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AutoSys Workload Automation vs Control-M 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 AutoSys Workload Automation is 10.2%, down from 16.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Control-M is 19.1%, down from 26.5% 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 (%)
Control-M19.1%
AutoSys Workload Automation10.2%
Stonebranch4.7%
Other66.0%
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 While the current UI is a bit outdated, it's undergoing improvement.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.
Mark_Francome - PeerSpot reviewer
Easily connects to different platforms and ties everything together in a centralized screen
Areas of Control-M that have room for improvement include the reporting feature. The reporting on Control-M hasn't changed much over the years, although it is in a different internal format. It used to be Crystal Reports, and now they've upgraded that. It would be better if that was really flexible where you could define your own reports. You can customize it a little bit, but when people come in with complex questions, you should be able to use that tool and access anything in the database. Control-M has two internal databases that are core to the product. You can go in and do your own SQL queries against the database, but this reporting tool should really be able to do everything that you can do with SQL, and give you good information. Instead, you end up having to export to spreadsheets and then change and update them. It can be very labor-intensive to get this information out. Other than the reporting, they've addressed most things over the years. Control-M is a tool that's been around for more than 30 years, so they have actually fixed most issues that you would encounter. They have a request for enhancement process that most users have sent requests to, but it doesn't move very quickly. The other challenge is they're supporting so many different platforms; BMC just wants it to be a trouble-free release. When users request new features, such as improved reporting, BMC's priority remains maintaining a clean-running system.
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

"We don't have to manually run things anymore. We can have the work that a team of 50 people would do, all inside of one platform."
"It gives us flexibility when doing releases. We can make changes for one day in a PDS member, since we stage our jobs by date, and the next day the normal job definitions are run."
"AutoSys significantly reduces manual effort."
"The CA workload agent has gotten much better. For our organization it's important for us to communicate in a secure fashion between the host and the other platforms, and we are able to do that with our CA product"
"Automation of patch process."
"The most valuable feature of AutoSys Workload Automation is user-friendliness. If someone has some knowledge of the tool they can use it."
"AutoSys Workload Automation is a stable solution."
"We use CA Workload Automation AE r11.3.6 to automate enterprise-wide scheduling and file transfers using an FTP plugin."
"We are dedicated to making Control-M our primary workload automation and orchestration software."
"Technical support is very helpful and available 24/7."
"It integrates seamlessly with other tools within our ecosystem."
"My organization has been able to script scheduled jobs in Control-M to potentially replace legacy products that are at end of life or end of service. The previous backup applications that were being used for specific files, folders, or applications were no longer being supported, therefore being able to use Control-M to replace that has been very valuable."
"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."
"The workflow is much easier compared to the ACS services we were using."
"The solution has the power to reduce resources, which is good for business. It is constantly updated to remain compatible with new technologies such as Amazon, Azure, and Google Cloud. It's very easy to take advantage of the compatibilities."
"I would definitely recommend Control-M to every institute because it is extremely helpful to manage every task without any manual error."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the reliability of the agents, because we need them accessible and we need to run stuff. The agent technology and compatibility are top-notch."
"The support is good from Stonebranch Universal Automation Center."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"The scalability is poor because I cannot use it for all automation solutions."
"An area for improvement in AutoSys Workload Automation is that it lacks advanced features or advanced built-in functionalities found in competitors, for example, an advanced workflow feature. Even the handling or notification from AutoSys Workload Automation isn't the best in the industry. Other products have very good workflow-related functionalities such as ActiveBatch that's missing in AutoSys Workload Automation, so I wish the tool had those features."
"CA Workload Automation is not part of CA's strategic vision going forward."
"The reporting system, currently, could be better."
"We are trying to see if we can use this from a cloud perspective with AWS, Azure, and other clouds, but it seems that there is no cloud integration in this product. We would like to see cloud integration. We are very pleased with this solution, but we are moving our application to the cloud, and we found out that it doesn't support any cloud features. So, we are trying to find a replacement."
"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."
"I would like to see the Service Orchestrator, a B2B product, and maybe a process audit."
"The solution does not have a friendly subscription model because it forces users to take a five-year subscription simultaneously, charging millions of dollars."
"They really need to work on improving the web interface, as there are still a lot of bugs... In general, they need to do a lot of work on shoring up their testing and quality assurance. A lot of bugs seem to make it into the product."
"I'm currently working on the SaaS version, but I've also worked on the on-prem versions before. There is a handful of features that haven't been added to the SaaS version, and the BMC knows that. It's a matter of time before they prioritize the missing pieces and bring them into the SaaS version."
"A smartphone interface would be welcome."
"Control-M reporting isn't that good. It is very limited. We would like the ability to create our own reports as well as the ability to publish dashboards in the cloud, which would help us. Improved reporting will help us determine statuses and get the answers that we need. However, I personally think BMC is not focusing on the reporting. I have even visited the BMC office in India, and asked, "Why haven't you improved the reporting?""
"Currently, the history module captures only seven days of job execution data, and if we had at least 30 days available, that would be beneficial for investigating any issues."
"Support is one aspect that they really need to improve."
"I am unsure if Control-M is compliant with Microsoft Azure environment integrations. We have some clients in Azure environments. Specifically, in Canada, government agencies and nonprofits mostly use Microsoft Azure."
"I'm not sure how the solution fits together with our business modernization initiatives, as there are things outside of my area, even though Control-M is the scheduling tool of the company. They may use other things, e.g., Big Data."
"It can be hard to manage the task monitor."
"I would rate Stonebranch somewhere in the middle for ease of setup. It wasn't too straightforward for us because our infrastructure is complex."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It's not available on the cloud, so they should take that due to safety, security, and scalability."
"Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The return on investment would be very high because doing things manually without this product would be extremely expensive."
"I certainly think the pricing is worth the value."
"Validate how many agents you need beforehand."
"CA pricing has been a problem, and not looked upon favorably here at all."
"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."
"We paid to use the solution monthly."
"It is overpriced."
"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."
"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 pricing is reasonable. It's not an exorbitant amount. The licensing is pretty reasonable for the number of jobs that we run."
"Compare to other tools Pricing and licensing was more. It should be decrease."
"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."
"As we increase the number of tasks or jobs on the system, there are concerns about cost."
"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."
"We have account based licensing. There are two or three types of licensing. One of them is based on the number of jobs, so we a license close to 4,000 jobs per day. The cost is based on the different modules, which we buy from them. If we a buy a hardware module, which we are presently using and integrating, that is an additional cost, but I'm not sure of the amount. Each module comes with a different cost."
"When we reviewed this solution against other vendors, Stonebranch blew everybody out of the water in terms of cost."
"Stonebranch is cheaper than Control-M, so many companies are using Stonebranch."
"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."
"Outside of licensing fees, there aren't any other costs."
"The price of the solution is at a medium level compared to the competition."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
46%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
6%
Insurance Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
7%
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 Business13
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise77
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise112
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise22
 

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?
Pricing for Control-M depends on the licensing model, with different options such as the per-agent model or the per-j...
What needs improvement with Control-M?
Areas of Control-M that have room for improvement include the reporting feature. The reporting on Control-M hasn't ch...
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Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

CA Workload Automation, CA Workload Automation AE
Control M
Stonebranch Universal Automation Center
 

Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Gaumont, Mercantil do Brasil, CCEE, Hanwha Life
CARFAX, Tampa General Hospital, Navistar, Amadeus, Raymond James, Railinc
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.