BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer vs VisualCron comparison

BMC and SMA Technologies are both solutions in the Managed File Transfer (MFT) category. BMC is ranked #7 with an average rating of 9.1, while SMA Technologies is ranked #16 with an average rating of 9.0. BMC holds a 3.1% mindshare in MFT, compared to SMA Technologies’s 1.8% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of BMC users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of SMA Technologies users who would recommend it.

BMC Control-M Managed File ...

Read 28 BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer reviews

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1,503 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VisualCron

Read 11 VisualCron reviews

1,726 Views
501 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

BMC Control-M Managed File ...

VisualCron

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer and VisualCron both compete in the category of file transfer and automation solutions. VisualCron seems to have the upper hand in user-friendly interface and integration flexibility, whereas BMC offers strong encryption and disaster recovery features.

Features: BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer integrates with workload automation and offers flexible job scheduling, platform support, and secure file transfers with robust encryption. VisualCron provides a visual-oriented toolset, ease of scheduling interactive jobs, and extensive plugin support for database connectivity and integration with diverse environments.

Room for Improvement: BMC Control-M could enhance its API functionality, simplify deployment processes, and improve flexibility in scalability and licensing. VisualCron needs a more streamlined UI, better documentation, and enhanced technical support responsiveness.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: BMC Control-M is adaptable across on-premises and hybrid cloud settings with mixed support reviews, highlighting effective Level 3 but problematic Level 2 support. VisualCron supports various deployment models including public cloud and offers straightforward deployment, yet users seek improved documentation and support for complex scenarios.

Pricing and ROI: BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is perceived as pricey but delivers substantial ROI by reducing operational errors; its task/job-based licensing can be costly yet negotiable. VisualCron offers affordable, straightforward annual licenses allowing cost-effective scaling; its pricing is praised as fair, optimizing multiple licenses for different environments, delivering prompt ROI with competitive pricing compared to its feature set.

To learn more, read our detailed BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer vs. VisualCron Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer vs. VisualCron

December 2025

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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

7.0

Number of Reviews

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

Ranking in other categories

Workload Automation (17th), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (15th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Managed File Transfer (MFT) category, the mindshare of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is 3.1%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VisualCron is 1.8%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Managed File Transfer (MFT) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer	3.1%
VisualCron	1.8%
Other	95.1%

Managed File Transfer (MFT)

Featured Reviews

Ashish Khot

Director at a outsourcing company with 11-50 employees

Manages complex file workflows and accelerates critical business processes across industries

Regarding the usability of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer, I have been using it since 2009, and I have encountered no issues. I appreciate that no code is required, it is centrally managed through account management, validations are in place, and file transfers are tracked in an audit through which account they occur. It is one of my favorite solutions, existing since 1980, and I have written a lot of papers on Control-M, including one on my LinkedIn called 'A Leader's Journey' before BMC published the journey of Control-M. My impressions of application workflow orchestration with BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer are that it is a fantastic tool I have been using for 16 years. I have even received appreciation from the development team in Israel, stating that no one has used the solution to the extent that my team and I have for one of our customers. The orchestration process allows easy accessibility to different applications, and it facilitates configuring with drag-and-drop functionality to set dependencies.

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Sourav-Dutta

Technical Lead - Database Administrator at SMART ENERGY SYSTEMS LLC

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…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is stable."

"BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer has indeed helped our clients reduce IT operation costs, for instance, I implemented it for one of the largest banks in 2012, which reduced their loan process sanction from four days to just two hours, and now it completes in 30 minutes."

"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."

"In terms of scalability, I would rate BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer a nine out of ten for its ability to scale and expand."

"Dashboard and recovery are the features I found most valuable in the solution."

"The most valuable thing is that it works as advertised. We don't take advantage of some of the features like we should because that's not our primary role and responsibility in the environment that we manage. We only want to make sure that a file gets to where it was supposed to go, or we pull in a file and it comes to us correctly."

"It saves a lot of time for maintenance."

More BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer pros

"'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."

"The most valuable feature of VisualCron is its ability to schedule interactive jobs so that you can have interdependencies within the job and interdependencies of a job on another job, and so on."

"VisualCron is a very powerful program to automate different steps in your business processes. We use it to automate replacing files and inform departments about the replacement."

"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 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."

"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."

More VisualCron pros

Cons

"We're only using the functionality that we need to use. However, we've had an opportunity to work with one application owner here who wanted to do some transfers in the cloud and things like that. I know that there were some challenges on that, but they finally got all that set up. There was a learning curve though."

"From a support perspective, BMC technical support needs improvements."

"Offering it as open source for free would be great, however, that's unlikely."

"We'd like it to be easier to maintain the administrative side."

"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."

"I would love to see REST API integration and more plugins for Google Cloud Platform compared to AWS and Azure."

"AI can improve and is definitely an area where BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer continues to enhance."

"An area for improvement in BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is integration. It should be compatible with more solutions. It should have integrations with newer applications as well."

More BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer cons

"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."

"The documentation is a bit weak."

"I want to improve the UI in VisualCron, as it's not as user-friendly, particularly when setting up the task scheduler. If you're familiar with the tool, then no problem, but if not, you'll have a problem typing text because sometimes, the cursor points to other places, so there's an issue with text box alignment in VisualCron. That was painful for me when I was just a VisualCron novice, but when you become used to it, there won't be a problem."

"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."

"VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve."

"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."

"Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way."

