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Control-M vs GoAnywhere MFT comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 14, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.8
Control-M boosts ROI by automating tasks, reducing costs, improving efficiency, and enhancing data management for large enterprises.
Sentiment score
5.6
GoAnywhere MFT saves costs and time through automation, efficiency, security, and ease of use, enhancing overall resource management.
The main return on investment with Helix Control-M has been a reduction in downtime and minimization of manual interventions, which has improved our operational efficiency.
You can run a million batch jobs or tasks at night when all of your highly skilled people are at home sleeping.
By implementing automation tools, you can minimize human errors and improve efficiency.
GoAnywhere can perform the work of three people, leading to a decrease in manpower needs for automation and file transfer.
There is a drastic improvement in time; at least a 50% to 60% improvement in terms of effort.
We have cut down the time by 50% by utilizing this solution.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.3
Control-M's support is praised for effectiveness and resources, though some users face delays and require issue escalation.
Sentiment score
6.0
GoAnywhere MFT's customer service is praised for professionalism, but some desire faster response times and improved first-level support.
They quickly evolve with changing technology trends, easily adopt new features, and incorporate them into the product.
The technical support is very polite, helpful, and available 24/7.
If something fails at 3 AM in the morning, you need to fix it and get it back up and working really quickly.
It's not a situation where you raise a ticket and wait for 48 hours to get a response; it's immediate.
They have their number on their website to call, and they are fast and available all the time.
The support technician who worked with me initially owned the ticket through the whole process, even after escalating to developers or higher-level support.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Control-M is scalable and adaptable, efficiently managing complex operations across industries, despite occasional server load and cost concerns.
Sentiment score
6.2
GoAnywhere MFT is scalable, user-friendly, supports diverse platforms, and efficiently manages connections for process automation and integration.
Our license doesn't limit our ability to configure Control-M as needed, allowing us to easily create new agents or environments.
It can absorb more workload wherever needed.
As the workload on Control-M increases, its scalability is much higher.
The scalability is ten out of ten because it works effectively even with many users, large files, and a lot of data moving at once.
I would rate the scalability of GoAnywhere MFT as a ten.
Stability is excellent, downtime is rare, and even large files can be transferred completely without any problem.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Control-M is praised for stability and reliability, with minimal issues often linked to external factors and resolved quickly.
Sentiment score
6.6
GoAnywhere MFT is praised for stability, minimal downtime, reliable performance, with responsive support and near-perfect satisfaction ratings.
The downtime is higher compared to AWS.
The testing and development phases need to be more rigorous before releasing patches.
Once properly implemented, the system becomes very stable, which is one of its strongest attributes.
The stability of the application itself is excellent.
Stability is excellent, downtime is rare, and even large files can be transferred completely without any problem.
It works very well, especially when kept up to date.
 

Room For Improvement

Control-M users desire better reporting, lower costs, improved interfaces, enhanced integrations, simplified upgrades, and offline capabilities.
GoAnywhere MFT needs improvements in UI design, documentation, training, support, pricing, DNS, security, connectivity, speed, and integration.
They could provide more documentation and tutorials to make the initial setup easier to understand.
We've experienced main problems with MFTE where having one setup means when an error occurs, the entire service goes down.
Documentation should be maintained for all versions since they provided the application.
That's the only thing that could help if the application could log what caused the error for us to prevent it.
We had to reach out to GoAnywhere support, and they were quick to provide support within a day, so we were able to complete that use case.
when the application runs on a server and encounters problems, it doesn't provide detailed information on the server issues, which could help users troubleshoot better.
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise buyers face high costs with Control-M, but many find its comprehensive features a worthwhile investment despite complex licensing.
GoAnywhere MFT pricing is flexible with custom quotes, offering good value despite potential costs for extra features or modules.
The licensing cost is very high, and they often consider switching to IBM Workload Scheduler or other options.
Control-M tends to be more expensive compared to other solutions, but users get great value from it.
Control-M is among the highest-priced solutions in the market.
Azure is significantly more expensive.
There are approximately 30% to 40% savings.
For the Indian market, the pricing is particularly high.
 

