We performed a comparison between Control-M and Rocket Zena 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 variety of valuable features such as Managed File Transfer, credentials vault, integration capabilities, Role-Based Administration, file transfer integration, collaboration dashboard, scheduling, configuration ease, reporting, workload archiving, and forecasting. Rocket Zena excels in ease of use, user interface, diagram feature, Linux configuration, cross-platform job scheduling, web-based client, whiteboard feature, FTP file transfer, licensing process, technical support, and pricing.
Control-M can enhance its microservices and API integration, address bugs in the web interface, develop a lighter web version, improve reporting capabilities, streamline the upgrade process, and integrate with third-party tools. Rocket Zena needs improvement in providing visibility into connections between applications, monitoring agents, ensuring availability on distributed platforms, enhancing communication between servers and agents, and implementing a notification feature for non-functioning servers.
Service and Support: Control-M's customer service has received both positive and negative feedback from customers. Some customers appreciate the support team's promptness and expertise, while others have concerns about the time it takes to resolve issues. Rocket Zena's customer service has received positive reviews, with customers expressing satisfaction with the fast response time and high-quality support.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for Control-M was considered simple and user-friendly, thanks to the helpful guides and videos provided. However, the need for manual conversion of jobs and scripts added some complexity. The initial setup for Rocket Zena varied among users, with some finding it easier to understand. Although integrating with SAP posed a challenge, once users became familiar with the system, creating use cases became easier.
Pricing: Control-M has received mixed feedback regarding its setup cost, with some users expressing concerns about the expenses associated with hardware and licensing. Rocket Zena is perceived as a cost-effective and affordable alternative, particularly suitable for small businesses.
ROI: Control-M provides reduced overall expenses, increased productivity, centralized connection profiles, and improved automation and workflows. The ROI for Zena is unclear.
Comparison Results: Control-M is highly recommended over Rocket Zena. Users love its simple setup, effortless maintenance, and effective automation. Its standout features include Managed File Transfer, credentials vault, integration abilities, and Role-Based Administration. Users also appreciate its teamwork and unified view dashboard.
"The File Watcher utility, cyclic jobs, and email alert notification are valuable."
"Cross-platform support: A Linux job can be dependent on a Windows job, which can be dependent on many other flavours of hardware/software. Your batch is therefore managed by a single tool, allowing you to monitor your entire flow."
"Self Service, BIM features are most valuable. As no need to login to EM client and check the job status."
"Because it's a tool which allows us to do scheduled work, it allows for notifications when jobs aren't running within that scheduled time frame. This improves the opportunity to meet SLAs."
"Speeds up processes and automated tasks."
"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."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"It has absolutely saved us time. It has made us more efficient. As far as the processing between systems, we don't have as many people. They have been able to focus on other efforts, because we have been able to automate more stuff with Control-M."
"I have used other tools with similar capabilities; it's the ease of use."
"In the latest upgrade, Zena added a web-based client. The more I use it, the more I like it. It's an excellent interface. They do a good job of steadily improving the solution to make it more useful."
"From a Linux configuration point of view, Rocket Zena is straightforward. It's fairly easy to set up the server and agents once you know how to do it."
"You can click Ctrl-G and bring a diagram view. You're able to view in a diagram format. The view that it provides is easy, and you can move to the left, up, or down. You can double-click on a certain process. It'll drill into that process and all of its underlying components. You can double-click on an arrow or a component, and it'll bring up a screen that'll have all the variables that are assigned to that particular piece, as well as the values at run time. So, the diagram feature of it, at least for me, is pretty valuable."
"Its FTP feature is very good, as is scheduling any process or task with the Zena client. I have found it to be very helpful. If a task fails, it gives you a prompt."
"We haven't had any problems since we installed it. It runs as expected, we haven't had any critical problems. It helps keeps the business running 24/7."
"The most valuable feature is the FTP file transfer."
"I like the whole product, but specifically, I like the license part. It's very easy to acquire a license for this product."
"A Control-M on-prem license is based on the number of jobs, which is the number of tasks a particular customer wants to have. These tasks have to be run within 24 hours window. For example, if you have a license for 100 jobs, you can run a maximum of 100 jobs in a 24-hour window. If your operations could not run 10 jobs, and they ran only 90 jobs, they just carry over to the next day, but the next day, they will have 110 jobs. Control-M asks you to buy those 10 more licenses because you were out of compliance in terms of the number of licenses. This is something that needs to be indicated in Control-M GUI so that customers know the number of licenses they're going to use in this time window. Their support and documentation should be improved. I am not that satisfied with their customer support. Sometimes, they don't have the answers. Their documentation is very poor. It is not well written, and it is not in a very logical manner. You can use it on Unix, Linux, Windows, and AIX, but it needs some improvement on iSeries. It needs a built-in mechanism inside the system to give you an option to restore from the last point of failure. If a process crashes, the Control-M needs to have a mechanism in iSeries where the process can be restored from the last point of failure."
"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."
"I'm not sure how the solution fits together with our business modernization initiatives, as there are things outside of my area, even though Control-M is the scheduling tool of the company. They may use other things, e.g., Big Data."
"The report form and display function are weak; they are not very powerful."
"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."
"There's a lot of room for improvement and I think it can be more user-friendly."
"The reporting tool still needs a lot of improvement. It was supposed to get better with the upgrade, and it really didn't get better. It needs help, because it's such a useful thing to have. It needs to be more powerful and easier to use."
"After we complete FTP jobs, those FTP jobs will be cleared from the Control-M schedule after the noon refresh. So, I struggle to find out where those jobs are saved. Then, we need to request execution of the FTP jobs again. If there could be an option to show the logs, which have been previously completed, that would help us. I can find all other job logs from the server side, but FTP job logs. Maybe I am missing the feature, or if it is not there, it could be added."
"In the web interface, it stacks the tasks across the top, and they accumulate until you close or clean those out. That seems a little cumbersome. You must right-click and close all tabs constantly to keep the console clean and manage your views."
"One area where it could be improved is communication between the different servers. Sometimes there are processes that have already been completed but we get a status notification that they're still active."
"Another one that is probably a little bit bigger for me is that when there is an issue or there's an error, it writes on a different screen. I have to find the actual process name and go to a different screen to view the alert that got generated. On that screen, everyone's processes, not just the processes of the folks in my department, are thrown. It takes me a while to find the actual error so that I could go in there and look at the alert. It could be because of the way it was set up, but at least for me, it isn't too intuitive."
"The documentation has room for improvement."
"Rocket Zena is a mainframe-based job scheduler. I would like it to be more open so that we can use it on a distributed platform."
"In the next release, I would like the user experience to be improved. The user interface should be more appealing to gen-z."
"In the next release, I would like to have an alert feature to indicate when an agent is down. Rocket Zena is not capable of sending alerts that the agent is down. As of now, you have manually monitor to see when the agent is down."
"The scheduling mapping is a little disjointed. There is no wizard-type approach. There are a lot of different things that you have to do in completely different areas. They could probably add the functionality for creating all components of a mapping or an OPA schedule. The component creation could be done collectively rather than through individual components."
Control-M is ranked 1st in Workload Automation with 110 reviews while Rocket Zena is ranked 12th in Workload Automation with 9 reviews. Control-M is rated 8.8, while Rocket Zena is rated 8.4. 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 Rocket Zena writes "A continuously evolving, stable solution, with responsive support". Control-M is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence, Automic Workload Automation and Redwood RunMyJobs, whereas Rocket Zena is most compared with Rocket Zeke, IBM Workload Automation, AutoSys Workload Automation and ActiveBatch by Redwood. See our Control-M vs. Rocket Zena report.
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