Control-M for Informatica good. You can connect to the Linux or Windows servers, and you can run multiple jobs."
"The web interface is handy. It's easy to use, and Control-M provides you with the necessary materials to understand the features and perform various tasks."
"There is a batch monitoring tool called Batch Impact Manager, which proactively warns when processing is behind and SLAs are in jeopardy of being missed."
"In the client, it provides a unified view for me. I can alter the view that I want to see jobs and conditions. This is nice to have. The fact that you can see everything in one space is very important, especially these days where everything is about data and monitoring as well as because we are working from home on a global basis. So, I can monitor jobs in real-time, along with any failures or anything that might be stuck. The real-time monitoring and the ability to see everything in one place is important for us because we operate 24/7."
"We value Control-M mainly for the ability to control multiple nodes in a coordinated manner. Control-M has the ability to really coordinate across a lot of nodes."
"It has certainly helped speed things up."
"The File Watcher utility, cyclic jobs, and email alert notification are valuable."
"What could be improved is more on the front end perspective, like the user interface and the mobile application aspect."
"They should provide more flexibility so designers can create a more picture perfect device."
"It would be useful if they could create an academy or forum in the future to help active users answer questions they have about the solution."
"It needs better integration with our existing application ecosystem."
"We would like to have more granular control for interface styling."
"A point of improvement would be the SAIL forms. The built-in tool used to generate forms does not have debugging support (to view local variables as they change on live preview, and step-by-step valuation) which is a big drawback for form development. Moreover, the script language used to build SAIL forms does not support inheritance or lambda expressions (functions as arguments of other functions), which makes the code base more verbose."
"The tool itself is pretty good, but the main area that we struggled with was the backend. The frontend development is really good, but the backend modeling can be streamlined a little bit. There are good integrations, but tying them through the data layer and then up into the frontend could be improved a little bit. It does read/write on the data source, and you can configure it to just write or just read, but there is a little bit of work involved."
"If we could calculate the amount of data that will be realized, it would help us a lot."
"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."
"I would like to have a web version of Control-M to replace the client. Currently, our support and jobs-creation teams are using the client and that needs to be installed on a PC. It's very heavy, consuming a lot of resources compared to the web portal. I know that they're trying to improve the client with the latest version, but for me, there hasn't been enough improvement yet."
"The biggest improvement they could have is better QA testing before releases come out the door."
"I would like to see more auditing capabilities. Right now, it has the basics and I've been trying to set those up to work with what our auditors are looking for."
"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."
"You need to pay for extra features if you need them."
"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."
"I would like not to have to reach out to a third-party application company to do automated notifications. Right now, we still have people manually calling people and emailing people. There's a company called xMatters - and there are others - that has an API through Control-M that can automate any aspect of failure management. I'd like to see it build right into the product. I'd like to see a better notification product."
Appian is ranked 3rd in Process Automation with 58 reviews while Control-M is ranked 4th in Process Automation with 110 reviews. Appian is rated 8.4, while Control-M is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Appian writes "Low resource consumption, easy setup, and stable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Control-M writes "We have seen quicker file transfers with more visibility and stability". Appian is most compared with Microsoft Power Apps, Camunda, ServiceNow, OutSystems and Pega BPM, whereas Control-M is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Rocket Zena, Automic Workload Automation and ESP Workload Automation Intelligence. See our Appian vs. Control-M report.
See our list of best Process Automation vendors.
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