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Control-M vs IBM Sterling File Gateway comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 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
6.6
Control-M automates operations, reduces costs, and improves efficiency, offering swift ROI and enhanced service levels for large enterprises.
Sentiment score
6.6
IBM Sterling File Gateway is valued for cost-effectiveness, ease of use, robust support, and simplifies monitoring, enhancing retail processes.
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.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.2
Control-M's customer support is praised for responsiveness and expertise, despite occasional slow responses, offering strong resource availability.
Sentiment score
6.0
IBM Sterling File Gateway support is mixed; praised for availability but criticized for delays, inefficiencies, and outsourcing concerns.
They quickly evolve with changing technology trends, easily adopt new features, and incorporate them into the product.
The support is accurate, and BMC is always ready to help with queries and complex incidents.
The technical support is very polite, helpful, and available 24/7.
Regarding the technical support of IBM Sterling File Gateway, I would rate their job about nine.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Control-M efficiently scales across enterprise levels, managing extensive jobs, though costs may impact its otherwise robust capabilities.
Sentiment score
6.4
IBM Sterling File Gateway is highly scalable with some complexity and effective for large transactions, but performance may drop.
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.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Control-M is highly stable and reliable, handling large workloads efficiently with minimal downtime or disruptions.
Sentiment score
6.2
IBM Sterling File Gateway is generally stable, with occasional bugs and issues, but cloud migration has improved overall performance.
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.
 

Room For Improvement

Control-M needs better flexibility, reporting, integration, scalability, UI, cloud and AI support, documentation, and streamlined upgrades.
IBM Sterling File Gateway needs user management, interface, auto-deployment, performance, and licensing improvements for a better user experience.
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.
When there is an audit requiring proof that a file has gone in a secure way, most customers have not been able to prove it.
 

Setup Cost

Control-M's complex pricing reflects robust features valued by enterprises, justifying the premium cost despite competitive alternatives.
IBM Sterling File Gateway is costly but valued for secure transfers, cloud compatibility, and appealing to corporate organizations.
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.
 

Valuable Features

Control-M offers user-friendly GUI, extensive integration, efficient scheduling, real-time monitoring, mobile access, and centralized workload management features.
IBM Sterling File Gateway offers secure, automated file transfers with high configurability, supporting large data volumes and multiple protocols.
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.
The software has automation that at a fixed point in time triggers the copying of file A to B.
 

Categories and Ranking

Control-M
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
138
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (2nd), Workload Automation (1st)
IBM Sterling File Gateway
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
2nd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Managed File Transfer (MFT) category, the mindshare of Control-M is 4.4%, up from 4.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Sterling File Gateway is 8.8%, down from 11.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed File Transfer (MFT) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM Sterling File Gateway8.8%
Control-M4.4%
Other86.8%
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.
Vinutha Gangadhara - PeerSpot reviewer
Ability to customize on top of the inbuilt processes, user-friendly and well-categorized
I’ve been part of this client for the last seven-plus years. It’s been close to 70 to 80 continuous improvements we have delivered. The priority ones which we always shortlist are the recurring incidents or recurring issues, which came in the initial phase of the year when we took this entire landscape under our maintenance. One such incident I can recollect is with respect to performance tuning. We committed to our users 99.99% and above as the availability metrics for Sterling Integrator. This has acted as a high-availability system, but we treat it as mission-critical. When it comes to the commitment we give to users, we have to ensure the system is kept most stable. So, the majority of the problem was in the communication channels. Whenever we enabled additional logging for the communication channel, the system used to have hiccups. So we worked with the vendor, stating that the visibility channel framework needs to be changed because the moment we enable more logging, it literally brings the system down, or the system doesn’t work as it should. They took our input and delivered a better framework in their next releases, which helped us after upgrading to have that stability intact. As the system grows, we ensure to have performance tuning triggered and optimize the business process wherever required. For example, by default, Sterling Integrator business process will have full logging enabled. We took care of those things. Not all business processes or workflows require full logging enabled. Only a few critical ones require every step logs. For the rest, we categorized and reduced the logging for those workflows. That actually helped us to increase the IO overall from ten milliseconds to six milliseconds. That was a good achievement. Apart from that, in terms of queues, how we maintain the queues, how we defined all file queues across the critical business process is one thing we felt was done better. The threads we assign for the priority queues and the business processes were configured to those priority queues, whatever is critical, so that it gets high priority to allow the threads to process. So that queue thread Sterling was taken under the performance tuning. Apart from that, I think some of the best practices which IBM recommends is what we usually run through every year. We just have the health check done through IBM, and we just ensure that all the best practice recommendations are added in the system.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
33%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise114
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise12
 

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 IBM Sterling File Gateway?
The cost-effectiveness of IBM Sterling File Gateway was a major factor in our decision to use it, in comparison to the higher costs associated with DataPower.
What needs improvement with IBM Sterling File Gateway?
The product itself wasn't very easy to comprehend. I required a lot of customization that didn’t meet my needs. I resolved more issues than IBM did. Sterling needs better testing for larger custome...
What is your primary use case for IBM Sterling File Gateway?
I utilized Sterling primarily for SFTP and Connect Direct. I have a complicated system involving ZOS mainframe, data power, and various complex rules as I was trying to replace everything with Ster...
 

Also Known As

Control M
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CARFAX, Tampa General Hospital, Navistar, Amadeus, Raymond James, Railinc
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Control-M vs. IBM Sterling File Gateway and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,846 professionals have used our research since 2012.