We performed a comparison between Control-M and Redwood Software - Workload Automation Edition 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 valuable features such as Managed File Transfer, credentials vault, integration capabilities, Role-Based Administration, file transfer integration, collaboration dashboard, scheduling, web interface, reporting, workload archiving, and forecasting. Redwood Software provides powerful job definitions, job importation, user authority restrictions, monitoring alerts, dashboards, error handling, task scheduling, system integration, user-friendly interface, real-time event monitoring, cloud automation, load balancing, memory management, and mobile notifications.
Control-M could benefit from improvements in microservices, API integration, reporting capabilities, and customization options. Redwood Software would benefit from improvements in reporting features, monitoring and alert service, user interface, and security standards.
Service and Support: Control-M's customer service and support have received both positive and negative feedback. Some customers appreciate the support team's promptness and expertise, while others believe there is room for improvement in terms of responsiveness and proactive assistance. Redwood Software's customer service and support have garnered predominantly positive reviews, with customers describing it as good and helpful.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for Control-M was generally user-friendly and supported by informative guides and videos. Nevertheless, a few users encountered difficulties in converting jobs or dealing with database problems. Redwood Software was described as intricate and time-consuming. However, after completing the setup, it resulted in a smaller system footprint and facilitated easy upgrades.
Pricing: Control-M has a high setup cost, including expenses like infrastructure and salaries. This can be burdensome for smaller companies due to the pricing being based on the number of jobs or endpoints. Redwood Software has a more innovative pricing model that is based on job executions. This makes it cost-effective and advantageous for companies looking to explore new platforms.
ROI: The Control-M product offers advantages such as reduced expenses, enhanced task performance, stability, and efficient data handling. Users of Redwood have experienced time savings and improved job scheduling, resulting in a return on investment.
Comparison Results: The user reviews indicate that Control-M is the preferred product compared to Redwood. Users appreciate Control-M for its easy setup, consistent performance, useful features like Managed File Transfer and Role-Based Administration, and its ability to improve operational efficiency. Control-M stands out with its more extensive solution, greater automation, user-friendly interface, and the value it brings to organizations.
"The most valuable features are the GUI console, stability, and workflow."
"We can set up automated email notifications to the programmers or the whole team for a particular job. It helps save time because we're not consistently looking at the job to see if it has ended or failed."
"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."
"BIM is helpful because we do not miss any SLAs, as we get to know the issue well in advance. It is the topmost service that has helped us provide better solutions for the business."
"The scheduling and management were really good. Monitoring was also better. It had a good visual presentation. It showed me charts and all such things. It was really good on that side."
"The feature we use most in Control-M is related to the file transfer module. It is quite advanced compared to the other tools like Automate, etc. The new version which has come of same MFT has a lot of advanced features which makes it very easy to work with. There is less need for written programs and more GUI-based stuff."
"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."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"Redwood manages all complex job workflow processes."
"There are various ways in which you can construct jobs depending on your business needs and requirements."
"Its monitoring and alerting features are what I found the most valuable."
"REL expressions are quite helpful for setting up the preconditions."
"Our team was able to integrate it with the ITSM tool as well as security monitoring tools to make the incident creation process automatically feasible."
"The best feature I love about Redwood is the real-time event monitoring and alerting."
"Error handling and the recovery feature ensure that my job processes are not stopped if any error occurs."
"One of Redwood Software's features that I liked was its event-driven automation, which allows IT teams to respond to real-time events, alerts, and notifications from numerous systems."
"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."
"Reporting in Control-M could use improvement."
"We develop software. More frequently, we are working with microservices and APIs, using our integration tool, MuleSoft. While Control-M is really a good tool to integrate with other tools, it is important for them to continue improving their microservices and API."
"The MFT applications should have more functionality and flexibility within that tool. Having more flexibility with that tool for handling the one to many or many to one concept. Like being able to take data from one source and push it to many locations or pull data from many locations and bring it back into a single source. That's why we still use our TPS program for the file transfers just because we don't have some of those capabilities available to us within MFT."
"When it comes to supporting cloud services, Control-M is a bit slow. We are not advancing with the technology because we don't have the modules that can interact or use the new application services provided by the cloud technologies."
"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 can definitely expand promotions, so that a single job can be moved. Currently you can only promote a job by promoting the entire table."
"In general, it is a very good product, and we are very happy with it. It meets all of our expectations."
"There is a lack of resources and product documentation which, if included, would help to gain more knowledge about the application."
"The job log has a size limit."
"It lacks some of the common reporting features. I'm a bit surprised that there aren't some standard reports to be able to extract any data on usage. They've described to us that customers have different reporting needs, so they let them develop those, but reporting is a common need. It would be helpful to have it as part of the solution."
"The dashboard provided can be made more visually appealing and could include more critical data that would help associates in one glance get the required information."
"Having a graphical user interface for the dashboard would be great."
"The only issue at first was that we had to manually delete or raise the event in order to run some of the events and wait for jobs, even if the file was kept at the correct AL11 position."
"The user interface of Redwood can be improved a bit to make it more user-friendly and interesting."
"It would be nice if Redwood RunMyJobs could work on different systems."
Control-M is ranked 1st in Workload Automation with 110 reviews while Redwood RunMyJobs is ranked 3rd in Workload Automation with 30 reviews. Control-M is rated 8.8, while Redwood RunMyJobs is rated 9.6. 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 Redwood RunMyJobs writes "Simple to use, increases CPU speed, and reduces the cost of machine time". Control-M is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Rocket Zena, Automic Workload Automation and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, whereas Redwood RunMyJobs is most compared with Stonebranch, Tidal by Redwood, AutoSys Workload Automation, Automic Workload Automation and ActiveBatch by Redwood. See our Control-M vs. Redwood RunMyJobs report.
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