OpCon vs Stonebranch comparison

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OpCon

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Stonebranch and OpCon compete in the IT automation category. Stonebranch seems to have the upper hand in seamless integration and agent technology, whereas OpCon stands out for file transfer automation and scheduling.

Features: Stonebranch offers robust automation capabilities with integration across platforms like z/OS, Windows, and Unix. Its strong agent technology ensures high stability and minimal maintenance. Users favor its visual workflow editor and universal templates for simplifying automation tasks. OpCon, in contrast, provides a wide array of automation features, notably its RSJ connector for database changes and self-service options. It excels in file transfer automation and integrates well with industry-oriented platforms.

Room for Improvement: Stonebranch could enhance its graphical workflow overview, provide better API functionality, and improve FTP task handling with more encryption options. Users suggest enhanced support for PGP encryption and better user training materials. OpCon faces challenges with its user interface and needs improvements in integration capabilities, training ease, and usability of complex features. Its licensing model complexity and the need for richer web-based functionality are additional areas for enhancement.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Stonebranch shines in deployment flexibility, supporting on-premises and cloud setups, and receives praise for its swift technical support. OpCon favors on-premises deployment with some cloud capabilities and is noted for good customer service, although its support for remote cloud features needs improvement. Both products are recognized for responsive customer service teams.

Pricing and ROI: Stonebranch is favored for its competitive pricing, offering flexible licensing options that contribute to a positive ROI. It is often more cost-effective than alternatives like Automic and Control-M. OpCon, while cost-effective compared to hiring additional staff, tends to have higher pricing than some competitors and provides value through reduced manual processes. Both solutions deliver ROI through efficiency gains but differ in cost structures and licensing flexibility.

To learn more, read our detailed OpCon vs. Stonebranch Report (Updated: June 2025).

OpCon vs. Stonebranch

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Helped 860,168 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

OpCon

Ranking in Workload Automation

8th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Stonebranch

Ranking in Workload Automation

14th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of OpCon is 1.7%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Stonebranch is 4.9%, up from 4.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Workload Automation

Featured Reviews

Jose Rivera Hernandez

Senior VP of Technology at Triangle Credit Union

Helps automate all kinds of jobs and it's worth the price because it saves a lot of time and money

One problem that I had with them when we got SMA Technologies is that sometimes the jobs fail, but they automatically restart. SMA Technologies automatically gets a notification that the job has failed, and they restart it on their end, so now, we have the job restarting twice. There were times when we came into the office in the morning, and we had two files because the job ran twice. I do not know if the system can prevent a job from running the second time. If a job has run successfully, or it is running, it should not run again.

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Siddharth Matalia

Senior Technical Specialist at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Good GUI and has helpful support but needs a mobile app

This was a migration project where we provided our database, the previous one, and there was a tool that automatically converted the awarded job into Stonebranch. All the conversion was done from the Stonebranch side, and we got a person as well from Stonebranch during migration. There was a person who worked with us a decade back for the AutoSys install as well. He was well aware of our environment, so he helped us a lot. It was easy. It was not that complex. It is much more GUI. That said, we are looking for how the various automation can be done since, through command lines, you can create a number of jobs. While you are creating a single job, it takes 15 minutes with the GUI, however, if you go for the command line, within two or three minutes, your job gets completed. We have built our own solution for automation using some REST API and all those various integrations. It is working for our organization right now. However, we are requesting some kind of solution from Stonebranch. They should have been providing that to us already. For deployment, three or four people were engaged with the setup on their side. To manage everything, they provided us with a person who required help to manage it. Eventually, since it was a cloud platform on their side, if there is some configuration necessary, which they do it. They get a notification, and they fix it very immediately if there is an issue. The response time is very good from their side, and we don't have to worry about maintenance.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"It allows us to have more information and more control than we previously had over the processes that are running in host systems."

"MAS is by far the best feature, although not a feature of the software specifically. MAS has more knowledge than our employees, so we have been able to develop schedules that are far beyond our own skillset."

"When a lot of jobs are scheduled on different platforms, without any interaction possible between them, it's very difficult to manage things. With OpCon we avoid this difficulty. It's very visual."

"The most valuable features are its integration into Windows, into VM, and into AIX, as well as SQL."

"There are three features which are valuable: the automated calendar functions; the notification process for failed jobs or unscheduled events occurring, via email and text messaging; and the ability for the scheduling package to communicate across multiple platforms."

"The biggest example in which OpCon has improved my organization is that we have to download and process files from the federal reserve several times a day. If we don't do it in a certain timeframe, we can be penalized. It's the fact that we can download these files, process them, get our accounting teams the information they need to work the exceptions that is one of the most important roles."

"Often times there are criteria that cannot be determined by the system, which allows a human to make the determination and use the Self-Service Solution Manager to trigger a job."

