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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
6.9
Number of Reviews
641
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 (1st), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (1st), 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 (7th)
FireMon Asset Manager
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (17th), IT Asset Management (11th), Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) (6th)
 

Featured Reviews

Venkat Sivaprakash - PeerSpot reviewer
Management Consultant at Accenture
Has significantly improved document-driven workflows and reduced processing time across finance and HR functions
Automation Anywhere has evolved significantly and upgraded itself to provide agentic AI and AI-based automation solutions for document automation. The product has matured considerably over time. We can create workflows that can call an API. We can include prompts in particular workflows for ChatGPT-related functions, connecting to an LLM and RAG to perform tasks. For document automation, modern features are available to train documents, ensuring high accuracy and repeatability over time. The system is very easy to use. I recently completed a course in document automation, typically designed for people involved in coding and technical aspects. Though I understand coding comprehensively, I don't do actual coding. The course was very accessible. Currently, extensive coding isn't necessary due to the hybrid model incorporating GenAI aspects, low-code, no-code capabilities, APIs, and numerous pre-built objects in Automation Anywhere. The features include GenAI-driven prompting methods and workflow creation capabilities. In these workflows, we can create decision boxes and call APIs without coding. We simply pull objects, drop them, connect them, and add minimal coding when needed. The most crucial aspect isn't coding but rather sizing the automation and fleshing out the details. Automation Co-pilot takes notes and performs automated analysis. It can extract details from videos, summarize conversations, and provide detailed information. During calls, it identifies instructions and performs tasks such as preparing reports and reconciliation. Automation Anywhere can also connect with Microsoft Co-pilot. Through Co-pilot, real-time operations can be executed, allowing direct interaction between vendors and automation through this component.
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

"I have been using this solution for a while now, and I think that it is a very good platform."
"We realized a return on investment with Automation Anywhere, especially during the COVID surge in volume within the payment process."
"Manual efforts have been reduced and the accuracy has increased. In the processes I have done, the accuracy has reached 100 percent, and manual load and time has been reduced."
"The ability to automate repetetive tasks and processing that should not require human intervention."
"Without thinking twice, I would recommend going for Automation Anywhere."
"We have been able to reduce the amount of repetitive tasks completed by operations, allowing individuals to move onto tasks which cannot yet be automated."
"Document automation has been phenomenal."
"Automation Anywhere was easier to learn for the developers. It has a lot of out of box features when it comes to SAP, Excel, and others."
"We have seen a return on our investment many times over."
"The initial setup is simple."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it is easy to install and deploy."
"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."
"In terms of the tools that BMC sells and tools like this on the market, there is no match."
"The solution is very stable and powerful."
"The most valuable feature of BMC Helix Discovery is it operates well. It is well known and has gained recognition for its software."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its application dependency mapping."
"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."
"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."
"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 fills a genuine gap in network security visibility that many organizations underestimate."
"The most valuable feature is the change modules. Whenever there is a change in the firewall, it automatically reflects on FireMon."
 

Cons

"In A2019 it does not display the exact running status, but rather it displays the previous one."
"I'd like to see the stabilization of Co-Pilot and integration with multiple products... In the future, I will require integration with SAP Oracle, Atlassian, and Service Now. The contact center vertical is important..."
"They need to improve the speed. It runs too slowly."
"Automation Anywhere needs to have more testing tools to improve the testing portion of the solution."
"There is still a way to go for Automation Anywhere where we can see improvement. Mostly, we want to see more artificial intelligence and machine learning. Now, I can see only this mostly in the IQ Bot where we construct the data from PDFs. I also want to see more features where we can use the artificial intelligence in automating tasks as well."
"The IQ Bot could use improvement."
"The cost of this solution can be improved."
"I'd love to see the ability to build web or mobile applications that are integrated with Automation Anywhere bots, so that a user can work on a web interface directly. Then, it can be linked to the Automation Anywhere bots in the background. They just hit a button, and all the data or information will be used by the bot to do some process in the back end."
"While I consider the solution to be good, it should better be able to integrate with other solutions."
"The solution should have different portals and logins for each customer so only that customer's assets show."
"There is still room for improvement in terms of stability."
"The improvement which we require is to delete the Internet service. Till some of the features are coming, like, internally side. If you are taking one server to model, there are a lot of usages like three structures per diagram is coming, and we have to do the man lot of manual work. Instead of that, whatever our requirement, we should be able to provide the servers and get the structure. So this is what we want to implement with such data."
"The support from BMC Helix Discovery can improve, it takes a long time before we receive any feedback. It can take days to months sometimes."
"BMC Helix Discovery is a bit tough to use and administer."
"I would like to see the ability to scan some of the newer cloud platforms."
"BMC Helix Discovery needs more customization options."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I am not sure about the costs, but two Bot Runners and four Bot Creators may cost approximately 1CR."
"One of the key features that we chose, the bot as a service or the BotFarm, when they launched version 11.3, they decided not to have the BotFarm anymore. This put us in a situation because we expected to have bots on demand, just like our cloud software. This would have been cost efficient for us to use. We hope to see this again being realized with A2019. I hope the scalability from an on demand basis improves."
"My only suggestion in terms of pricing is very generic and that is to consider that as much as RPA saves cost and does automation, please get a realistic estimation done on whether you are really achieving any ROI over your investment with RPA."
"We paid separately for the Runner and Creater components. The final cost depends on the structure of your environment."
"The price for Automation Anywhere is reasonable."
"It looks like it will be right around $115,000, not counting IQ Bot, which we won't renew until later."
"Automation Anywhere is somewhat expensive. The prices are slightly higher, but if you need something, you must pay for it."
"I advise others that even as of right now, the setup cost and licensing cost to automate bots on Automation Anywhere is steep but it is worth the investment!"
"The licensing fee is very low."
"It's not a cheap product. But the benefits it delivers is that it's a fair price."
"I've heard that the solution was expensive earlier but is now much cheaper than its competitors."
"The licenses are very complex and quite costly."
"The solution offers yearly licenses."
"You need a license to use BMC Helix Discovery. The license is paid yearly, though I have no idea how much it costs."
"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."
"We have a perpetual license for the solution."
"FireMon Asset Manager's pricing has been reasonable and has worked well for us from a licensing standpoint."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
20%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Insurance Company
10%
Construction Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business154
Midsize Enterprise82
Large Enterprise536
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 manageab...
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: June 2026.
902,456 professionals have used our research since 2012.