Valuable Features

Control-M enhances workflow management with intuitive interfaces, robust automation, and seamless integration, improving flexibility, efficiency, and productivity.
GoAnywhere MFT offers automation, security, integration, and scalability, enhancing efficiency with seamless file transfers and compliance support.
Automation is more advanced, deployment is fast, and version control has been simplified.
The user interface is comprehensive and lets me view all my jobs on one page, monitor everything, and access the job history.
It is easy to integrate Control-M with technologies for data ops or DevOps processes as things change, and it is not complex compared to other workload automation tools available in the market.
It provides multiple cipher options for HTTPS and SFTP protocols, utilizing AES-based algorithms for secure communication and data transfer.
I can produce reports for security and have full control over secure protocols allowed on the system, making it easy to comply with security standards such as Sarbanes-Oxley.
Before, we had to write scripts and manually update them to move data around, encrypt files, or rename files. Now we just use the GUI to set the modules for transfers, encryption, renaming, and copying, allowing us to set it and schedule it to run without any user interaction.
 

Categories and Ranking

Control-M
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
132
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (2nd), Workload Automation (1st)
GoAnywhere MFT
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
68
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Managed File Transfer (MFT) category, the mindshare of Control-M is 4.6%, up from 3.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of GoAnywhere MFT is 10.7%, up from 6.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed File Transfer (MFT) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
GoAnywhere MFT10.7%
Control-M4.6%
Other84.7%
Managed File Transfer (MFT)
 

Featured Reviews

Mark_Francome - PeerSpot reviewer
Easily connects to different platforms and ties everything together in a centralized screen
Areas of Control-M that have room for improvement include the reporting feature. The reporting on Control-M hasn't changed much over the years, although it is in a different internal format. It used to be Crystal Reports, and now they've upgraded that. It would be better if that was really flexible where you could define your own reports. You can customize it a little bit, but when people come in with complex questions, you should be able to use that tool and access anything in the database. Control-M has two internal databases that are core to the product. You can go in and do your own SQL queries against the database, but this reporting tool should really be able to do everything that you can do with SQL, and give you good information. Instead, you end up having to export to spreadsheets and then change and update them. It can be very labor-intensive to get this information out. Other than the reporting, they've addressed most things over the years. Control-M is a tool that's been around for more than 30 years, so they have actually fixed most issues that you would encounter. They have a request for enhancement process that most users have sent requests to, but it doesn't move very quickly. The other challenge is they're supporting so many different platforms; BMC just wants it to be a trouble-free release. When users request new features, such as improved reporting, BMC's priority remains maintaining a clean-running system.
Rohan Suryawanshi - PeerSpot reviewer
Automation simplifies file transfer and builds confidence in security
I appreciate the features of GoAnywhere MFT such as advanced workflows to automate all the transfer and reduce manual effort. The logs and reporting are very helpful for checking all the compliances. The encryption is quite good. The main feature which is very useful is connectors to connect it with cloud services such as AWS, Azure, GCP. The automation in GoAnywhere MFT really helps us because it reduced the manual work significantly. We can transfer hundreds of files with zero manual interventions. The audit trails also help during the compliance audits. It has given stakeholders more confidence in the security of file transfer. It also helped developers to securely transfer the files. Overall, the impact was very good and positive in our business and personal improvements.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise112
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business41
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise31
 

Questions from the Community

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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Control-M?
Pricing for Control-M depends on the licensing model, with different options such as the per-agent model or the per-job model. BMC is phasing out the per-agent model in favor of per-job licensing, ...
What do you like most about Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT?
GoDrive eliminates the need to use the exchange server for file sharing.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT?
It is around market value. It is neither too high nor too low, but balanced.
What needs improvement with Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT?
Regarding data parsing on files such as XML and JSON, we mostly perform manipulations on the files themselves. I am unable to accomplish this with the predefined functions provided by GoAnywhere MF...
 

Also Known As

Control M
HelpSystems GoAnywhere MFT, GoAnywhere MFT, GoAnywhere Managed File Transfer,
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CARFAX, Tampa General Hospital, Navistar, Amadeus, Raymond James, Railinc
McKesson City of Modesto, California Kwik Trip Northwestern University Charter Communications
Find out what your peers are saying about Control-M vs. GoAnywhere MFT and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
867,370 professionals have used our research since 2012.