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.
"First of all, the shift from manual to automation has been valuable. We have a tool that can automate."
"It is an enterprise tool that integrates with all the applications in our organization. It has made our life easier because we don't need to wake up at midnight and do monitoring, etc. It does everything. It also sends precautionary alerts. If a job or activity is running for more than the specified time, it alerts the application team. So, our teams do not need to sit in front of a laptop or any open application to watch the jobs. They can do their other regular activities while Control-M takes care of all the jobs. It notifies them when there is job completion, delay, and error."
"You can let users access the system and manage jobs: self-service."
"Control-M has enabled true enterprise batch automation, which combined with the other BMC Control products on our mainframe platform, allows us to run a 24/7 site with the lights out."
"It has certainly helped speed things up."
"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."
"BIM is a good tool to monitor SLAs, and being a financial organization, this is a very good feature for us."
"Before Control-M, we didn't have a centralized view and could not view what happened in the past to determine what will happen in the future. The Gantt view that we have in Control-M is like a project view. It is nice because we sometimes have some application maintenance that we need to do. So, in a single console, we can hold the jobs for the next hour or two. We can release that job when it is finished. This is a really nice feature that we didn't have before. It is something really simple, but we didn't previously have a console where we could say, "For the next two hours, what are the jobs that we will run? And, hold these jobs not to run." This is really important."
"We like that it has GUI and is not just a command line."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the reliability of the agents, because we need them accessible and we need to run stuff. The agent technology and compatibility are top-notch."
"The features are upgraded, and every six months they're releasing patches."
"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."
"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"
"I like the dashboard and the various workflows."
"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."
"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."
"They can give more predefined plug-ins so that we don't have to create them."
"Its operations and infrastructure can be improved."
"It has a slight issue with daylight savings time while advancing the clock in the Spring."
"The infrastructure updates could use improvement. Some of the previous updates that we have run to get to version nineteen were troublesome. So, a more seamless upgrade path for the infrastructure components would be useful. I don't know if they have replaced that in version 20 or if version 20 has an easier path, but I would like to see the upgrade from one version to the next version be a little smoother."
"The community and the networking that goes on within that community need improvement. We want to be able to reach out to an SME, and say, "Hey, we are doing it this way. Does that make sense?" Ideally, they come back. and say, "Yes, it does make sense to do it that way. However, if you want to do it this way, then it is a little more efficient." We understand that one solution framework doesn't fit everybody. Depending on the breadth of the data and how broad it is, you may have different models for one over the other."
"Some of the documentation could use some improvement, however, it gets you from point A to point B pretty quickly to get the solution in place."
"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."
"There is room for improvement with its connectivity with the Microsoft SRS system. It is very weak. They keep telling us it works with it, and technically it does, but it does not provide a lot of visibility. We have lost a lot of visibility migrating to Stonebranch, compared with just running tasks on the SRS server. That's really about the only thing that is a sore point for us."
"It would be ideal if they had the exact same features as the CA Workload Automation DE series. It would be helpful to have calendaring options."
"Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics."
"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."
"It can't handle negative written codes."
"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."
"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."
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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