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AutoSys Workload Automation vs Control-M vs IBM Workload Automation 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 AutoSys Workload Automation is 11.7%, down from 17.8% 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 IBM Workload Automation is 6.9%, down from 8.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Antony Askew - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps us manage complex workloads, reduce our workload failure rates, and save us time
The visibility and control features are somewhat limited. This is a recognized weakness, but thee vendor is currently revamping the user interface to address it. While the current UI is a bit outdated, it's undergoing improvement. AutoSys Workload Automation has some areas for improvement, particularly in housekeeping and product maintenance. These tasks are currently quite manual and labor-intensive for our team. Additionally, the reporting and forecasting functionalities could be more robust. One area for improvement with AutoSys Workload Automation is that it comprises several distinct tools configured to work together. This necessitates familiarity with multiple tools for effective solution management. Consequently, it can sometimes lack a sense of cohesiveness as a unified solution.
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.
Alberto-Ezquerra - PeerSpot reviewer
An intuitive dashboard with user-friendly interface and a holistic view that automatically schedules the production workload
The most valuable feature of IBM Workload Automation is its holistic view, which helps me find technical solutions quickly. For instance, if a customer has an issue completing their workload within a specific time frame, the tool provides enough information to identify and resolve the issue. One of the main challenges is dealing with data infrastructure problems and pending updates. Workload Automation helps me leverage current AI capabilities to recommend architectural updates to avoid these issues. It also allows me to balance CPU usage effectively, ensuring service level agreements are met. The interface is user-friendly and facilitates this process smoothly.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"AutoSys significantly reduces manual effort."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the functions are easy to use."
"AutoSys Workload Automation is a stable solution."
"Autosys is one of the oldest products in the market, and it has been around for quite a long time, close to 20 to 25 years."
"It's very easy to work with. The learning curve is not that steep."
"This solution has made my clients' workplaces a lot less labor-intensive."
"Without this product we would have to manually submit jobs and it would take longer. There would also be a much greater possibility of jobs running wrong and/or not at the right time."
"The solution has been stable."
"The scheduling feature and scheduling tool are the most valuable features. I like the scheduling services that we have in Control-M, which are very beneficial to our organization because they are automating things. There is also less manual work. We can schedule a task without any manual interruptions."
"In our bank, all new applications need to be implemented with Control-M. We try to look for the best way to establish communication between both products. One of the new features for us is Application Integrator. It is a very interesting feature because it lets us integrate with those applications that are not included in Control-M. By using Application Integrator, we can easily integrate new technologies. With the help of Application Integrator, we recently integrated with Blue Prism, which is a robotic product. We could integrate such processes into Control-M. Now, we are working with Ansible, and we are putting Ansible automated processes into Control-M."
"The best feature of Control-M is its orchestration capabilities for any orchestration that's required."
"Because it's a tool which allows us to do scheduled work, it allows for notifications when jobs aren't running within that scheduled time frame. This improves the opportunity to meet SLAs."
"The Control-M interface is good for creating, monitoring, and ensuring the delivery of files as part of our data pipeline. There's a wealth of information in both the full client, as well as the web interface that they have. Both are very easy to use and provide all the necessary material to understand how to do various tasks. The help feature is very useful and informative and everything is very easy to understand."
"I find it very helpful to be able to keep track of all our help desk tickets."
"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."
"Our ability to integrate with many different solutions has been invaluable. The new approach of the automation API and jobs-as-code is also valuable."
"I have supported this product in literally 100s of different environments and its unmatched in its ability to scale to any size."
"The DWC, when configured correctly, is a great GUI tool to provide Self-Service Scheduling capabilities to the user community."
"The project we worked on involved the running of nearly 24,000 job instances in a single day, so I would say that the solution is stable."
"The whole product is valuable because it is a tool for batch automation."
"It offers features like MDM and a Windows workstation, although there are some technical dependencies. It is more user-friendly and also includes failover and failback capabilities. While both systems offer high availability, Control-M's high availability is superior to AWS's."
"The technical support is great, the product is easy-to-use, and it is stable."
"Technical support from IBM is very good."
"The support from Cisco is very good. I was with them as a company for 40 years"
 

