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Appian RPA vs Control-M comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 13, 2026

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

Appian RPA
Ranking in Process Automation
21st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (14th)
Control-M
Ranking in Process Automation
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
186
Ranking in other categories
Managed File Transfer (MFT) (2nd), Workload Automation (1st), AI IT Support (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Process Automation category, the mindshare of Appian RPA is 0.8%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Control-M is 3.5%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Process Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Control-M3.5%
Appian RPA0.8%
Other95.7%
Process Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Kunal Sharda - PeerSpot reviewer
Director & Key Managerial Personnel at Newlight Technology Solutions Private Limited
Partnering with comprehensive automation for increased efficiency
The best feature of Appian RPA is that it is highly integrated into the Appian platform itself. It is very easy to configure that in the end-to-end Appian automation solution. The second notable feature is that Appian RPA gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of how you want to design the robotic tasks. It has a very detailed orchestration console which provides details about the entire runtime and the logs of Appian RPA where you can find in detail what the robot did on the virtual machine. Appian provides dashboards where users or admins can log in and see how the robots are performing various robotic tasks. It is very detailed and gives substantial insight into how Appian RPA is functioning or is operational. It also lets you drill down into specific details at each task level.
RP
Batch Admin at NBC Universal
Brings data together from multiple platforms and optimizes cross-environment orchestration
The features of Control-M that I like the most include the ability to easily integrate or bring in different platforms into Control-M. For instance, AWS, mainframe, TWS, and something that's running on Autosys can all be brought into Control-M, converted to how Control-M runs it, and then the batch can be executed. This centralizes various applications in Control-M, which doesn't just have to handle batch processes, but also other tasks like reporting on required data. I find this functionality very useful and the setup is impressive, with more advancements yet to come. With Control-M, my company has achieved several measurable improvements since I started. The metrics indicate that the number of failures has dropped, and we have addressed the issue of excessive false alerts that I encountered when I joined. Previously, we received an overwhelming number of alerts daily, but now we manage to maintain that at a normalized level, perhaps around five to fifteen alerts, depending on running core batches and their setup.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Appian RPA is super easy to use, offering low code, no code capabilities."
"The best feature of Appian RPA is that it is highly integrated into the Appian platform itself and is very easy to configure in the end-to-end Appian automation solution."
"I find the pricing of Appian RPA reasonable because it is user-based, and we can experiment with it."
"The most valuable features of Control-M are automation and orchestration. It allows a different schedule, and we can manage thousands of jobs. It ensures we can complete them on time accurately. This automation reduces our manual intervention, significantly reducing error."
"The graphical visibility of processes is clearer than other job scheduling solutions, which is Control-M's biggest selling point."
"Promotions between environments, as well as local, mass update, versioning, and self-service."
"The job scheduling and file transfer are two major, important features."
"BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is highly stable. It is enterprise-grade software. Doing a job of 10,000 to 20,000 the solution is very stable."
"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."
"The solution is stable."
"The best features in Control-M are its ease of use and robustness; it is very feature-rich, which is what we use it for—scheduling."
 

Cons

"There are many competitive products in the market right now, for example, UiPath and Automation Anywhere. These competitive products are now coming up with features which Appian RPA currently does not have."
"There are not any areas that need improvement off the top of my head."
"In my opinion, Appian RPA can be improved."
"BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer has a scheduler and what they do is capture the steps based on the script, and then they put it into the Control-M job, or task. Any system that has the script behind it the solution can do it."
"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."
"The UI can be challenging for new users due to its learning curve."
"It has a slight issue with daylight savings time while advancing the clock in the Spring."
"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."
"In my previous project, I experienced lagging with refresh times of six to seven seconds."
"Its initial setup is a bit complex. They could provide more documentation and tutorials to make the initial setup easier to understand. Enhancing the documentation could simplify the setup process."
"I would like to see more audit report templates added, and perhaps more customizability in terms of reporting."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"You must accept that BMC licensing can be very confusing. No one can easily understand how they calculate things, whether it is user-based, job-based, or server-based. The calculation is quite tough. How BMC calculates licensing is not easily available anywhere."
"It works on task-based licensing."
"It was a little bit pricey. They were proud of the product. A particular module was not free. However, BMC was able to negotiate that particular module into our whole contract itself without having to negotiate an individual price for that module. All that was included in a one-time negotiation, and we've signed a five-year contract on that."
"They are expensive. If we were a small company, it would be complicated because we have to have strong sales and operations to be able to afford a tool of this level. Being a large company, the cost-benefit is covered, but it is not within the level of cheap solutions."
"Cost-wise, it is good."
"The pricing is moderate, not too low or too high compared to other solutions."
"We have a license till 2024. We are good and satisfied with it."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Insurance Company
15%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
27%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise143
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Appian RPA?
I didn't handle payments or costs. We recommended infrastructure stacks to our clients, who implemented them, and we provided ongoing consulting services.
What needs improvement with Appian RPA?
In my opinion, Appian RPA can be improved. We are planning to conduct a proof of concept on volume because we are still not entirely certain about how well the record type feature performs on Appia...
What is your primary use case for Appian RPA?
We have been working with Appian RPA along with the entire workflow case management suite. Recently, Appian released their AI, which achieved general availability in August 2025. This is a document...
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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Control-M?
From what I know about pricing, I would probably put Control-M in the expensive category, but you do pay for what you get; you are paying for a premium product.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Jidoka RPA
Control M, BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer, BMC Australia CTM
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

empark, talan, liverpool, ayesa, aeromexico, teknei
The Bank of East Asia, LINE Bank Taiwan, Coop, Air Europa, Carrefour, Itau Unibanco, Snam, Embraer, ANZ Bank, EDP, Dominio's, Tampa General Hospital, W&W Informatik GmbH, Veterans General, Up Sí Vale, Sky Italia, REWE digital GmbH, Raymond James, Railinc, Navistar, Management Science Associates, Colruyt, CARFAX, Banpara, Aspiag Service, Amadeus, AG Insurance, ING Bank Slaski
Find out what your peers are saying about Appian RPA vs. Control-M and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
881,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.