Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Automic Automation vs Control-M vs Tidal by Redwood 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:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of Automic Automation is 7.2%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Control-M is 21.4%, down from 26.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tidal by Redwood is 3.9%, up from 3.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Peter Grundler - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps to move away from manual tasks and offers wide platform support and web-based interface
Customers want to move away from manual monitoring and checking processes. Automating these processes helps in time-saving and reduces human error. When you automate business processes, it reduces mistakes. It eliminates the risk of manual errors such as typos. There is a 20% to 30% reduction in human error. It fulfills all the needs when it comes to visibility and control across various operating platforms. It is the perfect product for managing processes that span multiple operating platforms. Automic Automation has the widest platform support compared to other products, such as Control-M, Tivoli from IBM, or Stonebranch. It definitely helps with compliance processes. We have had a lot of customers for two years with a focus on compliance, and it works. They were successful. Due to the fact that our customers can automate a lot of things, it reduces operating costs. It is hard to give a number because the savings are different for each customer. If a customer never had any automation, there could be about 80% savings after implementing Automic Automation, whereas for a customer who already has automated tasks, the difference will be less by adding Automic Automation. They might see 5% to 10% more savings. Automic Automation helps improve our ability to meet SLAs. In the recent versions, SLA management has been integrated, which previously was an external component. Because a lot of customers used it and asked Broadcom to implement SLA management into the workload engine, Broadcom included it. We see more and more customers running their SLA management via the Automic Automation product.
Ujjwal Sachdeva - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficient automation and boosted workflow but needs better integration methods
Control-M is a bit faster compared to other solutions. The job and coding are easier. Also, my DevOps and Ops teams work collaboratively with it, enhancing its efficiency. The workflow is much easier compared to the ACS services we were using. Automation is more advanced, deployment is fast, and version control has been simplified.
Steve Mikula - PeerSpot reviewer
Very reliable processing engine, and scheduling is flawless—crucial elements in our financial transaction processing
Because we've been on it for 20 years, it's pretty easy for us to automate jobs with Tidal at this point. It has become second nature. It's pretty simplistic to set up and get going, although there are different levels of complexity you can have within the product. It depends on how simple you want to keep it. If you just keep it: Job A, Job B, Job C, Job D, that becomes pretty simple. But when you start integrating some complex calendars that use sub-calendars—and you can go three, four, or five deep to set up schedules—it becomes more complicated. The beauty of it is you can go as deep as you need to. We can get really complex or we can keep it simple. We have some use cases for both scenarios. The thing that I like the most is the reliability of the engine. The actual scheduling part of the product is pretty much flawless, but the stability of the product is what I find to be reassuring. We are a financial company, we move billions of dollars a day, and if we don't have our transactions processed in a timely manner we can be penalized and our clients can be penalized. It can have a serious financial impact.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"You gain a lot of time and effort because you can automatize many things. Repetitive tasks costs us, so we can reduce them to zero effort and minimal costs by using the product."
"We use it to automate our business."
"Automic Automation's most valuable features are perspective analytics and coding."
"It is easy to manage and customize the system. It performs well."
"We are able to control and change our processes when necessary."
"An important feature is the ability to modify PeopleSoft Run Controls at run-time."
"The monitoring and troubleshooting features are rich and with the dashboards and other features, automation work is made easier."
"All the components that it can use to design work flow; process automation."
"The solution is innovative. Specifically for the overseas and time differences, you can feel the efficiency of Batch Impact Manager on jobs, batch processing, and impact management. It works the best on these kinds of issues. It saves us time and money, which is important. We save a lot using Control-M."
"The flexibility of Helix Control-M allows us to manage tasks efficiently. The user interface is comprehensive and lets me view all my jobs on one page, monitor everything, and access the job history."
"Control-M is useful to automate all critical and non-critical processes. Using Control-M, we can automate application workflows as well as file transfers involved in application workflows. We can also use it to run batches related to applications. Automating these processes reduces the RTO and RPO, which helps in the case of failures. It also helps us to identify bottlenecks and take corrective measures."
"Most valuable feature would be the ability to detect and notify when a process has not completed successfully."
"Control-M is infinitely scalable. We only need to add agents. BMC will take care of it if you need anything on the SaaS side, but we can handle the rest using our agent architecture."
"As soon as you have an issue, a ticket is created and the tech support is quite responsive."
"The most effective feature of Control-M is the API integration."