Cons

"The WCC could be improved."
"Quick search feature and job analysis could be improved."
"To make it a lot more user-friendly, in order to make it so other people can use it without having to do much training with it; the more user-friendly it is, the easier it is to work with."
"The scalability is poor because I cannot use it for all automation solutions."
"Performance improvements in the UI would be appreciated."
"The solution could improve by having support for container environments."
"The lack of documentation, that is an issue. When we do need to bring it down for maintenance, it is always a scary moment for us because we have never had it crash."
"I am looking forward to more of their dashboard features. I think it would be very valuable for us to have dashboard features that could be delivered to our customers in the form of a URL, and they could refresh that URL whenever they wanted to get up to date performance metrics out of our systems."
"We've also had a few database bugs within our organization. I think we are migrating to OpenJDK rather than just regular Java and that has since shown some issues with our Control-M instance, timing out and causing our jobs to stop running. We are still working with BMC to fine-tune that and get that resolved."
"Everybody's biggest gripe is the reporting capability option. It is a gripe because there is a lot of information in Control-M, but the solution doesn't have a good reporting tool to extract that information. Now, if you want all that information, you need to rely on another third-party BI tool to extract the information out of Control-M."
"Consider adding a mobile application for remote management."
"Finding documentation on the website can be a bit confusing."
"We have some plug-ins like BOBJ, and we need a little improvement there. Other than that, it has been pretty good. I haven't seen any issues."
"One feature I would like to include is in the middle of the monitoring domain. In the monitoring domain, if I have to update a number of jobs, the only way to do it is by manually clicking on each job. I would like a feature that allows me to do a mass update in the jobs, which I feel is still lacking."
"Some of the features are not available. We were about to deploy the REST API, but we had some challenges. We had to use a third-party application. So, it should be improved in terms of integrating REST API jobs. That was something that was lacking. The customer was not that happy in terms of getting the desired output. So, we had to use a third-party application called Hangfire. We would like to have more videos on REST API integration, and we would like to have easy integration with the Control-M application through the REST API."
"Its architecture is old. AutoSys gives more flexibility."
"IBM Workload Automation could be improved by reducing its cost. The maintenance charges have increased significantly, and a lower cost would be beneficial."
"The schedule refreshes daily and that's a challenge for us."
"Slow down on the releases a bit. I fully understand that IWA functionality is increasing at an amazing rate, but trying to keep up with the upgrades is rough."
"It is missing some features and can improve in areas where the competition is somewhat better like linking job dependencies."
"The performance of the previous versions could be better."
"To improve IBM Workload Automation, I suggest enhancing automation features further, as more automation would be beneficial. The product is good enough for my current customers, but improving technical support and pricing would be welcome. We often need quicker responses and better solutions than we can manage manually. These improvements would make the product even better."
"This solution does have bugs and could be improved in this regard. However, these bugs are resolved relatively quickly."
"The solution should offer more free technical sessions to customers so that they can gain more experience or learn more about how to use it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Validate how many agents you need beforehand."
"We paid to use the solution monthly."
"I certainly think the pricing is worth the value."
"It is overpriced."
"The pricing needs to be improved. Some of my client's complained that it was too expensive."
"There is an annual license to use AutoSys Workload Automation."
"People need to pay attention to how they use their ESP agents on the distributed platform. That's where some of the cost comes in, based on how many you need or how many you use."
"I don't have information on the exact licensing cost of AutoSys Workload Automation because that's managed by the tools and financing teams. For agents, it's close to $4,00, but for the server setup, it's usually a one-time license initially, and it's AMC which is paid every year and comes close to $8,000 to $10,000."
"BMC's price is based on the number of jobs."
"we are more looking for a better cost/license/performance model because BMC, while we could say it's the best, is also the most expensive. That is what we are probably most annoyed with. We are paying something like €1,000,000 over three years for having 4,000 jobs running. That's expensive."
"The pricing is moderate, not too low or too high compared to other solutions."
"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."
"We have a five-year contract with task-based licensing."
"This product saves hours in a day based on my experience working here versus other companies with manually operations."
"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."
"The solution's pricing is affordable."
"The solution is a little bit expensive."
"The contract is with the customer with whom we are working, so IBM is not directly involved in this."
"To my knowledge, IWA is the only WLA product that will provide "parallel tracking" capability to assist in upgrading from one platform to IWA."
"It is about one-third of the cost of a controller."
"Pricing depends on the number of agents that you install."
"We transitioned from a server license to per job license, and that saved us a lot money."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
48%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
6%
Insurance Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
32%
Computer Software Company
11%
Retailer
7%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 AutoSys Workload Automation?
The most valuable aspects of AutoSys Workload Automation are its performance, scalability, and ease of getting starte...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AutoSys Workload Automation?
The solution is costly. The pricing is based on the number of users, which for me, translates to approximately $120,0...
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 needs improvement with Control-M?
I don't see any areas where Control-M could be improved because they are doing well. The support is awesome. We have ...
What needs improvement with IBM Workload Automation?
IBM Workload Automation could be improved by reducing its cost. The maintenance charges have increased significantly,...
What is your primary use case for IBM Workload Automation?
We use IBM Workload Automation ( /products/ibm-workload-automation-reviews ) as a scheduler. We install agents on the...
 

Also Known As

CA Workload Automation, CA Workload Automation AE
Control M
IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler, IBM TWS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Gaumont, Mercantil do Brasil, CCEE, Hanwha Life
CARFAX, Tampa General Hospital, Navistar, Amadeus, Raymond James, Railinc
Standard Life Group, Banca Popolare di Milano, A*STAR, ArcelorMittal Gent
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC, Broadcom, Redwood Software and others in Workload Automation. Updated: May 2025.
857,688 professionals have used our research since 2012.