We performed a comparison between Control-M and Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Managed File Transfer (MFT) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It provides a unified view where you can orchestrate and monitor all your application workloads and data pipelines. That's very important because with cloud, software as a service, edge computing, traditional data center, and legacy apps, there are all these environments. If you don't have that single pane of glass or that one place to look at, you're going to invest a lot of time and resources into tracking things down when they go wrong."
"The monitoring tool is very good. It's very easy for expert and entry-level users to use on short notice."
"We value Control-M mainly for the ability to control multiple nodes in a coordinated manner. Control-M has the ability to really coordinate across a lot of nodes."
"The best part about this product is that it has a lot of features. Control-M doesn't limit us and we can use it for a lot of things."
"In the client, it provides a unified view for me. I can alter the view that I want to see jobs and conditions. This is nice to have. The fact that you can see everything in one space is very important, especially these days where everything is about data and monitoring as well as because we are working from home on a global basis. So, I can monitor jobs in real-time, along with any failures or anything that might be stuck. The real-time monitoring and the ability to see everything in one place is important for us because we operate 24/7."
"Control-M has enabled true enterprise batch automation, which combined with the other BMC Control products on our mainframe platform, allows us to run a 24/7 site with the lights out."
"If they have ad hoc requirements, then they can theoretically schedule their own file transfers with the Self Service. We are trying to push as much work back to the customers or developers that have that requirement, because they prefer to help themselves, if possible. We try empowering them and enabling them through Control-M, especially for file transfers, because it is a much broader base of the business then just with batch scheduling. Typically, with SAP batch scheduling, it would work with dedicated teams. With file transfers, the entire business is involved. There are business users, end users, etc. It definitely needs to be as simple as possible and as managed as well as possible. They need to manage it themselves, if possible, because our team is not growing but the number of customers, applications, and jobs are growing. We need to hand back some of the responsibility to the customer for them to resolve and action it."
"In our bank, all new applications need to be implemented with Control-M. We try to look for the best way to establish communication between both products. One of the new features for us is Application Integrator. It is a very interesting feature because it lets us integrate with those applications that are not included in Control-M. By using Application Integrator, we can easily integrate new technologies. With the help of Application Integrator, we recently integrated with Blue Prism, which is a robotic product. We could integrate such processes into Control-M. Now, we are working with Ansible, and we are putting Ansible automated processes into Control-M."
"It enabled us to allocate staff toward other work. All the time that we would have wasted worrying about this stuff and correcting problems is put into other parts of our job. That's one of the best things about it, is that we don't waste time on these projects. We just don't have to worry about them because it lets us know if there's a problem."
"The solution is easy to learn and user-friendly, which makes it accessible even to those without programming backgrounds and extensive scripting training. Newcomers can quickly get to grips with the platform, and as it's a more object-oriented application, it's easier to use and program."
"Another nice feature is that you can invoke a native program from GoAnywhere. That helps you because you don't have to get fancy with agents. If a native program runs on the server that GoAnywhere is running on, like sed or perl, you can use it,"
"When users say, 'I'm building spreadsheets that I would like to be uploaded on a regular basis into the IBM i,' we are able to accommodate that request within a matter of hours rather than the days it would take to create programs to do that. That is very useful. It has eliminated several dozens of scripts for us."
"The use of this product has helped improve our organization and its ability to send or receive. It has done this by allowing us to remove any homegrown process and centralize needed actions."
"File monitors are one of the most valuable features. We have about 400 file monitors running in GoAnywhere. They monitor the NAS locations where files arrive, and they kick off workflows. When a file arrives, GoAnywhere will identify that the file is there, move it to a consumption zone, then reach out to our enterprise scheduler through a REST API call."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to call a workflow from another workflow. That really gives you an edge by increasing reusability and speeding up development time. You can create a workflow which is a type of template and then call that workflow from any other workflow... It has sped up development time by 80 to 90 percent."
"Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT supports the PeSIT protocol."
"The stability could be improved. I ran into an issue with a recent Control-M patch. The environment would become unstable if security ports were scanned. This is an area they need to improve on, but ultimately it's a relatively small improvement."
"The MFT applications should have more functionality and flexibility within that tool. Having more flexibility with that tool for handling the one to many or many to one concept. Like being able to take data from one source and push it to many locations or pull data from many locations and bring it back into a single source. That's why we still use our TPS program for the file transfers just because we don't have some of those capabilities available to us within MFT."
"I would like to see more audit report templates added, and perhaps more customizability in terms of reporting."
"We did encounter a few scalability issues. Sometimes, there are too many jobs in our environment on different servers, but that’s not the tool issue, we can simply increase the FS size. However, that requires bank cost; hence the scalability issue."
"I would like to see automatic license management. And probably more importantly, some kind of machine learning to help identify the optimum automation path."
"The Control-M API does not support SQL database-type jobs, where a job has been configured to use the SQL catalog to locate SSIS."
"Everybody's biggest gripe is the reporting capability option. It is a gripe because there is a lot of information in Control-M, but the solution doesn't have a good reporting tool to extract that information. Now, if you want all that information, you need to rely on another third-party BI tool to extract the information out of Control-M."
"Consider adding a mobile application for remote management."
"The process of adding a vendor is very easy. You just point and click. You create your job, schedule, and project, and off you go. You just need to know what the processes do when you add in a new job that runs daily and so on. For us, it is not a problem, but maybe the documentation on that could be a little more straightforward. We, however, have no problems figuring that out. It is pretty straightforward for us."
"I want to be able to use GoAnywhere to create customizable reports that I can share with the MSP containing any information related to file transfers."
"Improvement in support or product relies on being ingenious, supportive, and listening to its customer base."
"The security could be upgraded to address novel cyberattacks. I'm not sure whether the product's security is being updated periodically."
"Fortra needs to offer more use cases for GoAnywhere MFT during training."
"There's one persnickety issue about NAS permissions. That is a problem we have run into with GoAnywhere. I would like to see more focus on compatibility with/enforcement of user roles and access permissions across NAS, among other things. We have filed a couple of tickets on that in the past."
"When we restart the agent on each server, it tries to go out to the internet and it takes about a 13-minute timeout before it can move forward. Why is there a 13-minute timeout value when trying to go to the internet? ...If they could limit that timeout or give us a way to modify it so we could have a faster timeout, that would help us at least knock out a half-hour's worth of outage."
"We are a little concerned because the maximum number of open connections allowed is 200, and we are pretty much maxed out... if they expanded the number of open connections allowed, we would be better off."
Control-M is ranked 2nd in Managed File Transfer (MFT) with 110 reviews while Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT is ranked 7th in Managed File Transfer (MFT) with 26 reviews. Control-M is rated 8.8, while Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Control-M writes "We have seen quicker file transfers with more visibility and stability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT writes "Key to our workflow and our workload automation strategy, helping us trade and consume files". Control-M is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Rocket Zena, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence and Automic Workload Automation, whereas Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT is most compared with MOVEit, Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct, IBM Sterling File Gateway, Kiteworks and JSCAPE by Redwood. See our Control-M vs. Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT report.
See our list of best Managed File Transfer (MFT) vendors.
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