"It helps us meet our service-level agreements. It is integrated into our CI/CD pipeline. It enhances our operational productivity."
"We use the solution for cross-platform and cross-application workloads. That's one of the core reasons we chose it. It's one of a few things in the industry that can be used for cross-platform integration."
"Tidal helps administrators and users to see the information that is relevant to them in that single pane of glass. They can see jobs running, they can see job history, and they can see job progression. If you look at alternatives like Airflow and clouds, you'd have to design your own UI to monitor the progress of the different jobs that you've created in Airflow. So Tidal is huge for us."
"It has been super stable. There are no complaints on stability. We would not be using it if Tidal wasn't stable."
"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."
"The best feature is that it allows task scheduling based on particular occurrences, like the receipt of files, database updates, or system notifications."
"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 most valuable feature is the job scheduler, where you can schedule thousands of jobs to execute at specific times."
"The first, big thing that we got out of using Tidal Workload Automation was having a centralized view of the status of all of our batch processes across all these systems... We can look into the schedule at any given time and see if things are running on track or if they are falling behind. We can also see if something failed."
 

Cons

"There are too many bugs to be solved after a version upgrade. We are working on the limits of an architecture with 16,000 platforms. It is impossible to test everything out in the software lab of CA."
"The stability is not as good as it was in former years. Stability has gone down from version to version."
"Content of file transfers cannot be searched by the system, but has to be done by the user interface. This is not good, as it has been erased often."
"The scalability is limited by the SQL in the background, and that is a problem."
"ServiceNow creates problems with the Automic entry of the connector, so the stability could be a little bit better with this product."
"Integration with the cloud is an area for improvement. They have to make it somehow fit or usable for cloud use cases. Right now, it works great for our on-prem data center, but they have to come up with a very good reason why people should be using it in the cloud."
"The frustration that we have probably had in the past is where CA tools run for a period of time, then they get deprecated, and you have to build a new one."
"The forecast and long-term planning could be made a little better when you work with it in the future."
"The unifying features between Control-M for different platforms needs improvement. The scheduling options on the Control-M mainframe jobs are different than they are on our Linux server. There are a few differences here and there."
"A developer sandbox could be very helpful to try out new features or experience them."
"Some of the documentation could use some improvement, however, it gets you from point A to point B pretty quickly to get the solution in place."
"We did encounter a few scalability issues. Sometimes, there are too many jobs in our environment on different servers, but that’s not the tool issue, we can simply increase the FS size. However, that requires bank cost; hence the scalability issue."
"Finding documentation on the website can be a bit confusing."
"But for some issues, BMC will suggest to upgrade to new version which will not be feasible to standards of the organisation. Hence some work around should be shown to run the business until new version was upgraded."
"The downtime is higher compared to AWS."
"The community and the networking that goes on within that community need improvement. We want to be able to reach out to an SME, and say, "Hey, we are doing it this way. Does that make sense?" Ideally, they come back. and say, "Yes, it does make sense to do it that way. However, if you want to do it this way, then it is a little more efficient." We understand that one solution framework doesn't fit everybody. Depending on the breadth of the data and how broad it is, you may have different models for one over the other."
"Tidal Automation could be further integrated with other systems used in the operation of tidal energy systems, such as weather forecasting tools, energy management systems, or asset management software."
"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."
"For the most part, the drill-down and the logging are really good. But if we take an Informatica job, for example: We have the ability, and the operators have the ability, to actually drill down and see, at a session level, where the failure is. There is, unfortunately, no way to extract that into an actual output email or failure email. It's not that that information is not available, but extracting it into an email would be a nice-to-have."
"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."
"One of the weaknesses of the product is, when something happens, it's difficult to find out the root cause. There are a lot of logs you can take a look at in Tidal. Sometimes, they are useful, but other times, they're not. That is mostly relegated to the administrative team. Users for the most part don't see that and don't know anything about that. They just know they have a problem, then it's up to the administrative team to see what happened and figure out the problem."
"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."
"Some users have complained that the initial setup process is complicated and time-consuming, while others have suggested that the software could offer more freedom in customizing processes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Initially, the pricing was competitive but consistently, year over year, its pricing has become more erratic. It increases to the point where even with the positives, it starts to become a longer-term question about how it will fit into the environment."