"The error timeout and info could be better. When making web request calls, it will time out sometimes and we won't get any useful info out of the error response."

More VisualCron cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I switched to this solution within the last year. I switched from the servers payment package to the job payment package, and it is very expensive."

"BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer has reasonable pricing. What you pay for is the task or job, and as it's a module, it's complimentary, so you save about twenty percent of the job cost."

"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."

"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."

"Its cost is high for small companies."

"Yearly licenses are based on the number of jobs."

"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."

"BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is expensive."

More BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer pricing and cost advice

"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."

"ROI is one month."

"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."

"ROI is 95 percent."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Educational Organization

Performing Arts

Computer Software Company

27%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	12

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	5

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer?

The pricing for licensing has increased. I'd rate the pricing three out of ten.

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What needs improvement with BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer?

If you can share an email, I can provide pointers on potential improvements for BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer, focusing on customer-centric enhancements. For example, providing checksums for ...

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What is your primary use case for BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer?

BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is extensively used by our clients mainly in the BFSI sector, where we see around 5,000 to 10,000 file transfers for a few critical customers. We use it for data...

See all answers

What do you like most about VisualCron?

The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VisualCron?

The price is a bit high. However, it is okay.

See all answers

What needs improvement with VisualCron?

The documentation is a bit weak. The tool must provide a better set of documentation.

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 21% of the time

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Compared 18% of the time

Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct vs BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer

Compared 13% of the time

ActiveBatch by Redwood vs BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer

Compared 12% of the time

Globalscape EFT vs BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer

Compared 11% of the time

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Microsoft Power Automate vs VisualCron

Compared 21% of the time

Control-M vs VisualCron

Compared 17% of the time

OpCon vs VisualCron

Compared 9% of the time

Fortra's Automate vs VisualCron

Compared 9% of the time

JAMS vs VisualCron

Compared 8% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer

January 2026

BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer report

Download BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer product report

Buyer's Guide

VisualCron

December 2025

Download VisualCron product report

Overview

Control-M Managed File Transfer is a market leader in the field of building, scheduling, and managing internal and external file transfers. Users of this solution are able to automate whole portions of the transfer process. They can set up a dynamic scheduling feature, which will activate once a transfer operation has concluded. This automatically updates the schedule of activities that your system is supposed to perform. However, this feature does not stop with simply setting a schedule. After the schedule is updated, the system will set those activities in motion. The automation relieves you of the need to assign a team to write scripts or any kind of manual work. This will ensure that everything runs on schedule while at the same time reducing the amount of resources necessary to make that happen.

Control-M Managed File Transfer has a simplified and unified dashboard. Users are able to view and access all of the system’s file transfer information. This platform provides a high level of visibility and intuitive use. It ensures that users will be able to view any stage of their file transfer operations at any time that they wish. Users can conduct a quick search with specific pre-set search options and find any piece of information they might require.

Key Features

Some of Control-M Managed File Transfer’s key features include:

The ability to view and search any and all information related to the transfer of your files from a single dashboard. Control-M Managed File Transfer’s operations dashboard enables users to track all aspects of their file transfer with ease.
The ability to set up a virtual hub with users and folders based in the cloud. Control-M Managed File Transfer allows you to involve partners in your business ventures. This program gives users the ability to create a virtual space in which to house the files related to your business partners. You will be able to grant them access to this space by establishing them within the system as the users of the space. This will enable them to manage their files in a space that is connected to your system.

Reviews from Real Users

Control-M Managed File Transfer stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are the robustness of the solution and its ability to integrate easily with other related programs. It is constantly being upgraded to meet the varied needs of its users.

A software engineer at a computer software company notes the robust nature of this solution when he writes, “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.”

Another PeerSpot user, who is an RPA-WLA BU director at a tech services company, takes note of how easy it is to use Control-M Managed File Transfer in conjunction with other products. They point out, “It is easy to use and integrate with different solutions. It is a good solution that is easy to implement and deliver.”

BMC

VisualCron offers task automation through a visual interface, eliminating the need for programming skills. With capabilities like alerting and variable usage, users benefit from integration with databases, timely task execution, and cross-platform operations.

VisualCron empowers users by simplifying complex workflows. It allows seamless task automation through features like interactive scheduling and role-based operations. Users appreciate its integration capabilities, replacing multiple tools with a comprehensive automation solution. The support system ensures quick assistance, making it a reliable choice for workflow visualization and task execution. However, areas like error handling and interface design require enhancements for improved user experience.

What are the key features of VisualCron?

Visual Interface: Users automate tasks without needing programming skills.
Integration: Connects with databases and multiple systems to streamline operations.
Alerting: Notifies users about tasks and system statuses.
Task Scheduling: Allows interactive management of automated tasks.
Credentials Management: Enables cross-platform operations securely.

What benefits can users expect when evaluating VisualCron?

Increased Efficiency: Reduces the time spent on manual processes.
Cost Reduction: Eliminates the need for multiple tools by consolidating functionalities.
Enhanced Support: Offers robust post-sales support for quicker assistance.
Streamlined Workflows: Simplifies complex task automation.

Organizations leverage VisualCron in industries like finance and logistics to automate tasks such as encryption and secure file transfers. It's also integral in managing data operations, facilitating communications between systems, and executing SQL jobs, enhancing operational efficiency across sectors.

SMA Technologies

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)

Buyer's Guide

BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer vs. VisualCron

December 2025

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