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BMC Helix Discovery vs FireMon Asset Manager comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 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

Automation Anywhere
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
669
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (2nd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (1st), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (1st), Agentic Automation (1st), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (2nd), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (2nd), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
BMC Helix Discovery
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
IT Asset Management (9th)
FireMon Asset Manager
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (19th), IT Asset Management (14th), Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) (7th)
 

Featured Reviews

Nadeem K. - PeerSpot reviewer
Rpa Developer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Automation has freed teams from repetitive finance and supply tasks and supports global operations
In the current organization, we had trouble initially because I think the documentation and support could be better than what it is now. This is one difference between Automation Anywhere and other RPA tools such as UiPath. In UiPath, if you have an issue, you go to the UiPath website and search for it, and you get lots of help materials. In Automation Anywhere, you do not get exactly what you are looking for. You get a very large number of results when you search for something, and from this large result set, you have to filter out what you need, or only partial information will be available. User handbooks are available for each product. In that regard, I would say Automation Anywhere is lagging compared to other RPA tools. It is difficult to get hold of their customer support team. I want to clarify that it is not a matter of us building logic on Automation Anywhere and it failing. When it is a product-related issue, they have to give us support because we only know how to develop within Automation Anywhere. We do not know how to fix Automation Anywhere itself. Whenever we have an issue, trying to get in touch with them always takes three to four business days.
JP
Presales Manager at HCLSoftware
Comprehensive discovery has populated our CMDB and provides deep insight into asset relationships
The applicability depends on the customer environment. Usually it is straightforward to apply the policies. BMC Helix Discovery is seamless and has many plugins available. It is a good feature that they offer. I have heard about it, but I am not currently using it, though I know that they have that feature available. BMC Helix Discovery provides a lot of information that can be obtained from discovery, including the relationship between the CIs and how many CIs are orphans. The analytics capabilities are strong.
MC
Business Continuity And Disaster Recovery Manager at Cadence Bank
Continuous asset discovery has strengthened audits and BCDR planning but reporting needs improvement
FireMon Asset Manager supports my disaster recovery and business continuity planning through continuous real-time discovery, which is the foundation of everything. The fact that it's not a point-in-time scan, but ongoing, passive and active discovery, means my inventory is always current. That's what makes it useful for BCDR, where stale data is dangerous. The best features FireMon Asset Manager offers include leak path detection, which is genuinely valuable. It identifies rogue internet connectivity, unauthorized connections, and paths in and out of the network that shouldn't exist. In a bank, that's both a security concern and a BCDR concern because undocumented network paths create recovery risks I don't know I have. The topology mapping is also excellent. Being able to visualize how assets connect to each other and to the network helps my BCDR team understand dependencies between systems, which is critical for sequencing recovery procedures correctly. If I'm recovering a system, I need to know what it depends on and what depends on it. FireMon Asset Manager has positively impacted my organization primarily