Control-M vs Fortra's Automate comparison

Cancel
You must select at least 2 products to compare!
BMC Logo
4,849 views|1,690 comparisons
Fortra Logo
2,000 views|1,043 comparisons
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Control-M and Fortra's Automate based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Camunda, Pega, Appian and others in Process Automation.
To learn more, read our detailed Process Automation Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The web interface is handy. It's easy to use, and Control-M provides you with the necessary materials to understand the features and perform various tasks.""Most valuable feature would be the ability to detect and notify when a process has not completed successfully.""I think the administration part is much more valuable than any other feature.""The ability to integrate file transfers has been instrumental in allowing us to accomplish the things we need with Control-M. In our industry, we take a lot of data and either push it down to the stores or retail grocery stores. We take files and push them down to the stores or pull files and information from the stores and bring it back to corporate. So, it's two-way communication with file transfers. One of the bigger things that we do with Control-M is scheduling data moves and moving data from one location to another.""Control-M is excellent when it comes to building, scheduling, managing, and monitoring production workflows. Those workflows are of very high importance to our operations.""If a job fails, that development team is notified right away, which improves reliability. Previously, it was on the operators to notify the developers that their job failed, erred, or aborted. Now, it's all automated.""The Control-M interface is good for creating, monitoring, and ensuring the delivery of files as part of our data pipeline. There's a wealth of information in both the full client, as well as the web interface that they have. Both are very easy to use and provide all the necessary material to understand how to do various tasks. The help feature is very useful and informative and everything is very easy to understand.""The most valuable features are the managing of file transfers and the product keeping up with technology."

More Control-M Pros →

"A great feature that you seldom see in these kind of systems is the ability to use a database as trigger to launch a task. This is something I asked for a few years ago and that was added.""The solution is continuously adding more integrations to help with workflows and bot and task creation.""It's very easy to use. That's a big selling point for it. It has got a drag-and-drop interface, so you can quickly deploy bots.""I like the interface; it makes managing automation easy. We can set different schedules and templates for each task.""I find it very user-friendly. Our IT department and other departments can seamlessly collaborate without requiring extensive training. As a business department, we particularly value this aspect, as our team doesn't consist of many IT users. However, we couldn't solely rely on a drag-and-drop approach to implement and utilize the solution within our departments.""I actually quite liked the no-coding functionality.""This tool has machine learning and voice recognition and computer vision, which are both quite useful aspects. These aren't available in other tools. It's a good addition to this tool and it gives the solution an edge on the market.""The best feature of Automate is its ease of use, which is a major selling point."

More Fortra's Automate Pros →

Cons
"We have some plug-ins like BOBJ, and we need a little improvement there. Other than that, it has been pretty good. I haven't seen any issues.""The initial setup was complex, because I wasn't used to it.""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.""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.""A lot of the areas of improvement revolve around Automation API because that area is constantly evolving. It is constantly changing, and it is constantly being updated. There are some bugs that are introduced from one version to the next. So, the regression testing doesn't seem to capture some of the bugs that have been fixed in prior versions, and those bugs are then reintroduced in later versions.""The stability of Control-M has Not been great. A big thing we've been trying to work on with BMC is observability. Modern applications should be observable and resilient, but we're finding that sometimes Control-M is not very resilient and many times Control-M is not very observable.""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.""The stability could be improved. I ran into an issue with a recent Control-M patch. The environment would become unstable if security ports were scanned. This is an area they need to improve on, but ultimately it's a relatively small improvement."

More Control-M Cons →

"The intelligent automation feature could be improved. It's interesting because it's simple, but the automation quality isn't always good. It's easy to use, but sometimes you need to make a slight improvement to the automation, and that's not so easy.""While this solution is continually improving, as it is now, the user interface could use improvement when I compare it to a product like UiPath.""The workflow for variables could be better. The input and output of task-level variables could be made a little clearer in terms of passing those around from one task to another upon success, etc. Things like that could be a little easier potentially.""The solution has a very weak knowledge base.""It would be an improvement if Automate had better stability tools, whether by recommending a certain amount of memory because it can be a memory hog at times.""Error messages should be better. For error status, there should be better documentation because a lot of times, error messages that you get are quite vague. For example, you get a message saying that the workflow has run into an unknown status, which is vague. It just tells you that it failed, but you don't know how or why it failed. It makes debugging difficult.""The technical support could be better. We suffer from language barriers, as we are in Argentina.""I believe we need to test various OCR tools that assist in evaluating, let's say, six different customer resyncs. We analyze their spending patterns and documentations, but current OCR support has limitations, requiring highly standardized documents, which isn't always the case. With a more advanced OCR system, we could improve processes related to credit risk management and legal matters. We're exploring how to integrate Fortra's Automate with our CRM platform, taking cues from instances where Salesforce seamlessly merged with Automate. However, we use a different CRM, Insight for New Enterprise, and we're seeking ways to connect the automation process within our CRM. We aim for the automation to continue smoothly, even in instances where traditional automation methods might face hurdles."

