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Automic Automation vs Stonebranch comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

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

Automic Automation
Ranking in Workload Automation
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
103
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Stonebranch
Ranking in Workload Automation
15th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 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 Stonebranch is 4.9%, up from 4.3% 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.
Earl Diem - PeerSpot reviewer
Allowed us to develop workflows without having to train and develop very specialized skillsets
The Universal Agent is the most valuable feature. Being agent-based and being able to go across multiple technology stacks, which is what our workflows do, Stonebranch gives us the ability to bridge those disparate technologies. It enables us to remove the dependency-gap with the agent so we know the status of the workflow at each step. Workflow development in Stonebranch is straightforward. There is something of a learning curve, but it's not very steep. Being able to develop workflows without having to train and develop some very specialized skillsets to use the tool is very useful. Stonebranch absolutely helped enable digital transformation in our company and it still is. In our automation efforts, we're pushing everything to Informatica and, as we move those ETLs, we're automating the entire workflows. In phase-one and phase-two, there were 244 jobs migrated in from other ETL platforms to Informatica, and we've automated all of those. We have almost 200 jobs remaining. We're going to have something approaching 450 workflows in Stonebranch when we're done.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We do not have to use a broad variety of agents to connect to different types of systems."
"It's allowing us to increase our overall volumes of data that we're working with, without actually increasing the overall amount of team that we need to monitor it."
"I like the script engine of CA, where you can build everything you want."
"Customer service and technical support are exceptional."
"The most valuable features are the predefined templates for application-specific jobs and the access for different users."
"It is reliable. We have never had any unplanned crashes."
"We automate very manual, robust tasks, which are very time consuming and not error-free."
"It is easy to manage and customize the system. It performs well."
"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 features are upgraded, and every six months they're releasing patches."
"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 have found the agents to be so much simpler, when compared to ESP."
"The tasks are incredibly capable, and as long as you name them with a nice, uniform naming convention, they are very useful. You can create some interesting workflows through various machines, or you can just have it kick off single tasks. All in all, I really like the Universal Task. You can do some mutually exclusive stuff, such as an "A not B" kind of thing. It has a lot of capabilities behind the scenes."
"We like that it has GUI and is not just a command line."
"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"
 

Cons

"There is one missing part in the product concerning recurring tasks. You can schedule a recurring task by a context action, and run it as recurrent, but it creates a time container which can be quit and disappears."
"The hotline can take a long time. They will say, "I will take it and give it to the Level 2 support.""
"There are pain points, like anything else. Sometimes, things they say work, and sometimes, they don't work. You need to find out why they don't work and then go back and have them fixed."
"The stability is not as good as it was in former years. Stability has gone down from version to version."
"There are some scripting elements that could be added."
"The interface could be made more user-friendly in terms of job creation and scheduling, especially when doing bulk job creation."
"I would like to see more stability in the product and have the transition between versions be more seamless."
"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."
"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 a component called the OMS, which is the message broker. We rely on infrastructure, resiliency, and availability for that piece. If that could change to be highly available just as a software component, so that we don't have to provide the high-available storage, etc. for it, that would be a plus. It would just be cheaper to run."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It can be hard to manage the task monitor."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Every time there is a task which must be repeated, the solution can reduce costs."
"This solution is pretty well-priced."
"Pricing is competitive compared to other major vendors."
"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."
"The pricing is based on the number of servers and agents."
"The pricing of Automic Automation varies depending on the specific contract terms."
"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."
"We cannot use all the functions because they are too expensive."
"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."
"Outside of licensing fees, there aren't any other costs."
"Stonebranch is cheaper than Control-M, so many companies are using Stonebranch."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Computer Software Company
12%
Insurance Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
9%
 

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 years, affecting customer satisfaction. Improvement is needed in both the respon...
How would you compare Stonebranch Universal Automation Center vs Control-M?
Hi Doug, I am looking at the same, or at least a very similar issue. Have a customer who is leaving z/OS on which he is using IWS to go to Linux, and the question now is whether to pick up IWS (TWS...
 

Also Known As

Automic Dollar Universe
Stonebranch Universal Automation Center
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Adidas, 84.51, ESB
Nissan, Coop, United Supermarkets, Groupon, CSC, Orbitz, Johnson & Johnson, BMW, Qantas.
Find out what your peers are saying about Automic Automation vs. Stonebranch and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.