"Pricing is a big issue for some of them because Broadcom changed the way of calculating the price. People have been their customers for the last five or ten years, but Broadcom decided to change the way of licensing by moving to the number of jobs runs and then they say that clients have to pay three million because they run one million jobs per day. The clients are quite surprised to see that the contract is not the same as before, and then they are afraid of paying more."
"Pricing is competitive compared to other major vendors."
"Every time there is a task which must be repeated, the solution can reduce costs."
"They have increased the license price a little bit. It is more than what we expected about two years ago. So, there could be some surprises when it comes to pricing."
"Automic Automation is costly."
"The pricing was client-wise, but they are changing it to execution-wise pricing. So, we are in negotiation."
"Certain licenses can be a bit expensive. The PeopleSoft agents, in particular, are a bit pricey."
"The pricing is moderate, not too low or too high compared to other solutions."
"The solution is not cheap, it comes with quite a hefty price tag. Control-M is the market leader, but we still want the price to be as friendly as possible."
"Its cost is a little bit higher than other solutions such as AutoSys or DAC. For the demo, there were some plans, such as start plan, scale plan, etc. Pricing was based on the plan."
"There are two different types of licenses available. The first is based on the number of jobs that we run per day, and the other is based on the number of agents that we install. My current project has a contract for five years."
"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."
"We have a license till 2024. We are good and satisfied with it."
"The license model is based on the number of jobs we run on the SaaS application or the number of executions, unlike the on-premise model options. If we have a handful of jobs, it's always good to consider Control-M, but if it's a large number of jobs, Control-M might not be a great option."
"Initially, our licensing model was based on the number of jobs per day. That caused some issues because we were restricted to a number. So at our renewal time we said, 'We want to convert from number of jobs to number of endpoints.' That cost us extra money but it gave us additional capabilities, without worrying about the number of jobs."
"The solution enables admins and users to see the information relevant to them, but this is bundled as an add-on that we would have to pay for."
"We've been able to purchase more adapters because the cost of the product has been very reasonable."
"Right now, we are in a good position with the licensing model that we have with the Tidal vendor. So, we won't have any issues. even if we double in our current production. Initially, Tidal provided us some specs where if you have these number of jobs, then you come under this category. They usually provide a range of jobs from 2,000 to 10,000. You can use these specs for your infrastructure. Whether you have 2,000 or 8,000 jobs, Tidal should support it."
"The solution’s licensing model in terms of its flexibility and transparency regarding costs is pretty good. A person can buy the license, and if you decide to stop support, you can do that but still have the product. So, it's not like you're paying constantly to keep that license alive. Certainly, you want to keep support going too. Once you buy it, you own it. It's not like I have to keep paying somebody to keep using it."
"There are project, system, and server costs. Some of the things that they are doing is introducing new products. They are introducing what they call their Repository, which is a way for you to move a job. That doesn't cost anything to us, because it is reusing a tool called Transporter. The repository is the successor to Transporter, so we already own it and are sort of grandfathered in. But that new product requires a server and database, so now we have to go out and get a server and database. So, there is a cost there."
"The new prices that we've received seem reasonable and comparable to the marketplace."
"We pay maintenance annually through Blue House of about $9,000. That's for our two environments: production and test."
"If you are willing to shop around to other vendors, you can possibly get a good price on your support license."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Workload Automation solutions are best for your needs.
858,327 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
18%
Computer Software Company
12%
Insurance Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Computer Software Company
11%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Automic Workload Automation?
It is easy to manage complex workloads and use electronic workflow automation.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Automic Workload Automation?
The pricing was client-wise, but they are changing it to execution-wise pricing. So, we are in negotiation.
What needs improvement with Automic Workload Automation?
The support and knowledge of incident management could be enhanced. There have been unresolved issues persisting for ...
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 b...
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?
Its cost can be more competitive. One of the main things customers look at is the cost. It's not affordable. The cost...
What do you like most about Tidal Automation?
Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Tidal Automation?
The price is reasonable in terms of the product’s functionality.
What needs improvement with Tidal Automation?
Initially, it is complicated to understand the functionalities as there is limited product documentation. The setup a...
 

Also Known As

Automic Dollar Universe
Control M
Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Adidas, 84.51, ESB
CARFAX, Tampa General Hospital, Navistar, Amadeus, Raymond James, Railinc
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC, Broadcom, Redwood Software and others in Workload Automation. Updated: May 2025.
858,327 professionals have used our research since 2012.