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.
"It has helped with scheduling complex jobs with simple scripts."
"ActiveBatch provides summary reports and logs for further analysis and improvements in monitoring servers, which is very handy."
"The product offers a centralized platform for managing activities across many environments, applications, etc."
"We use the main job-scheduling feature. It's the only thing we use in the tool. That's the reason we are using the tool: to reduce costs by replacing manual tasks with automated tasks and to perform regular, repetitive tasks in a more reliable way."
"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."
"From a scheduling point of view, it is pretty good."
"The software offers real-time monitoring and reporting features that let IT teams keep tabs on the progress of their batch operations and workflows."
"There are hundreds of pre-built steps."
"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."
"It is very stable. We hardly get calls in respect to issues on Control-M, particularly on version 9.0.19."
"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."
"Control-M is useful to automate all critical and non-critical processes. Using Control-M, we can automate application workflows as well as file transfers involved in application workflows. We can also use it to run batches related to applications. Automating these processes reduces the RTO and RPO, which helps in the case of failures. It also helps us to identify bottlenecks and take corrective measures."
"Control-M has improved application reliability and the SLAs in our company by quite a bit. You can see if problems are coming. If we have an SLA in a couple of hours, we know well before that couple hours if processing is behind, and it allows us to take some preventative action."
"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."
"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."
"If they have ad hoc requirements, then they can theoretically schedule their own file transfers with the Self Service. We are trying to push as much work back to the customers or developers that have that requirement, because they prefer to help themselves, if possible. We try empowering them and enabling them through Control-M, especially for file transfers, because it is a much broader base of the business then just with batch scheduling. Typically, with SAP batch scheduling, it would work with dedicated teams. With file transfers, the entire business is involved. There are business users, end users, etc. It definitely needs to be as simple as possible and as managed as well as possible. They need to manage it themselves, if possible, because our team is not growing but the number of customers, applications, and jobs are growing. We need to hand back some of the responsibility to the customer for them to resolve and action it."
"Providing some detailed training materials could be very helpful for new users who have very limited technical information about the tool."
"A cloud option is not provided as a free feature, making it a costly solution for smaller organizations."
"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 could be easier to provide dashboards on how many jobs are running at the same time; more monitoring."
"I can't get the cleaning up of logs to work consistently. Right now, we are not setup correctly, and maybe it is something that I have not effectively communicated to them."
"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."
"They could provide an easier installation guide or technical support to the organizations during the installation process."
"The reporting needs improvement. There is a real need for the ability to generate audit reports on the fly. It needs to be a lot easier than what I can do right now. This is a major item for me."
"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."
"It is a very strong product, but the reporting could be better."
"They can give more predefined plug-ins so that we don't have to create them."
"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."
"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."
"There's a lot of room for improvement and I think it can be more user-friendly."
"The main area that could be improved would be documentation, just like every other software product out there!"
"The unifying features between Control-M for different platforms needs improvement. The scheduling options on the Control-M mainframe jobs are different than they are on our Linux server. There are a few differences here and there."
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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