"It's very scalable. Right now we're barely scratching the surface of what it can do. I've looked at Symitar's instance of OpCon and they're running something like 13,000 jobs a day with all the clients that they have. So it can go from small use cases like ours to enterprise-level."

More OpCon pros

"We like that it has GUI and is not just a command line."

"The support is good from Stonebranch Universal Automation Center."

"Stonebranch performs well, and the graphical representation is excellent. Overall, it requires more technical effort from our teams, but the solution is intuitive, so anybody can use it."

"I love the Universal Controller. It's been great for us. We host it on-premise... It's High Availability, meaning there's failover from one server to the other if one goes down."

"We lean a lot on the multi-tenancy that they offer within the product, the ability to get other people to self-manage their estate, versus having a central team do all the scheduling."

"The interface is very user-friendly and easy to navigate."

"When it comes to agent technology and compatibility with other vendors, from a platform perspective it was the one vendor that fit all the platforms that we have, from your old platforms - mainframe, NSK, IBM i - to the new ones, going into cloud and container"

"The most valuable feature is the reliability of the agents, because we need them accessible and we need to run stuff. The agent technology and compatibility are top-notch."

More Stonebranch pros

Cons

"At first, it's a little clunky, but once you learn it, it actually is very simple. You have to get over that initial learning hump."

"The process of getting automations done and the process of testing them is a little complicated."

"The only thing that we have been talking about with the vendor is the Solution Manager tool that we have. It is a great tool. It is getting replaced by another tool that is probably called Enterprise Manager. We just had a few complaints about it. The navigation of that new tool is a little bit more arbitrary than what we have been used to."

"I think that they're working on this, but I wish that there was a more centralized area to be able to see what other people are doing... They have a community platform for OpCon users, but I want to see more of where somebody is doing this process in that way. They have a great community platform right now, but I feel that it could be developed."

"A way to select multiple jobs in the UI for a quick change or to hold, release, et cetera, would be nice."

"Do your first install, your first upgrade, with SMA. It's simple, it's as per the manual, as per the training, but you need that little bit of confidence."

"The learning curve could be shorter. The problem is that it's difficult to simplify a product without taking away functionality. I would love to see OpCon become a little easier to grasp. However, my concern is that making things easier isn't always better for the product. If they can keep the integrity of the product while making it easier to learn, that would be an area of improvement."

"We are still in the early stages of our implementation, so at this point, I cannot see any needed improvements or features."

More OpCon cons

"I have a request regarding our agent on the mainframe. It may time out when communicating to the Universal Controller, when the mainframe is extremely busy. That can cause a task which is running at that time to not see the results of the job that ran on the mainframe. It happens sporadically during times of really busy CPU usage. We're expecting that enhancement from them in the fourth quarter."

"One hiccup we've had is due to the fact that we have other internal scheduling tools. We're able to talk to them, but we have trouble with some of the networking between them, so we're still trying to work out the kinks there."

"Occasionally, we have an agent that doesn't come back up after patching. That doesn't happen very often... It's really just a restart of the agent and it comes back up. But that might be one thing that could be improved."

"There is room for improvement with its connectivity with the Microsoft SRS system. It is very weak. They keep telling us it works with it, and technically it does, but it does not provide a lot of visibility. We have lost a lot of visibility migrating to Stonebranch, compared with just running tasks on the SRS server. That's really about the only thing that is a sore point for us."

"Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics."

"It's not available on the cloud, so they should take that due to safety, security, and scalability."

"It can be hard to manage the task monitor."

"It would be ideal if they had the exact same features as the CA Workload Automation DE series. It would be helpful to have calendaring options."

More Stonebranch cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Annually, we pay $29,000. This is for a blanket policy that covers everything, like licensing and support."

"Compared to AutoSys and ISE, OpCon was a lot cheaper to put in. AutoSys is hundreds of thousands of dollars to just install it because they don't have an interface into our system. You have to teach them what your system does."

"On a yearly basis our cost is between $25,000 and $30,000."

"Scaling is pricey."

"Operating OpCon comes with a cost."

"The cost is based on the number of jobs. You pay for what you use. For us, the support cost is between €20,000 and €30,000 per year. It's too expensive."

"This solution is certainly not the cheapest, but we win in time."

"There are different add-ons, like the Self Service or Vision model. It all depends on what agents you have in your environment. We have a mainframe and Windows, and while I think SQL is free, SAP or anything beyond that has different connectors that might need a license."

More OpCon pricing and cost advice

"Stonebranch is cheaper than Control-M, so many companies are using Stonebranch."

"Outside of licensing fees, there aren't any other costs."

"When we reviewed this solution against other vendors, Stonebranch blew everybody out of the water in terms of cost."

"The price of the solution is at a medium level compared to the competition."

"I don't have pricing information, but I do know it's cheaper than our old legacy system. Other than the standard licensing fees there are no additional costs."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

45%

Financial Services Firm

18%

Government

Real Estate/Law Firm

Financial Services Firm

25%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about OpCon?

