Control-M vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform comparison

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4,668 views|1,673 comparisons
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14,073 views|9,760 comparisons
97% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Control-M and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

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Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The monitoring tool is very good. It's very easy for expert and entry-level users to use on short notice.""We can set up automated email notifications to the programmers or the whole team for a particular job. It helps save time because we're not consistently looking at the job to see if it has ended or failed.""It has absolutely saved us time. It has made us more efficient. As far as the processing between systems, we don't have as many people. They have been able to focus on other efforts, because we have been able to automate more stuff with Control-M.""Because it's a tool which allows us to do scheduled work, it allows for notifications when jobs aren't running within that scheduled time frame. This improves the opportunity to meet SLAs.""The solution is innovative. Specifically for the overseas and time differences, you can feel the efficiency of Batch Impact Manager on jobs, batch processing, and impact management. It works the best on these kinds of issues. It saves us time and money, which is important. We save a lot using Control-M.""It gives us the ability to have end-to-end workflows, no matter where they're running.""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.""Its compatibility with the new technologies and platforms, like the Google Cloud or Amazon, is the most valuable. Its console allows us to view the duration and execution of a process. It is also very easy to use and easy to implement."

More Control-M Pros →

"The most valuable features of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform are the agentless platform and writing the code is simple using the Yaml computer language.""Ansible provides great reliability when coupled with a versioning system (git). It helps providing predictability to the network by knowing exactly what's being pushed after validating it in production.""The Organizations feature, where I can give clear silos and hand them over to different teams, that's amazing; everybody says that it's their own Tower. It's like they have their own Tower out there.""It is very extensible. There are many plugins and modules out there that everybody helps create to interact with different cloud providers as well.""The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don’t need an agent for it to work.""It enabled me to take the old build manifest and automated everything. So when it came time to spin everything up, it was quick and simple. I could spin it up and test it out. And then, when it came time to roll production, it was a done deal. When we expanded to multiple data centers, it was same thing: Change a few IP addresses, change some names, and off we went.""Ansible Tower offers use a UI where we can see all the pushes that have gone into the server.""The initial setup is straightforward."

More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Pros →

Cons
"For installing or upgrading the PeopleSoft and SAP plugins, currently there is no way to do it via Control-M Configuration Manager. So, we are installing or upgrading the plugins, like PeopleSoft and SAP, manually. If BMC could provide an option via Control-M Configuration Manager to upgrade these plugins, it probably would reduce a lot of manual work as well as ease our work. This is one improvement that I personally want to see, because it would help our way of working.""Finding documentation on the website can be a bit confusing.""Advanced File Transfer (AFT) has limitations that cause us to use a bit more licensing than we feel is appropriate.""The history module only contains a maximum of 10 days, but we would like to have access to more. For example, it would be helpful to have 30 days or two months of history available.""I would like to see them adopt more cloud. Most companies don't have a single cloud, meaning we have data sources that come from different cloud providers. That may have been solved already, but supporting Azure would be an improvement because companies tend not to have only AWS and GCP.""After we complete FTP jobs, those FTP jobs will be cleared from the Control-M schedule after the noon refresh. So, I struggle to find out where those jobs are saved. Then, we need to request execution of the FTP jobs again. If there could be an option to show the logs, which have been previously completed, that would help us. I can find all other job logs from the server side, but FTP job logs. Maybe I am missing the feature, or if it is not there, it could be added.""I would like not to have to reach out to a third-party application company to do automated notifications. Right now, we still have people manually calling people and emailing people. There's a company called xMatters - and there are others - that has an API through Control-M that can automate any aspect of failure management. I'd like to see it build right into the product. I'd like to see a better notification product.""Reporting in Control-M could use improvement."

More Control-M Cons →

"What we need is model-driven, declarative software infrastructure management. However, things tend to break with new versions, requiring a lot of work to fix…The focus should be on improving the support for Ansible in the area of AI coding.""For Ansible Tower, there are three tiers with ten nodes. I would like them to expand those ten nodes to 20, because ten nodes is not enough to test on.""It can use some more credential types. I've found that when I go looking for a certain credential type, such as private keys, they're not really there.""They should think of this product as an end-to-end solution and begin to develop it that way.""Improvements should be made in terms of execution speed, which is, I believe, the most lacking feature. Aside from that, re-triggering a failed task is another useful feature.""The support could be better.""The user interface on the Ansible Tower product could be better, but it is functional.""On the Dashboard, when you view a template run, it shows all the output. There is a search filter, but it would be nice to able to select one server in that run and then see all that output from just that one server, instead of having to do the search on that one server and find the results."

