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Ab Initio Co>Operating System vs Control-M comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Ab Initio Co>Operating System
Ranking in Workload Automation
29th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (47th)
Control-M
Ranking in Workload Automation
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
121
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (3rd), Managed File Transfer (MFT) (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of Ab Initio Co>Operating System is 0.6%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Control-M is 21.8%, down from 26.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

AM
Enables creation of sophisticated applications with powerful parallelism and quick, effective support
The most valuable features of Ab Initio Co>Operating System are its performance and the ability to implement parallelism. There are three kinds of parallelism in Ab Initio Co>Operating System, which allow us to create very sophisticated solutions for almost any kind of application. This parallelism is one of the strongest features. Additionally, its scalability offers a unique way to escalate applications that differs from other technologies. In terms of data processing, the emphasis is on understanding the data. Data profiling is fundamental, and Ab Initio Co>Operating System integrates tools to perform this within the GDE, as well as specialized products for this purpose. Data profiling graphs can be implemented when necessary to understand the data sources.
Pedro Fuentes - PeerSpot reviewer
Cost-effective, excellent support, and centralized access and control
They have a department that handles requests for enhancements. I talked to Control-M guys back in October or November when they had a gathering here in Atlanta. We talked about not being able to go back in history in Helix Control-M for more than two weeks. We submitted a request for enhancement. They told us that they are working on it, and they are thinking of expanding that to 30 days. We would like to see it expand to 90 days, but they are working on it. In Control-M, we were able to go back 180 days, but that was on-prem. The storage of that data was on our own servers. We know that storage is money, and we do not expect them to store that much of the data, but at least 30 to 60 days seem proper.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Ab Initio Co>Operating System support is the best I have encountered."
"Ab Initio reaches the highest performance and is very flexible in processing huge amounts of data."
"Co>Operating System's most valuable feature is its ability to process bulk data effectively."
"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."
"Ability to handle files remotely through the advanced file transfer feature."
"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."
"There is a batch monitoring tool called Batch Impact Manager, which proactively warns when processing is behind and SLAs are in jeopardy of being missed."
"We can tie together all the workloads across the estate and make the whole process reactive to events."
"It is an enterprise tool that integrates with all the applications in our organization. It has made our life easier because we don't need to wake up at midnight and do monitoring, etc. It does everything. It also sends precautionary alerts. If a job or activity is running for more than the specified time, it alerts the application team. So, our teams do not need to sit in front of a laptop or any open application to watch the jobs. They can do their other regular activities while Control-M takes care of all the jobs. It notifies them when there is job completion, delay, and error."
"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."
"As soon as you have an issue, a ticket is created and the tech support is quite responsive."
 

Cons

"Co>Operating System would be improved with more integrations for less well-known technologies."
"An awesome improvement would be big data solutions, for example, implementing some kind of business intelligence or neural networks for artificial intelligence."
"The initial setup was complex, because I wasn't used to it."
"The response time could be faster when you need a person to answer your questions. There are situations where availability becomes crucial."
"We would recommend modernizing the look and feel of Control-M. They also need to move towards more self-service and development in their environment. It's very antiquated."
"They should have a proper integration method that clearly defines the workflow."
"There's a lot of room for improvement and I think it can be more user-friendly."
"Control-M could benefit from incorporating AI features for better job scheduling."
"Consider adding a mobile application for remote management."
"Regarding product design and R&D, the DevOps pipeline could be improved with better capabilities and automation. API security and authentication is another area that could use improvement; users must have static credential passwords, which is a security concern."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Co>Operating System's pricing is on the expensive end since it tends to be used by big enterprises."
"Its pricing and licensing could be a little bit better. Based on my experience and discussions with other existing customers, everybody feels that the regular Managed File Transfer piece, not the enterprise one, is a little overpriced, especially for folks who already have licensed Advanced File Transfer. We understand that Advanced File Transfer is going away and is going to be the end of life, and there is some additional functionality built into MFT, but the additional functionality does not really correlate with the huge price increase over what we're paying for AFT already. This has actually driven a lot of people to look for alternative solutions."
"For the tooling that you get, the licensing is acceptable. It has competitive pricing, especially with all the value that you get out of it. There are additional costs with some of the additional modules, but they are all electives. Out of the box, you get the standard Control-M experience and the standard license. They're not forcing some of the modules on you. If you decide that you do need them, you can always purchase those separately."
"You're going to spend a lot of money upfront, but the benefits you're going to get out of it are going to quickly pay for it."
"It works on task-based licensing."
"Licensing costs are around $3000 a year."
"The price is right because of the licensing schema, which is based on nodes and processes. You purchase what you use, no more and no less, and you can grow with time."
"This is now from my previous years as support for banks and big companies. If it's not enterprise scale, I find that it's too expensive for smaller companies. You really have to be quite big and need to have a dedicated support staff to run it, then you'll be fine. What we've seen at smaller companies, it's too expensive because they want to automate everything. Now, stuff that can literally run once a day for the rest of their lives is costing them $3 a job a day. It becomes too expensive, eventually. They are not seeing the return on investment because it's not business critical. Nobody is going to die or they're going to lose money if that job didn't run exactly at 11 minutes past 4:00. It's definitely for bigger enterprise companies, especially banks or healthcare providers. We have had an instance where Control-M was unavailable due to external factors for 20 minutes and there was a loss of almost a million euros because the solution involved logistics."
"This product saves hours in a day based on my experience working here versus other companies with manually operations."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
38%
Computer Software Company
10%
Insurance Company
7%
University
5%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Ab Initio Co>Operating System?
Ab Initio Co>Operating System has its own paradigm, requiring a new approach to problem-solving that differs from traditional paradigms like object-oriented programming. While many people sugges...
What is your primary use case for Ab Initio Co>Operating System?
My main experience with Ab Initio Co>Operating System has been in banking. I have architected and developed many applications, some in the backend as ETL solutions but also to generate different...
What advice do you have for others considering Ab Initio Co>Operating System?
On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Ab Initio Co>Operating System a nine. It is a very good technology for solving large data problems or approaching big data solutions. However, it is not su...
How does Control-M compare with AutoSys Workload Automation?
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 th...
What do you like most about Control-M?
First of all, the shift from manual to automation has been valuable. We have a tool that can automate.
 

Also Known As

Co>Operating System
Control M
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

A multinational transportation company
CARFAX, Tampa General Hospital, Navistar, Amadeus, Raymond James, Railinc
Find out what your peers are saying about Ab Initio Co>Operating System vs. Control-M and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.