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BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer vs VisualCron comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

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

BMC Control-M Managed File ...
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
7th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VisualCron
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
16th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Workload Automation (16th), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (16th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Managed File Transfer (MFT) category, the mindshare of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is 3.6%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VisualCron is 1.7%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed File Transfer (MFT)
 

Featured Reviews

SirajShaik - PeerSpot reviewer
Improve operational efficiency through workflow orchestration
Its stability and the feature list are rich compared to other tools in the market. I have experienced a thirty percent reduction in operational time for developers, increasing efficiency in workflow orchestration design. The UI is great, with a minimal learning curve and caters to both click-and-monitor users and those who want to code.
Sourav-Dutta - PeerSpot reviewer
It's user-friendly, and I didn't need long to understand the process
We use VisualCron for all our automation needs, like connecting to FileZilla, calling APIs, generating PGP keys, creating encryption files with the PGP key login to Azure, etc. It can automatically log in to SQL Server and execute SQL script jobs in bulk. We had 2,000-3,000 users at my previous…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is highly stable. It is enterprise-grade software. Doing a job of 10,000 to 20,000 the solution is very stable."
"The most valuable feature is the automation process."
"The GUI is good if I'm comparing it to other scheduling products."
"The job scheduling and file transfer are two major, important features."
"This solution has a vast amount of features and with every new release, there are lots of new features introduced. The application has high availability—we have multiple customers and it's highly available. On an application level, if something goes down with the primary, then the application goes over to the secondary, so it's very, very easy to do disaster recovery. From an application integration point of view, it has a lot of APIs, rich APIs. Every month, they are releasing new APIs and new updates, like Java, but more than that. Now they are introducing a couple more APIs, which you can use to integrate your controlling environment with any applications you want."
"It is a highly scalable solution...I rate the product's initial setup a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy."
"The solution supports all file transfers."
"The product works very well with the modules. If you have MFT, Managed File Transfer, or the old AFT, you can link that to processing jobs."
"We don't have to do any coding. We just plug and play and it works."
"It has improved our organization with more automation within the business departments and less administration and development in the IT department. Usually, as the IT department, we are the bottleneck for many requirements within the business. With this tool, the business departments are able to perform many task themselves."
"What I found most beneficial from VisualCron is that you can directly connect it with different databases, user accounts, and credentials. You can run queries from one machine to another using the credentials, unlike PowerShell, that's run by the machine itself. With VisualCron, you can directly ask other machines and run requests through user credentials. Suppose you have an AWS or Azure environment. In that case, you can maintain the connection between on-premises and cloud-based machines, which is the type of setup in the organization I'm working for. You can directly call some of the services via VisualCron on your local on-premises machine, and I found that an excellent feature of the tool."
"The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%."
"What I like about VisualCron is that like its name, it's a very visual tool. In my previous company, there were a lot of scripts for all kinds of services, and through VisualCron, you get to group all flows and get a nice visual overview. VisualCron also has an alerting feature, so you receive alerts from it. VisualCron makes everything clearer and easier to maintain. Every other solution that I was looking for almost always needed a programmer, but with VisualCron, you can do what you need to do without programming skills, so this is another valuable feature of the tool."
"It helped us reduce manual steps."
"'ve only had a few cases where I've had to request support in the past 12 years of use, but the support response time and resolution were was extremely quick."
"The ability to clone jobs to shorten the time it takes to implement a process has been invaluable, but its flexibility also gives us the ability to create a job that can handle a multifaceted process with a complex workflow."
 

Cons

"The solution should improve the out-of-the box conversion tool for migrations so the percentage result isn't so low."
"The only improvement I would suggest is the license pricing should be a little reduced. Apart from that, I don't see anything else as a major concern with the tool right now."
"The solution lacks a graphical user interface for reporting."
"Password vaulting would be a feature that should be included."
"It scales well, except for the cost. I have to pay per agent per server, which could be prohibitive for some organizations."
"Most improvements are related to cloud connectivity."
"I'd like to see MFT included as part of the overall product and not a cost add-on as AFT used to be included and they stopped supporting that and now have come up with MFT and you now have to pay for it separately."
"There are eight different kinds of dashboards in Workflow Insights, but there could be more because there is third party software that provides more dashboard styles."
"There are some conditions in the mail trigger, but you can only use them as an "AND" condition, not as an "OR" condition. This is an improvement that could be useful. For example, some people put "invoice" in the subject and others put "invoice" in the body. If I want to make a trigger for everybody whose sending invoices, I have to make two jobs for this now."
"VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve."
"Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way."
"The only problem I face when I use the tool is that it doesn't contain much documentation or it doesn't have many video tutorials on its features."
"I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run."
"An area for improvement in VisualCron is its cluttered interface. It isn't always easy to find all functionalities, so what VisualCron needs is a user interface expert who can improve the interface. There's a learning curve in terms of finding what you need from the interface of VisualCron. The technical support for VisualCron also needs improvement in terms of response time. Currently, there's no live support or hotline you can call to get quick answers, so this is what I'd like to see in the next version of VisualCron. A less cluttered and more streamlined interface, where you don't need to hunt for some of the features, is also what I'd like to see in the next VisualCron update."
"The documentation is a bit weak."
"VisualCron is software, and you will experience performance degradation when you scale up. VisualCron takes too much memory or CPU power. We have to increase the hardware resources of a specific server or system."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This solution is very expensive compared to others in the market. Previously it was the only solution in our country to offer this kind of functionality. However, technology has caught up and many competitors offer the same at a lower price."
"I rate the solution's price a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is low or really affordable, and ten is high or really expensive. It is a really expensive tool."
"Yearly licenses are based on the number of jobs."
"It is an expensive solution."
"It was a little bit pricey. They were proud of the product. A particular module was not free. However, BMC was able to negotiate that particular module into our whole contract itself without having to negotiate an individual price for that module. All that was included in a one-time negotiation, and we've signed a five-year contract on that."
"The licensing is a bit more expensive than other tools, so if a client is focused on the cost, that would be something to consider. The licensing should be cheaper."
"The license model is based on the number of tasks or jobs required. The price overall is expensive. In my country, we don't have any choice but to use them because no one can match their capability."
"BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is expensive."
"ROI is 95 percent."
"ROI is one month."
"The price is a bit high."
"VisualCron is correctly priced because it wasn't very cheap, and it wasn't overly expensive, so the price for it was set correctly. When my previous company bought VisualCron, it was €800 per server per year. On a scale of one to five, I would rate the pricing for VisualCron a five because it was just right. The tool was affordable, and it has one of the most competitive pricing in the market."
"We are fine with a rather cheap setup. Licensing with VisualCron is fair. You have a simple one-year licence in different sizes. There isn't a licensing jungle with hundreds of options and opt-ins."
"The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
Insurance Company
6%
Computer Software Company
27%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Insurance Company
9%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer?
It is a highly scalable solution...I rate the product's initial setup a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer?
Negotiate based on task and ask for a better price where non prod tasks could be charged a lower price.
What needs improvement with BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer?
There is not much room for improvement. It already has a GUI and even a mobile app, although I don't use it. It is adequate for most scheduling needs. Offering it as open source for free would be g...
What do you like most about VisualCron?
The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%.
What needs improvement with VisualCron?
The documentation is a bit weak. The tool must provide a better set of documentation.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

British Sky Broadcasting
7 Eleven, ABB Sécheron SA, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Amazon Europe Core, Apple, Assa Abloy, Aston Martin, Banco Santander, BMW (Australia)
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer vs. VisualCron and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.