on our audit and examination posture. Before FireMon Asset Manager, when examiners asked about our asset inventory, I was presenting data I knew had gaps and hoping nobody looked too closely. Now I can walk into an examination with a continuously updated, discovery-validated asset inventory and answer those questions with confidence. That's a qualitative shift, but it has real consequences. Examination findings in banking are not trivial. This shift has led to measurable outcomes, such as reducing the time to compile our annual BIA asset inventory from roughly three weeks of manual effort down to essentially a report pull. That's significant staff time saved. I've also seen our CMDB accuracy improve. FireMon Asset Manager's continuous discovery keeps finding things that manual processes miss. And from a regulatory standpoint, I've had two examinations since deploying FireMon Asset Manager, and in both cases, the asset inventory questions that were previously a weakness in our program were answered cleanly. That's the metric that matters most in a regulated banking environment.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Now, we can have the bot check all of them."
"By implementing processes using Automation Anywhere, we can save up to 3,000 euros within two weeks of development."
"A project that we automated: A person used to spend about eight to twelve hours every week to finish the process. The bot finishes it in half an hour. Now, the person just reviews it, then passes along the information. This has helped our organization because originally EMEA and APAC would not receive the files the same day that they were processed. But because the bot only takes a half an hour, everyone can now receive the files on the same day."
"The company continues with research and development to expand the capabilities of the product to meet market needs."
"Even a non-IT or business user can just look at the bot language and understand what the bot is doing, and that's the easy part."
"The best feature is its ability to combine Automation Anywhere with AI to build intelligent bots."
"One good thing in A2019 is that all products of Automation Anywhere, like IQBOT services, Meta Bot Designer, Discovery Bot, and Control room are all together in one product which is very effective for any business team."
"Our ROI has ranged from thousands to hundreds of thousands, depending on the type of process being automated."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it is easy to install and deploy."
"The tool's accuracy of the results we receive looks promising in general. Its values are more than 95 percent accurate compared to other clients or different tools. I would say that Discovery offers a valuable mechanism to discover information."
"The solution's most valuable feature is service modeling."
"I'd recommend BMC Helix Discovery to others because I've been working with it for the last eight years and my experience with it has been good."
"It is a stable solution. The stability is okay."
"The initial setup was quite easy."
"It provides comprehensive dependency mapping, which is essential for reducing the time spent and addressing problem-solving between data centers."
"The most valuable feature of BMC Helix Discovery is it operates well. It is well known and has gained recognition for its software."
"FireMon Asset Manager fills a genuine gap in network security visibility that many organizations underestimate."
"It offers a single platform for managing firewalls of different brands and simplifies policy deployment and auditing. It helps push policies to different firewalls, and it also helps with policy auditing."
"The most valuable feature is the change modules. Whenever there is a change in the firewall, it automatically reflects on FireMon."
"Now I can walk into an examination with a continuously updated, discovery-validated asset inventory, and I can answer those questions with confidence."
"FireMon Asset Manager supports my disaster recovery and business continuity planning through continuous real-time discovery, which is the foundation of everything."
"The most valuable aspects of FireMon Asset Manager are its integrations and its ability to passively monitor the network for unknown assets."
 

