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Automic Automation vs OpCon vs Stonebranch 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 September 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of Automic Automation is 8.1%, up from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpCon is 1.7%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Stonebranch is 4.7%, up from 4.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Automic Automation8.1%
OpCon1.7%
Stonebranch4.7%
Other85.5%
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.
Jose Rivera Hernandez - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Siddharth Matalia - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is it always runs things automatically that you normally have to do manually, like download files."
"The solution's technical support has always been excellent."
"We impose some standards for backup and restore operations."
"Customer service and technical support are exceptional."
"We have two nodes that are highly available. You can add new nodes if you need that. You can take a node, a total node, down and still be operating fine. It has a lot of scaling to it."
"The most valuable parts are the scalability and flexibility, where you can do whatever you think, then you can realize it in the product and have many ways to do it."
"The very special feature that we use is the connection to ServiceNow."
"The user interface is very simple and straightforward."
"With a simple click of a button in self-service, the department or the user can complete his/her job."
"We particularly like the fact that it's graphical because it is Windows-based. Before, we were text-based on the mainframe. You can also produce flow charts. Because it's point-and-click, its ease of use is very nice."
"We have found it scales very well. We run thousands of thousands of jobs every day, and sometimes thousands of jobs in a few hours."
"There are a lot of valuable features. The version that we're currently casting, Self Service, is going to be the most valuable to us. It is going to allow us to open up the doors, broaden our automation capability and help other business units to be able to automate a lot of the little things that they do from day to day. I'm really looking forward to being able to help other areas with their automation needs. Self Service is really key."
"The greatness of it is the flexibility of the scheduling and the integration of all platforms and processes. We have integrated it with everything from AIX to Microsoft Servers; with pretty much anything that we can."
"The whole product is valuable to us because of the integrations that it has with the MCP and the Windows environments. You have to have the agent on each one of them that you want to monitor. The integrations that we have created are along the lines of extracting files and sending them through SFTP to another vendor. Those are the things that were taking a lot of time away from my staff."
"Auto-scheduling is the most valuable feature. We have the ability to schedule [batch jobs on our Unisys mainframes] seven days in advance, so we know exactly how we're running every night."
"The most valuable feature is being able to schedule tasks so that they reliably occur each day, each week, each month, or sometimes several times a day... The scheduler works as it should."
"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."
"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."
"The interface is very user-friendly and easy to navigate."
"The features are upgraded, and every six months they're releasing patches."
"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."
"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"
 

Cons

"They could improve by providing more control features for schedules."
"I would not recommend using Automic's technical support for complex problems."
"We would like to have token-based authentication. Where we do not have to use a password, and can use tokens for authentication in other systems."
"From a features perspective, we still need some agents to connect to specific systems that Automic doesn't have. Expanding their available agents would make the tool more compatible with various systems that other customers may have."
"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."
"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 support has declined somewhat over the years due to various takeovers. It's not as personal as it used to be."
"They need to handle cross datacenter failover. They have a really good High Availability solution that works well within a single sysplex, but in our environment, since we have two main datacenter locations, we have two separate sysplex."
"Upgrading to newer versions remains complex."
"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 would like OpCon to implement a reporting feature on the dashboard that displays historical data for specific jobs. Ideally, this feature would allow us to view the past seven days or the next seven days, but with a specific focus on highlighting instances where a particular job has historically failed, particularly on Saturdays over the past year."
"It would be nice to go to a fully thin client."
"The only downside to OpCon is that its features can be complicated and really must be taught. Most of our users don't have training beyond the free Basic Training that SMA provides, so for fresh eyes, it is kind of difficult to understand some of the language used."
"The way to view a schedule is called perch view, and that's not always the greatest. It can be quite slow."
"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."
"There is a learning curve. We had to go to class, learn, and take their training classes, then come back. We got assistance from OpCon as well to convert our processes on the Unisys machine over to the IBM. Now, when we add new products, it's pretty straightforward to write a new process and schedule it, then run it at a set time of day."
"Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics."
"The Universal Controller is decent for the money it costs... It needs some work to have full features, compared to other products that are out there, specifically IBM's Workload Scheduler."
"It's not available on the cloud, so they should take that due to safety, security, and scalability."
"It can't handle negative written codes."
"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."
"I would rate Stonebranch somewhere in the middle for ease of setup. It wasn't too straightforward for us because our infrastructure is complex."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution seems expensive to me, but it does the job well."
"There are different licensing fees for cases where high availability is important."
"Do your own proof of concept. Make sure you know what you want. Be clear about what you want the product to do for you. Go out and meet with the vendor, then test it."
"It costs too much. That's why we are now looking at other products."
"Pricing is competitive compared to other major vendors."
"The cost of the solution depends on the number of systems that are being orchestrated."
"There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"You do not need any humans to start jobs, so you can save a lot of money."
"The purchasing price was in the $30,000 or $40,000 range, but I don't remember how much of that was licensing or installation and how it was broken out."
"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."
"Our annual maintenance costs are $45,000. The initial cost is separate."
"The pricing is over $100,000 for our credit union and I believe it's $89,000 for our clients, in total, annually."
"The pricing is very reasonable."
"I have seen some contracts, and it seems that Control-M is a lot more expensive than OpCon, but I do not know the pricing of OpCon. Control-M seems to be four or five times more expensive than OpCon."
"Yearly, it's around $30,000."
"It's definitely worth the cost."
"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."
"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."
"Stonebranch is cheaper than Control-M, so many companies are using Stonebranch."
"Outside of licensing fees, there aren't any other costs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Computer Software Company
12%
Insurance Company
8%
Computer Software Company
45%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Non Profit
4%
Manufacturing Company
3%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Insurance Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise66
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise29
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise22
 

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 ...
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 pro...
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 aft...
What needs improvement with OpCon?
One problem that I had with them when we got SMA Technologies is that sometimes the jobs fail, but they automatically...
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Also Known As

Automic Dollar Universe
No data available
Stonebranch Universal Automation Center
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Adidas, 84.51, ESB
LOHR, Carnival Cruise Lines, Herbalife, Digital Federal Credit Union, Synergent, Frandsen Bank & Trust
Nissan, Coop, United Supermarkets, Groupon, CSC, Orbitz, Johnson & Johnson, BMW, Qantas.
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC, Broadcom, JAMS Software and others in Workload Automation. Updated: September 2025.
867,349 professionals have used our research since 2012.