We performed a comparison between Control-M and Tidal Automation 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 features such as managed file transfer, secure storage for credentials, seamless integration capabilities, role-based administration, collaboration dashboards, efficient scheduling, easy configuration, and accurate forecasting. Tidal Automation also provides valuable features like a job scheduler, a unified and intuitive interface, flexibility in running jobs, effective error handling, role-based access control, and dynamic job scheduling.
Control-M can enhance its microservices and API integration, address bugs in the web interface, streamline the upgrade process, and integrate with third-party tools. Tidal Automation needs improvement in its graphical user interface, pricing model, cloud/hybrid solution, migration process, artificial intelligence capabilities, user interface intuitiveness, initial setup process, security features, and performance scalability.
Service and Support: Control-M's customer service elicits a range of opinions, with some customers commending the prompt and knowledgeable support staff, while others express reservations about slow response times and the desire for more proactive assistance. Tidal Automation's customer service receives widespread acclaim for its responsiveness, expertise, and willingness to assist. The support team is consistently described as experienced and well-versed in the product.
Ease of Deployment: Users found the initial setup for Control-M to be straightforward and easy, with a relatively short deployment time. Learning the system and implementing it was considered manageable. The initial setup for Tidal Automation was also described as straightforward and easy, however, with a longer deployment process. Learning how to use the system was relatively simple, with a slightly steeper learning curve for administrators.
Pricing: The cost of setting up Control-M has garnered diverse feedback, as some users find it costly due to hardware and licensing expenses for each job. Furthermore, pricing and licensing can be perplexing, particularly for smaller businesses. Users perceive the pricing of Tidal Automation as reasonable and predictable, with a transparent and easily comprehensible licensing model.
ROI: Control-M offers advantages such as reduced expenses, enhanced job setup, stability, and efficient data transfers. Tidal Automation delivers cost savings, improved efficiency, and better risk management.
Comparison Results: Control-M emerges as the favored choice compared to Tidal Automation. Users appreciate Control-M's user-friendly and effortless setup process, as well as its comprehensive guides and videos. They also value its capability to automate file transfers and provide a consolidated view for monitoring workflows.
"We use Control-M for maintenance on our Oracle and SQL Server databases. It automates maintenance on packages, including standard procedures on the databases themselves, snapshots, checking integrity, verifying the RDBMS of the databases, etc. It ensures they aren't clogged and that they are running smoothly and that there aren't any jobs stuck, eating up the performance of the server or any of the CPU cores."
"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."
"The pressure on our operations and our maintenance has been reduced."
"It provides a unified view where you can orchestrate and monitor all your application workloads and data pipelines. That's very important because with cloud, software as a service, edge computing, traditional data center, and legacy apps, there are all these environments. If you don't have that single pane of glass or that one place to look at, you're going to invest a lot of time and resources into tracking things down when they go wrong."
"We can tie together all the workloads across the estate and make the whole process reactive to events."
"My organization has been able to script scheduled jobs in Control-M to potentially replace legacy products that are at end of life or end of service. The previous backup applications that were being used for specific files, folders, or applications were no longer being supported, therefore being able to use Control-M to replace that has been very valuable."
"Most valuable feature would be the ability to detect and notify when a process has not completed successfully."
"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."
"I like the fact that I have control, and I am able to monitor. If there is an issue, I would be able to respond to any jobs that may fail. With any other scheduler that I know of, a lot of times, when I have a very complex script, if there is an issue in the middle of it, I have to let the whole process fail and then figure out a way to recover from it, whereas Tidal will stop the process, and I can resolve that issue. Once I resolve the issue, I can continue the process. This is very important for invoicing, accounts payable, accounts receivable, or any kind of financial reporting. It allows you to recover from an issue much more effectively than anything else that I have seen."
"The best feature is that it allows task scheduling based on particular occurrences, like the receipt of files, database updates, or system notifications."
"The best feature of Tidal Workload Automation Software is its ease of integration with other systems, including ERP, CRM, and BI tools."
"Especially in the newer versions of Tidal, the segmentation of user permissions enables us to give people operator permissions for their jobs, to rerun jobs, but view-only for other groups' jobs. We're able to keep people from hurting themselves or other groups accidentally. The permissioning is really good."
"The first, big thing that we got out of using Tidal Workload Automation was having a centralized view of the status of all of our batch processes across all these systems... We can look into the schedule at any given time and see if things are running on track or if they are falling behind. We can also see if something failed."
"The feature that I find to be valuable, as I'm working with other folks, is the ability to cross-schedule across platforms, and the flexibility that comes with that."
"One of the most useful features is being able to set up a schedule and create dependencies. The calendar can kick off processes at certain times, based on dependencies that you specify, like time, or whether another process has finished. Dependencies are the most useful thing."
"It is intended to enable large-scale automation environments, making it appropriate for companies with complicated processes and big data volumes."
"You need to pay for extra features if you need them."
"With earlier versions, the support was not accurate or delivered in a timely manner. What would happen is that I would be in production mode and I would have an issue and would want to get someone on a call to see what was happening. But they would always say, “Hey, provide the log first and then we'll review and we'll get back to you." I feel that when a customer asks about a production issue, they should jump onto the call to see what is going on, and then collect the logs."
"Its architecture is old. AutoSys gives more flexibility."
"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."
"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!"
"I would like to see automatic license management. And probably more importantly, some kind of machine learning to help identify the optimum automation path."
"The initial setup was complex, because I wasn't used to it."
"We've had some quirky stuff happen on an occasional basis where a job does not take off. For example, a job we expected to be finished by 3:00 a.m. is sitting there and not executing when we come in in the morning. We have to go all the way back to the dependencies and then we can see that one of the dependencies has become unscheduled, for some reason. No changes were made to the schedule but this prerequisite job has, all of a sudden, become unscheduled. I have brought this up with Tidal's support but they have never had an answer for it."
"The drill-down into details using the Graphical Views feature is a bit difficult and not that helpful. If you want to go into the details, you have to go to the Job Activity. Graphical Views is not that easy for getting that kind of information."
"Setting up the initial product was a little hard."
"It takes a lot of time to learn the product. I have admins and developers who are working on the products for the last three to four years and still don't know all the functionalities. Tidal has really great things about it, but people are focused on their day-to-day job and the solution is not intuitive."
"Tidal Software interface could be more intuitive and user-friendly."
"When we patch to the next version, there is often a little thing that breaks. It has rarely been a big deal, but I always seem to have to follow up on one tiny issue. It would help if they had some better QA testing of their patches."
"One thing I would like to see improved is that, currently, when an action is executed and finishes in Tidal, it's marked as either "success" or "failure." I would like more options that would flag a job according to multiple options, rather than just "good" or bad"... Tidal has told us that it's possible to do so through the product or with a workaround."
"I'm still hoping with Explorer to be able to see end-to-end job streams. That's not really something that's easy to see today in the web client. However, I haven't worked with Explorer yet. One of the things that we have found frustrating is not being able to see an end-to-end job stream across multiple applications within Tidal. We use jobs for that right now, but I have high hopes that we'll be able to see that in Explorer."
Control-M is ranked 1st in Workload Automation with 110 reviews while Tidal by Redwood is ranked 2nd in Workload Automation with 37 reviews. Control-M is rated 8.8, while Tidal by Redwood is rated 9.0. 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 Tidal by Redwood writes "Great visibility with a single pane of glass and a low learning curve". Control-M is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Rocket Zena, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence and Camunda, whereas Tidal by Redwood is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs, ActiveBatch by Redwood and Rocket Zeke. See our Control-M vs. Tidal by Redwood report.
See our list of best Workload Automation vendors.
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