Cons

"The overall product in Automation Anywhere is good, but they need to improve a little bit on the overall architecture side."
"What I am suggesting, when using A2019, if there are any additional features to exclude those antivirus scans until after my task is completed, then the antivirus can start scheduling. Then, I can easily tell the client that the priority are running and the Automation Anywhere scans can wait until after the release."
"The initial implementation of Automation Anywhere regarding the elastic search and database set connection can be a little difficult."
"Especially while using v11, I often experience freezes with OCR extraction from PDF files."
"Their license model needs to be improved. The biggest issue for me is that the license is tied to a person, and it is not something that I can pass if I want to use it for the first five hours and pass it on to you for the next five hours and so on. When we automate, the license is tied to me, and if you or somebody else needs to use that license, as a COE administrator, I need to transfer the license from person A to person B. This is something that I have always told them that should not be this way because you want to utilize your licenses effectively."
"We have a few issues which have persisted. These end up restarting the machine. We are hoping in version 11.3 of Automation Anywhere, our compatibility and infrastructure issues will be resolved."
"For the short term, in this pandemic era, they should have a feature to write and save directly into Word documents, Office 365, or Google Docs."
"Autosuggestion of existing use cases based on the problem statement could use improvement."
"It is very complicated to use."
"There isn't much that could be improved. The solution is pretty thorough, very easy to implement, and very easy to operate."
"While I consider the solution to be good, it should better be able to integrate with other solutions."
"The monitoring tools could be more stable."
"What would make BMC Helix Discovery better is if it had more client-side discovery features, for example, printers and desktops."
"Management of its own application infrastructure and integrations with other BMC tools."
"The solution's scalability is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are needed."
"What would make BMC Helix Discovery better is if it had more client-side discovery features, for example, printers and desktops. Right now, it's focused more on data center discovery, so if it had additional features focused on the client-side discovery, that would be great. In the next release of BMC Helix Discovery, I'd like more client-side discovery features such as desktop discovery, printer discovery, and other IP-based client-side discovery features. The solution can discover desktops and printers, but there's still room for improvement on the client side."
"While passive discovery remains important, active retrieval of asset details would be valuable, and this functionality is starting to be implemented, as I've observed in recent updates but it is not fully there yet."
"I find that FireMon Asset Manager's reporting customization is more limited than I would like."
"The discovery process could be improved. If incorrect credentials are entered, it should give an error message. That would make our work easy rather than having to troubleshoot why the issue is occurring."
"It is not very good at monitoring the Check Point firewall, but it works very well with other firewalls such as Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Cisco ASA."
"The biggest friction point or frustration I have encountered with FireMon Asset Manager is the support experience being inconsistent."
"FireMon Asset Manager can be improved in reporting customization, which is more limited than I'd prefer."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We save 34,000 hours of time per year and have recouped up to $6000 in lost revenue."
"I am not responsible for the pricing part, but I know the pricing is competitive compared to other tools."
"Regarding the price, licensing, and maintenance, Automation Anywhere provides its customers with its best and affordable value."
"IQ Bots are very costly. It's not a sustainable bot for us as of now. We will look for better, alternate options for that."
"The solution is quite expensive. Not every organization can consider this option."
"We have established a CoE and we take our bot opportunities based on their ROIs. The best ROI opportunity goes to development first. Our ROI opportunities are compliance, profitable growth, productivity enhancements, productivity gains, number of hours the productivity saved, and resources not available that the work can be done by the bot. However, the single most important criteria that we use to measure ROI is how much time does the bot cut down from an analyst's work, as this has the best ROI. E.g., if an analyst is spending a 100 hours of work that a bot can do in one hour, we calculate the 99 hours saved as ROI."
"The ROI is really good. We have saved time and money."
"The price for Automation Anywhere is reasonable."
"We have a perpetual license for the solution."
"You need a license to use BMC Helix Discovery. The license is paid yearly, though I have no idea how much it costs."
"The licenses are very complex and quite costly."
"The licensing fee is very low."
"BMC is available for a reasonable price compared to ServiceNow — it's half the price."
"We are on a three-year agreement with BMC Helix Discovery to use the solution. There are not any additional fees other than the standard license."
"It's not a cheap product. But the benefits it delivers is that it's a fair price."
"Operating cost is actually high compared to other products, actually. It's a little expensive only, but it's very good than other products."
"FireMon is more expensive than other brands but justified by its comprehensive feature set. It includes several functions that might require additional subscriptions in other solutions."
"FireMon Asset Manager's pricing has been reasonable and has worked well for us from a licensing standpoint."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
Outsourcing Company
23%
Comms Service Provider
20%
Media Company
10%
Transportation Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business162
Midsize Enterprise86
Large Enterprise566
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is ver...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applic...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
What needs improvement with BMC Helix Discovery?
The interface is quite old and can be outdated.
What is your primary use case for BMC Helix Discovery?
BMC Helix Discovery is used for discovery of the assets and configuration items so that you can populate the CMDB.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FireMon Asset Manager?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing reveals that it's not inexpensive. The license cost is mana...
What needs improvement with FireMon Asset Manager?
The biggest friction point or frustration I have encountered with FireMon Asset Manager is the support experience bei...
What is your primary use case for FireMon Asset Manager?
My main use case for FireMon Asset Manager is continuous network asset discovery and visibility. We have a complex hy...
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
Discovery, ADDM, Atrium Discovery & Dependency Mapping
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Windstream Communications, News UK, Mercator Group, Wageningen University and Research Centre (WUR)
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC Helix Discovery vs. FireMon Asset Manager and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
921,523 professionals have used our research since 2012.