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.
"The product has improved dramatically over the years; it offers a lot in terms of features and capabilities and integration with third-party tools. A wide range of models available with the product is critical in reducing manual and mundane work such as custom script writing. This saves significant amounts of time and, by association, money for the organization."
"Self Service, BIM features are most valuable. As no need to login to EM client and check the job status."
"Our ability to integrate with many different solutions has been invaluable. The new approach of the automation API and jobs-as-code is also valuable."
"The File Transfer component is quite valuable. The integration with products such as Informatica and SAP are very valuable to us as well. Rather than having to build our own interface into those products, we can use the ones that come out of the box. The integration with databases is valuable as well. We use database jobs quite a bit."
"Monitoring is a valuable aspect of it. The monitoring tool is very good, and it is easy for expert and entry level users to use on a short notice."
"I find Control-M for SAP and Control-M for Informatica good. You can connect to the Linux or Windows servers, and you can run multiple jobs."
"The monitoring tool is very good. It's very easy for expert and entry-level users to use on short notice."
"The File Watcher utility, cyclic jobs, and email alert notification are valuable."
"For us, the calendaring system is very robust. Some of the teams have very specific requests for when they need jobs to run. That's been really valuable, because a lot of times, when people run scripts, if they run on a holiday, they're going to fail... A couple of times a month it probably saves us work and the necessity of logging in from home and checking to make sure everything's okay."
"We wouldn't be able to do many of the complex scheduling that we do today without it. For us, it is a mission-critical app. Because if it doesn't work or has a problem, then SAP doesn't function. It is that critical. So, it's an essential tool for us to manage and run SAP jobs."
"The data management on offer was valuable."
"We have to run about 12,000 jobs every day and the majority of them need to be launched from our ERP, JD Edwards. The native compatibility of the Tidal platform with JD Edwards dovetails with our greatest need. It's directly connected to the heart of our IT system. We couldn't work without it."
"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 job dependency is something that you cannot have in a regular, simple cron job or simple scheduler dependency. The event-driven jobs are core for us, as we really need that. Therefore, we really need Tidal with its ability to run thousands of jobs per day."
"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."
"Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution."
"Sometimes, with technical support, they will take feedback, but you don't know where that feedback goes or if it proceeds along in the thought process."
"The main area that could be improved would be documentation, just like every other software product out there!"
"Control-M reporting isn't that good. It is very limited. We would like the ability to create our own reports as well as the ability to publish dashboards in the cloud, which would help us. Improved reporting will help us determine statuses and get the answers that we need. However, I personally think BMC is not focusing on the reporting. I have even visited the BMC office in India, and asked, "Why haven't you improved the reporting?""
"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."
"I would like to see automatic license management. And probably more importantly, some kind of machine learning to help identify the optimum automation path."
"In general, it is a very good product, and we are very happy with it. It meets all of our expectations."
"The Control-M API does not support SQL database-type jobs, where a job has been configured to use the SQL catalog to locate SSIS."
"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."
"The product’s UI is outdated. They should work on this particular area."
"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."
"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."
"They can do better reporting in terms of production statistics reporting."
"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."
"The software's performance and scalability could be improved, particularly when dealing with large-scale workloads or complex business processes."
"Tidal's adaptability and user-friendliness could be increased by integrating it with additional programmes and platforms."
"The UI might have the potential to provide a more polished and user-centric encounter, promoting seamless engagements and simplifying the navigation process for individuals interacting with the software."
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 OpCon, 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.
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