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Control-M vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
7.0
Red Hat Ansible Automation minimizes setup time, lowers costs, boosts efficiency, scales well, and supports enterprises effectively.
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
7.3
Control-M's support is praised for effectiveness and resources, though some users face delays and require issue escalation.
Sentiment score
7.2
Red Hat Ansible Automation's support is generally satisfactory, with users often utilizing community resources and varying experiences with technical 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.
The Ansible sales and technical support services need significant improvement.
I have not escalated any questions to the Red Hat support team regarding Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, as their modules are professional and complete.
 

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
7.2
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform scales well for varying server sizes, offering adaptable and manageable automation for diverse environments.
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.
Ansible can face scalability issues, such as limitations when trying to scale up infrastructure.
 

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
8.0
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is stable and reliable, scoring high in user feedback despite minor module glitches.
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 Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is excellent, deserving a 10 out of 10 rating.
 

Room For Improvement

Control-M users desire better reporting, lower costs, improved interfaces, enhanced integrations, simplified upgrades, and offline capabilities.
Red Hat Ansible needs better scalability, GUI improvements, improved orchestration, and enhanced integration, documentation, and automation execution speed.
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.
The dashboarding capabilities should be improved by bringing CMP (Cloud Management Platform) into Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform could improve by creating modules for upcoming AI and ML tech stacks.
More library support for microservices architecture and Kubernetes would be helpful.
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise buyers face high costs with Control-M, but many find its comprehensive features a worthwhile investment despite complex licensing.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform offers flexible pricing based on usage, with costs for advanced features and tailored licensing options.
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.
The pricing is high, and since I'm not using all functionalities, it would be better if the price depended on the functionalities used.
The cost of combining Red Hat Developer Hub and Ansible is extremely high, which presents a significant challenge with the Red Hat product.
It is free and open-source for testing or small labs.
 

Valuable Features

Control-M enhances workflow management with intuitive interfaces, robust automation, and seamless integration, improving flexibility, efficiency, and productivity.
Red Hat Ansible automates tasks with agentless architecture, YAML configs, community support, and a user-friendly interface via Ansible Tower.
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 agentless architecture of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, using the SSH key, makes it passwordless and allows us to push configurations with one click, creating a major advantage.
The automation capabilities streamline deployment processes, providing reliability and reducing manual intervention and errors.
It makes it simple to develop Ansible playbooks and roles, which aids in simplifying my daily administrative tasks.
 

Categories and Ranking

Control-M
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
133
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (2nd), Managed File Transfer (MFT) (3rd), Workload Automation (1st)
Red Hat Ansible Automation ...
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
Release Automation (3rd), Configuration Management (1st), Network Automation (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

Control-M and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Control-M is designed for Process Automation and holds a mindshare of 4.6%, up 4.1% compared to last year.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, on the other hand, focuses on Configuration Management, holds 16.1% mindshare, down 19.1% since last year.
Process Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Control-M4.6%
Camunda24.8%
Temporal7.4%
Other63.2%
Process Automation
Configuration Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform16.1%
Microsoft Configuration Manager11.5%
AWS Systems Manager9.9%
Other62.5%
Configuration Management
 

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.
Sudhir Kumar Tiwari - PeerSpot reviewer
Have managed thousands of servers with streamlined configuration processes
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is very helpful due to passwordless integration and the ability to interact with multiple servers at once, which is especially advantageous when dealing with thousands of servers. The integration aspect of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has optimized my IT ecosystem significantly by consolidating multiple tools, such as a CI/CD pipeline with Jenkins, where we validate everything, including testing and SonarQube code quality. The agentless architecture of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, using the SSH key, makes it passwordless and allows us to push configurations with one click, creating a major advantage. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform's main benefit is that it allows us to push configurations to multiple servers without manually visiting each one, maintaining efficiency.
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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
20%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise113
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise48
 

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 is the difference between Red Hat Satellite and Ansible?
Red Hat Satellite has proven to be a worthwhile investment for me. Both its patch management and license management have been outstanding. If you have a large environment, patching systems is much ...
How does Ansible compare to Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (SCCM)?
Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager takes knowledge and research to properly configure. The length of time that the set up will take depends on the kind of technical architecture that your org...
What do you like most about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform?
The most valuable features of the solution are automation and patching.
 

Also Known As

Control M
Ansible
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CARFAX, Tampa General Hospital, Navistar, Amadeus, Raymond James, Railinc
HootSuite Media, Inc., Cloud Physics, Narrative, BinckBank
Find out what your peers are saying about Camunda, BMC, Temporal Technologies and others in Process Automation. Updated: August 2025.
867,445 professionals have used our research since 2012.