My favorite feature is the dashboard feature, which shows jobs that are running, and completed, any failures, and provides dashboard reporting.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OpCon?

I am the one who signs the contract. In the beginning, when I started working here, it seemed very expensive, but after I learned everything that it does, I found it worth the price. I would recomm...

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What needs improvement with OpCon?

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Comparisons

Control-M vs OpCon

Compared 31% of the time

VisualCron vs OpCon

Compared 12% of the time

IBM Workload Automation vs OpCon

Compared 10% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs OpCon

Compared 10% of the time

JAMS vs OpCon

Compared 5% of the time

More OpCon Competitors

Control-M vs Stonebranch

Compared 30% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Stonebranch

Compared 15% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Stonebranch

Compared 12% of the time

ESP Workload Automation Intelligence vs Stonebranch

Compared 8% of the time

Rocket Zena vs Stonebranch

Compared 2% of the time

More Stonebranch Competitors

Product Reports

OpCon

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Also Known As

No data available

Stonebranch Universal Automation Center

Overview

OpCon automates batch processing, core system operations, file transfers, and daily processing. Integrated across Unisys, Windows, and cloud systems, OpCon is used in financial institutions, credit unions, and multi-platform environments for job scheduling, report generation, SQL queries, scripting, and FTP processes, handling thousands of jobs daily.

Users value OpCon for comprehensive automation capabilities, particularly the scheduling feature that allows advance planning and streamlined workflows. The self-service functionality enables non-IT staff to manage tasks efficiently. OpCon's integration with core banking systems, robust job management, and error notification system significantly improve operational efficiency. Features like Solution Manager enhance accessibility and control, ensuring process continuity and ease of use.

What are the Key Features of OpCon?

Advanced Scheduling: Allows users to plan and automate workflows efficiently.
Self-Service Functionality: Empowers non-IT staff to manage tasks independently.
Integration with Core Systems: Works seamlessly with core banking systems and other platforms.
Error Notifications: Provides robust error management and notifications for quick resolution.
Solution Manager: Enhances control and accessibility for managing automated processes.

What Benefits Should You Look for in Reviews?

Operational Efficiency: Users often report improved operational performance and reduced manual effort.
Time Savings: Automation of repetitive tasks leads to significant time savings.
Improved Accuracy: Automated systems minimize human error, leading to higher accuracy in processes.
Cost Reduction: Optimized resource usage results in cost savings.
Enhanced Flexibility: Customizable workflows meet unique business requirements.

Users find OpCon complex with a steep learning curve. Desired improvements include better separation of environments, enhanced graphical display, finer user authorization, simpler notification and alerts, more templates, increased web functionality, seamless interface, integration tools, online training, smoother scheduling, better reporting, mobile accessibility, smarter self-service, improved mainframe support, and integration with third-party systems. Pricing model and licensing could be more streamlined.

In financial institutions and credit unions, OpCon is implemented to handle thousands of daily jobs, automate internal processes, and integrate workflows across various platforms. It ensures secure file transfers, generates detailed reports, executes SQL queries, and supports seamless third-party integrations.

SMA Technologies

Stonebranch automates enterprise-level workload and task scheduling across platforms like Linux, Windows, and mainframe, managing thousands of daily tasks for improved efficiency and visibility.

Stonebranch enables organizations to streamline job scheduling by replacing older systems with a robust solution that automates complex workflows, batch processing, and secure file transfers. Its compatibility with multiple platforms and enhanced visibility aid teams in efficiently managing business processes, database interactions, and IT workflows. Equipped with a Universal Controller and Agent, it provides seamless integration across diverse systems, empowering users with greater control over their tasks. While it fosters digital transformation, there are opportunities for enhancements in areas like graphical workflow overviews and API functionality.

What features does Stonebranch offer?

User-friendly interface for intuitive navigation
Robust agents ensuring reliable task execution
Comprehensive workflow automation tools
Platform-agnostic compatibility for diverse systems
Secure file transfer capabilities
High scalability for growing needs
Effective error handling features

What benefits should users expect?

Improved efficiency in task management
Streamlined processes reducing operational complexities
Enhanced visibility and control over workflows
Seamless integration with existing systems
Support for digital transformation initiatives

Organizations in industries such as finance and healthcare implement Stonebranch for its ability to automate complex processes, manage mainframe and distributed environments, and securely transfer sensitive data. Its platform-agnostic nature caters to the demanding needs of these industries, providing a reliable backbone for essential operations.

Sample Customers

LOHR, Carnival Cruise Lines, Herbalife, Digital Federal Credit Union, Synergent, Frandsen Bank & Trust

Nissan, Coop, United Supermarkets, Groupon, CSC, Orbitz, Johnson & Johnson, BMW, Qantas.

OpCon vs. Stonebranch