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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
661
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 (10th)
FireMon Asset Manager
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (14th), 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

"This RPA tool is a leader in the market, and I have had a very good experience working with Automation Anywhere."
"The platform is easy to use, especially for business users."
"I found the new feature of integrating Python and HTML the most valuable."
"Automation Anywhere has a very rich and easy to use interface. This makes it very intuitive. As an organization, we give training to business users to help them automate themselves. It is an easy to go, create your own scripts, and logic. The typical commands which they have in the workbench are very helpful for us."
"The immediate impact is administrative tasks which were traditionally done manually are now being done by robots. This reduces the workload for people."
"My impression of the impact on visibility in the automation lifecycle is that we help to standardize the process and become more productive in those activities and visibility."
"Automation Anywhere has presented us with a platform that is easily accessible from a web interface, enabling us to write code for RPA scripts without having to download a dedicated software application."
"Automation Anywhere is a good platform with extensive capabilities that has innovated and kept their platform more centered and relevant in the market by introducing AI and agentic capabilities."
"Start anywhere application modelling brings a fantastic opportunity for users to see what is where."
"It is a stable solution. The stability is okay."
"I like the artificial intelligence and machine learning that it uses in the solution. Because once the solution discovers all the assets, all the infrastructure, and all the dependencies between services, it learns how it works. So, it learns to predict when a problem is going to happen. It becomes predictive in an autonomous way."
"The data models are the most useful aspect of the solution."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its application dependency mapping."
"It is agentless, which means you don't have to install anything on all the different pieces of hardware that you are looking to discover."
"It is a scalable solution."
"It provides comprehensive dependency mapping, which is essential for reducing the time spent and addressing problem-solving between data centers."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"SMTP mail features should come with migration options. All kind of VB scripts and Java scripts which we built using exiting version should support in this version."
"Automation Anywhere can be improved by offering more integration with many more applications."
"Having better documentation that is more openly available would help. Often, it feels necessary to contact someone or search for documentation that is stored behind a login or in another location. It would be beneficial to have one centralized place for everything."
"We want to have greater control on deciding when we want to upgrade to a newer version"
"Their support also needs improvement."
"It is good for standard procedures with an SOP. For those, it works well. But there are processes that are tricky and need human intervention and intelligence. In those cases, the process gets stuck."
"The platform has good capabilities, but it could improve by providing more development options."
"We have in-house, a few variables, which we use from technical perspectives. We don't have them in Automation Anywhere, but they introduced them yesterday."
"It would be nice to see more updates to the solution."
"BMC Helix Discovery is a bit tough to use and administer."
"If the dependency maps can go live and we can work through the process with a click, we're reaching the stage where issues are identified and mitigated. It would be ideal if we could utilize it to reduce vulnerabilities or address any other feedback."
"I would like to see the ability to scan some of the newer cloud platforms."
"There is still room for improvement in terms of stability."
"BMC Helix Discovery needs more customization options."
"The CMDB could be improved. Getting data from the CMDB is the greatest challenge."
"The monitoring tools could be more stable."
"FireMon Asset Manager can be improved in reporting customization, which is more limited than I'd prefer."
"The biggest friction point or frustration I have encountered with FireMon Asset Manager is the support experience being inconsistent."
"I find that FireMon Asset Manager's reporting customization is more limited than I would like."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Automation Anywhere has an advantage in terms of licensing. It is more cost-efficient compared to all other RPA platforms. It is a recommended solution when clients need a cost-efficient automation tool to perform unattended automation."
"Their overall pricing falls in the middle of the market. Cost-wise, Automation Anywhere is quite expensive because of their analytics, IQ Bots, and MetaBots. For a standalone machine, the pricing is okay. When adding in the licensing for IQ Bots (or MetaBots), it can become quite costly."
"The cost can be reduced a little for users."
"I think the pricing is reasonable, but clients often perceive it as expensive."
"It's cheapest among the competition, although bargaining is a must."
"We were required to purchase licenses and bot runners, which determined the permissible run times for the bots."
"They have a ridiculously expensive bot licensing structure, especially for the Asian region."
"I find the license pricing to be competitive and reflective of the pricing models throughout the RPA space, and I believe there is a lot of value in continuing to maintain the free community edition platform."
"It's not a cheap product. But the benefits it delivers is that it's a fair price."
"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."
"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."
"The licensing fee is very low."
"I rate the pricing an eight out of ten. All BMC products are expensive."
"The price was fair compared to competitors. BMC is very affordable. There are optional consulting services to assist with implementation."
"I've heard that the solution was expensive earlier but is now much cheaper than its competitors."
"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
Outsourcing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Outsourcing Company
23%
Comms Service Provider
16%
Media Company
10%
Insurance Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business161
Midsize Enterprise82
Large Enterprise560
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: September 2026.
914,351 professionals have used our research since 2012.