Top 10 Control-M Alternatives in ’23 – TechToday

46% of IT employees identified the growing pressure on their IT infrastructure and operations as steady while 32% as rapid.

However, choosing a WLA tool that fits to business goals and objectives in a complex market landscape can be challenging activity. For instance, Control-M is one of the market leaders along with ActiveBatch,  Redwood RunMyJobs, Stonebranch Universal Automation Center (UAC) and JAMS WLA in 7 different data sources. 

Therefore, this article provides pros and cons of Control-M and compares top 4 Control-M alternatives to help business leaders and IT professionals identify the best tool for their organization. 

Shortcomings of Control-M

Control-M is a WLA software developed by BMC Software that can automate and manage complex workflows across IT infrastructure, including on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.

In the Control-M user reviews:

• Automation capabilities: Overall, users voted positively on Control-M automation capabilities. However, Control-M alternatives, such as ActiveBatch and Redwood, perform better in terms of scalability, workload processing and intelligent automation.  
• Functionality: In all sources we gathered, 7% of all reviews focus on Control-M WLA features. 
  • Job scheduling: On G2, the job scheduling feature receives the highest score with 9.4. However, Control-M alternatives, ActiveBatch and Redwood obtains higher scores for each category under functionality than Control-M. 
  • Integrations/APIs: A user mentioned API and integration to other applications as the only  downside of the tool (Figure 1).
• Ease of use: Control-M ranks as one of the easiest to use and navigate (See Table below). In all B2B review platforms, Control-M software is identified as user friendly by 15%. Also, 4% of users mention drag and drop capability. 
• Administration: Control-M performs well for each administration category but specifically for workflow management, proactive workflow and error alerts. However, for all these categories, it did not obtain higher scores than its competitors, such as Redwood or ActiveBatch.

Top Control-M alternatives

While deciding over Control-M alternatives, we have taken into account two factors: 

• The number of B2B reviews: B2B reviews indicate the adoption rates for the tools, and they help understand the tool’s strengths and weaknesses better. Therefore, we excluded vendors with no reviews. Also, we expanded our comparison only for top 5 Control-M alternatives that have more than 100 reviews in total in review sources, such as G2, Gartner, Trustradius and Capterra. 
• The number of employees on LinkedIn: The number of employees indicates revenue and overall success of firms as more personnel can support company products and services. Therefore, we excluded vendors with less than 10 employees on LinkedIn. 

The table below shows the total number of B2B reviews, average score that they obtain and ease of use score: 

Solutions	Ease of Use	Total Number of Reviews	Review Score
ActiveBatch	8.7	259	4.5
Redwood Run My Jobs	9.3	174	4.7
BatchMan	9.2	16	4.7
CA AutoSys Workload Automation	8.9	38	4.0
Control-m	8.8	159	4.1
IBM Workload Automation	9	19	4.1
JAMS	8.6	204	4.5
OpCon by SMA	8.9	103	4.8
Stonebranch	8.7	72	4.4
Tidal by Redwood	9.3	61	4.6
Visualcron	8	18	4.7

1. ActiveBatch

• Automation capabilities: 29% of total B2B reviews on ActiveBatch mentions high quality of features. On G2, ActiveBatch performs better than Control-M considering scalability and workload processing. 
• Functionality: ActiveBatch has higher functionality scores for job scheduling, integrations and API integrations than Control-M. 
• Ease of use: Although ActiveBatch ranks slightly lower than Control-M in terms of ease of use, ease of setup and admin on G2 (see Figure 2), it has been described as easy-to-use by 16% of total B2B reviews we gathered.   
• Administration: ActiveBatch has similar scores for each administration-related feature. Yet, it ranks top for workflow management among all Control-M alternatives. 

2. Redwood Run My Jobs

• Automation capabilities: Redwood performs best for all automation capabilities according to reviewers on G2 (See Figure 4).  
• Functionality: Redwood scores best for job scheduling and integrations among all Control-M alternatives.
• Ease of use: On G2, Redwood exceeds Control-M and other alternatives on ease of use and ranks as top with 9.3 (See Figure 3).  
• Administration: Redwood has the highest scores for all administration related activities, such as error alerts or service management (See Figure 3).

3. JAMS WLA

• Automation capabilities: 13% of total reviews positively mentioned JAMS features. On G2, scalability and workload processing are the automation capabilities where JAMS has higher scores than Control-M. 
• Functionality: JAMS is the top performer for API/integrations. Also, it ranks better for integrations to other tools and job scheduling functionalities in comparison to Control-M (Figure 4). 
• Ease of use: 5% of reviews rate JAMS as easy-to-use and 2% as user friendly. 
• Administration: On G2, JAMS can only rank better for service management compared to Control-M. Also, JAMS is the only top tool that does not provide a pro-active workflow (Figure 3). 

Explore JAMS alternatives to assess JAMS’ strengths and weaknesses. 

4. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center

• Automation capabilities: According to the B2B reviews on G2, Stonebranch performs slightly better than Control-M in workload automation (See Figure 6). 
• Functionality: Stonebranch has higher ranking than Control-M for integration and API integration. However, Control-M has higher scores for job scheduling than Stonebranch (See Figure 8). 
• Ease of use: Stonebranch has slightly lower performance for ease of use compared to Control-M (See Table 1). 
• Administration: On G2, Stonebranch UAC has the top scores for service management and administration console (See Figure 7). For the other important aspects of administration, Control-M and top 3 Control-M alternatives perform better. 

Learn more pros and cons of  Stonebranch UAC and compare it against its alternatives. 

5. SMA OpCon 

• Automation capabilities: According to the reviews, workload automation is the only automation capability that OpCon’s score exceeds Control-M. 
• Functionality: On G2, OpCon has a higher score than Control-M for API integration.
• Ease of use: SMA OpCon obtains a slightly better score for ease of use compared to Control-M (See Table 1). 
• Administration: Although there is not enough data on administration-related capabilities for OpCon, Control-M performs better than SMA OpCon for workflow and service management (See Figure 7). 

Further reading

Read more on other workload automation tools and other IT automation technologies:

Transparency statement

AIMultiple serves numerous technology vendors, including Redwood which provides Active Batch, RunMyJobs, and Tidal.