More Fortra's Automate Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Compare to other tools Pricing and licensing was more. It should be decrease."
  • "BMC does NOT have a great licensing model from my perspective."
  • "we are more looking for a better cost/license/performance model because BMC, while we could say it's the best, is also the most expensive. That is what we are probably most annoyed with. We are paying something like €1,000,000 over three years for having 4,000 jobs running. That's expensive."
  • "We have account based licensing. There are two or three types of licensing. One of them is based on the number of jobs, so we a license close to 4,000 jobs per day. The cost is based on the different modules, which we buy from them. If we a buy a hardware module, which we are presently using and integrating, that is an additional cost, but I'm not sure of the amount. Each module comes with a different cost."
  • "As we increase the number of tasks or jobs on the system, there are concerns about cost."
  • "We have a five-year contract with task-based licensing."
  • "This product saves hours in a day based on my experience working here versus other companies with manually operations."
  • "It works on task-based licensing."
  • More Control-M Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Compared to other products, the pricing model for this solution is much more convenient, flexible, and adaptable to the Portuguese reality."
  • "I like the way this solution is priced because you can buy a license, or you can buy the software outright."
  • "It comes with a package that costs approximately $20,000 USD per year."
  • "While solutions like UiPath and Blue Prism cost around $11,000-$12,000 for each license, this product costs around $7,000 and you can keep it forever."
  • "I'm only involved in running the product and maintaining the systems, so I can't speak to the cost."
  • "The pricing is quite reasonable. We can run the process with one bot. The limitation is at the server level because they have some resources, and sometimes that is enough. It isn't too expensive, so you can get a good return off of one, and you can also have a pack of five bots that is quite competitive."
  • "From a distributor's perspective, one of the biggest selling points of Automate is its price point."
  • "The cost is a bit high for a small business like ours, but we manage with Fortra's Automate."
  • More Fortra's Automate Pricing and Cost Advice →

    report
    Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Process Automation solutions are best for your needs.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Control-M acts as a single, centralized interface for monitoring and managing all batch processes, which is helpful because nothing gets left unattended since it is all visible in one place, and… more »
    Top Answer:In Helix Control-M, we have the automation API that allows us to customize and do integrations easily in any script, such as Java or Python. It is all integrated within the integration API.
    Top Answer:It is not bad. The company can afford it, and it pays for itself. We have those jobs running automatically.
    Top Answer:We use it for specific cases, mainly secure file transfers, which are vital for us. And it works for us.
    Top Answer:I'm only involved in running the product and maintaining the systems, so I can't speak to the cost.
    Top Answer:There is room for improvement regarding cloud functionality; there are a few missing features, and the logging could be better, especially air logging. We can go into logging events and create our own… more »
    Ranking
    4th
    out of 64 in Process Automation
    Views
    4,849
    Comparisons
    1,690
    Reviews
    20
    Average Words per Review
    1,502
    Rating
    9.1
    Views
    2,000
    Comparisons
    1,043
    Reviews
    10
    Average Words per Review
    1,398
    Rating
    8.5
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Control M
    HelpSystems Automate, Automate
    Learn More
    Fortra
    Video Not Available
    Overview

    Control-M simplifies application and data workflow orchestration on premises or as a service. It makes it easy to build, define, schedule, manage, and monitor production workflows, ensuring visibility, reliability, and improving SLAs.

    • Accelerate new business applications into production—by embedding workflow orchestration into your CI/CD pipeline
    • Scale Dev and Ops collaboration, with a Jobs-as-Code approach
    • Simplify workflows across hybrid and multi-cloud environments with AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform integrations
    • Deliver data-driven outcomes faster, managing big data workflows in a scalable way
    • Take control of your file transfer operations with integrated, intelligent file movement and visibility

    Automate is an easy-to-use RPA software solution that boosts your productivity by transforming virtually any business or IT process. Get scalable automation capabilities whether you need a solution for one department, a small business, or an enterprise-wide Center of Excellence (CoE) initiative—Automate is built and priced right for employee-driven automation for any organization.

    Automate allows you to get up and running fast with no-code automation for both GUI and back-end functionalities. Form-based development lets you quickly build bots and leverage over 600 pre-built automation actions. Powerful out-of-the-box API and native integrations bring together the applications that keep your business running. And with the Automate Recorder, easily build, update, and deploy robust, UI-driven automation. Plus, bots can be deployed as attended or unattended with concurrent execution of tasks—no restrictions.

    A Key Part of Fortra (the new face of HelpSystems) Automate is proud to be part of Fortra’s comprehensive portfolio. Fortra simplifies today’s complex business landscape by bringing complementary products together to solve problems in innovative ways. These integrated, scalable solutions address the many challenges you face in streamlining your operations. With the help of Automate robotic process automation and other solutions, Fortra is your relentless ally, here for you every step of the way on your automation journey.

    Sample Customers
    CARFAX, Tampa General Hospital, Navistar, Amadeus, Raymond James, Railinc
    Aldergrove Financial Group, Preferred Health Professionals, Mindbeam Technologies, First Credit Union in British Columbia, Vestcom International, Prime Liberty Benefits, University of Tampa, CNLBancshares, World Precision Instruments, BJ's Restaurants, Globe Pequot Press, Accudata Technologies, Norton Healthcare, Pacific Toxicology Laboratories
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm34%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Retailer9%
    Healthcare Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm29%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Insurance Company7%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company14%
    Security Firm14%
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Insurance Company14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Healthcare Company8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business11%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise80%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business15%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise76%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business55%
    Midsize Enterprise25%
    Large Enterprise20%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise57%
    Buyer's Guide
    Process Automation
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Camunda, Pega, Appian and others in Process Automation. Updated: March 2024.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Control-M is ranked 4th in Process Automation with 109 reviews while Fortra's Automate is ranked 5th in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with 21 reviews. Control-M is rated 8.8, while Fortra's Automate is rated 8.2. 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 Fortra's Automate writes "Can automate several processes with only one bot and is easy to implement, administer, and use". Control-M is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Rocket Zena, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence and Automic Workload Automation, whereas Fortra's Automate is most compared with Microsoft Power Automate, UiPath, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, MOVEit and Automation Anywhere (AA).

    We monitor all Process Automation reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.