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CA Process Automation vs Control-M comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

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

CA Process Automation
Ranking in Process Automation
37th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Control-M
Ranking in Process Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
121
Ranking in other categories
Managed File Transfer (MFT) (4th), Workload Automation (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Process Automation category, the mindshare of CA Process Automation is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Control-M is 4.4%, up from 3.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Process Automation
 

Featured Reviews

it_user464568 - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides the ability to import objects as new versions of existing objects and to make the prior version the current version.
CA offers minimal public information pertaining to the performance drain the usage of some objects and operators introduce to processing. As an example, swim lanes within a process provide an excellent means of organizing operators within a process, but they can introduce substantial performance issues. As another example, it’s better to perform verbose JavaScript execution within a Run JavaScript operator instead of within another operator’s pre- or post-execution script. As yet another example, it’s better to hard-code variables within the process dataset as opposed to creating the variables at run-time. The biggest issue for me is its lack of support for current JavaScript methods and functions, which makes scripts unnecessarily longer than they need to be. It seemed I could only rely on the methods and functions available in ECMA 1 (which was released in 1997), but that wasn’t a deal-breaker and the product is capable of extending its capabilities through the inclusion of other code libraries.
Pedro Fuentes - PeerSpot reviewer
Cost-effective, excellent support, and centralized access and control
They have a department that handles requests for enhancements. I talked to Control-M guys back in October or November when they had a gathering here in Atlanta. We talked about not being able to go back in history in Helix Control-M for more than two weeks. We submitted a request for enhancement. They told us that they are working on it, and they are thinking of expanding that to 30 days. We would like to see it expand to 90 days, but they are working on it. In Control-M, we were able to go back 180 days, but that was on-prem. The storage of that data was on our own servers. We know that storage is money, and we do not expect them to store that much of the data, but at least 30 to 60 days seem proper.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is easy to debug and troubleshoot."
"This tool is used in my organization for automating IT infrastructure related incidents or service requests."
"The unified view where you can define, orchestrate, and monitor applications, workflows, and data pipelines is important because we have more than one team working on Control-M. We have a support team, a job-creation team, and a SAP team. We can all work together on it. It avoids anyone from working on his part and not using the latest modifications."
"We are now able to deliver data to our data warehouses and dashboards promptly."
"The best feature is that we can automate everything. Moreover, we can access all the features through one dashboard, which is beneficial."
"The most valuable features are the Advanced File Transfer and the manage file transfer. They make transferring files securely seamless. It's very easy to set up, get deployed, and have it transferred to and from vendors. As long as we can get our firewall rules implemented at a decent time, it's very easy and seamless to get important files transferred in a secure manner."
"First of all, the shift from manual to automation has been valuable. We have a tool that can automate."
"I find it very helpful to be able to keep track of all our help desk tickets."
"It is very easy to use. The HA feature is also very good."
"It has multiple features. You can plan your execution in Control-M. It provides one single window where you can define workflows regardless of geographic boundaries and platforms. A batch process can be executed from this single window. It provides insights into your processes. Your business people will know what process they are running and what is the state of the process. Instead of knowing that they're not going to meet the SLA the next morning, the business people immediately know the changes in their process. Control-M is very easy. I can tell a non-technical person that this is how it works, and he would be able to easily understand it. Business people can understand the methodology of Control-M and the intuitive features that it has. It has a fantastic graphical user interface and is easy to understand. You just have to drag and drop but in a very intuitive way. Monitoring features are also good. It has different color coding schemes, which can help you to understand the status of your workflow. An operator who is not that technical and is just monitoring the status of the application can see by color-coding the status of a process. If anything goes wrong or a process is stuck, it gives you a hint. You can just right-click and see the logs and the output. Even if the system is not right there in the data center and is located somewhere else, you can monitor it right from there and see the workflows."
 

Cons

"It needs auto-triggering of workflows based on machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI)."
"Somehow the product group within CA left the product dry from some regular expression functionality."
"OCR capability should be added as a feature."
"Make some of the features more open source that way developers can have more flexibility."
"They can improve their interface."
"Consider adding a mobile application for remote management."
"Control-M doesn't have any dynamic reporting facilities or features."
"We develop software. More frequently, we are working with microservices and APIs, using our integration tool, MuleSoft. While Control-M is really a good tool to integrate with other tools, it is important for them to continue improving their microservices and API."
"The response time could be faster when you need a person to answer your questions. There are situations where availability becomes crucial."
"The next major release needs to focus on the lightweight web client."
"I would like to have a web version of Control-M to replace the client. Currently, our support and jobs-creation teams are using the client and that needs to be installed on a PC. It's very heavy, consuming a lot of resources compared to the web portal. I know that they're trying to improve the client with the latest version, but for me, there hasn't been enough improvement yet."
"The infrastructure updates could use improvement. Some of the previous updates that we have run to get to version nineteen were troublesome. So, a more seamless upgrade path for the infrastructure components would be useful. I don't know if they have replaced that in version 20 or if version 20 has an easier path, but I would like to see the upgrade from one version to the next version be a little smoother."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are a lot of automation savings from any process which is repeatable."
"It has provided ROI by auto resolving incidents or requests in the ITSM queue, improved MTTR and SLA adherence, and added value to the delivery of services and the customer experience."
"We are paying way more for Control-M than we've paid for any of our other scheduling tools."
"Its cost is a little bit higher than other solutions such as AutoSys or DAC. For the demo, there were some plans, such as start plan, scale plan, etc. Pricing was based on the plan."
"This is now from my previous years as support for banks and big companies. If it's not enterprise scale, I find that it's too expensive for smaller companies. You really have to be quite big and need to have a dedicated support staff to run it, then you'll be fine. What we've seen at smaller companies, it's too expensive because they want to automate everything. Now, stuff that can literally run once a day for the rest of their lives is costing them $3 a job a day. It becomes too expensive, eventually. They are not seeing the return on investment because it's not business critical. Nobody is going to die or they're going to lose money if that job didn't run exactly at 11 minutes past 4:00. It's definitely for bigger enterprise companies, especially banks or healthcare providers. We have had an instance where Control-M was unavailable due to external factors for 20 minutes and there was a loss of almost a million euros because the solution involved logistics."
"The pricing and licensing could be better. However, when I compare Control-M pricing with JAMS, Control-M is still better priced than JAMS enterprise."
"The price is right because of the licensing schema, which is based on nodes and processes. You purchase what you use, no more and no less, and you can grow with time."
"In our environment, pricing depends on the total number of maximum jobs that can run, which is fine. Therefore, if the number of jobs increases, then the licensing fees will increase."
"Licensing costs are around $3000 a year."
"Pricing is generally affordable, though some features cost a bit more."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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How does Control-M compare with AutoSys Workload Automation?
Control-M acts as a single, centralized interface for monitoring and managing all batch processes, which is helpful because nothing gets left unattended since it is all visible in one place, and th...
What do you like most about Control-M?
First of all, the shift from manual to automation has been valuable. We have a tool that can automate.
 

Comparisons

No data available
 

Also Known As

CA IT Process Automation Manager
Control M
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Unum, HCL Technologies, Logicalis
CARFAX, Tampa General Hospital, Navistar, Amadeus, Raymond James, Railinc
Find out what your peers are saying about CA Process Automation vs. Control-M and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.