More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Compare to other tools Pricing and licensing was more. It should be decrease."
  • "BMC does NOT have a great licensing model from my perspective."
  • "we are more looking for a better cost/license/performance model because BMC, while we could say it's the best, is also the most expensive. That is what we are probably most annoyed with. We are paying something like €1,000,000 over three years for having 4,000 jobs running. That's expensive."
  • "We have account based licensing. There are two or three types of licensing. One of them is based on the number of jobs, so we a license close to 4,000 jobs per day. The cost is based on the different modules, which we buy from them. If we a buy a hardware module, which we are presently using and integrating, that is an additional cost, but I'm not sure of the amount. Each module comes with a different cost."
  • "As we increase the number of tasks or jobs on the system, there are concerns about cost."
  • "We have a five-year contract with task-based licensing."
  • "This product saves hours in a day based on my experience working here versus other companies with manually operations."
  • "It works on task-based licensing."
  • More Control-M Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Like many Red Hat products, they have a no-cost version of the web application (AWX, formerly Ansible Tower), but you are on your own to install and it is a little more complicated than just installing Ansible."
  • "The cost is high, but it still works well."
  • "We went with product because we have a subscription for Red Hat."
  • "Ansible Tower is free. Until they lower the cost, we are holding off on purchasing the product."
  • "Red Hat's open source approach was a factor when choosing Ansible, since the solution is free as of right now."
  • "You don't need to buy agents on servers or deploy expense management when using the solution, which affected our decision to go with it."
  • "The cost is determined by the number of endpoints."
  • "We're charged between $8 to $13 a month per license."
  • More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:In Helix Control-M, we have the automation API that allows us to customize and do integrations easily in any script, such as Java or Python. It is all integrated within the integration API.
    Top Answer:It is not bad. The company can afford it, and it pays for itself. We have those jobs running automatically.
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:The most valuable features of the solution are automation and patching.
    Ranking
    4th
    out of 66 in Process Automation
    Views
    4,668
    Comparisons
    1,673
    Reviews
    20
    Average Words per Review
    1,502
    Rating
    9.1
    1st
    Views
    14,073
    Comparisons
    9,760
    Reviews
    26
    Average Words per Review
    502
    Rating
    8.7
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Control M
    Ansible
    Learn More
    Overview

    Control-M simplifies application and data workflow orchestration on premises or as a service. It makes it easy to build, define, schedule, manage, and monitor production workflows, ensuring visibility, reliability, and improving SLAs.

    • Accelerate new business applications into production—by embedding workflow orchestration into your CI/CD pipeline
    • Scale Dev and Ops collaboration, with a Jobs-as-Code approach
    • Simplify workflows across hybrid and multi-cloud environments with AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform integrations
    • Deliver data-driven outcomes faster, managing big data workflows in a scalable way
    • Take control of your file transfer operations with integrated, intelligent file movement and visibility

    Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a powerful network automation solution that allows organizations to handle every aspect of their application launch process within a single product. It enables users to share their automations so that teams within an organization can collaborate on various projects with ease. Ansible Automation Platform is designed to be used by all employees involved in the network automation process.

    Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Benefits

    Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform include:


    • Maximum benefit for reduced overhead. Ansible Automation Platform is an all-in-one solution that can enable users to do the jobs of multiple products with one. Users do not need to purchase multiple products to handle their network automation and application development needs. It is equipped with prefabricated content from more than one hundred companies that are partnered with it.


    • Scalable. Ansible Automation Platform is a highly scalable solution. It can easily be scaled up so that automations can be extended across the various devices that make up an organization’s network.


    • Flexibility. Ansible Automation Platform is highly flexible. It enables users to tackle any and all automation-related tasks.


    Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Features


    • Automation analytics. Ansible Automation Platform comes equipped with an automation analytics feature. This feature enables organizations to measure the effects of their automations and plan how they are going to implement automations moving forward. It makes it easy for administrators to spot anomalies in their automations and resolve them before they can escalate and become major issues.


    • Integration suite. Ansible Automation Platform gives organizations access to a wide variety of integrations that enable them to connect to Ansible’s partners. Now users can augment their capabilities without needing to purchase additional solutions that will enable them to run features that are not normally a part of Ansible’s array of tools. The Ansible environment is built to handle the wide variety of integrations that their partners offer. In order to accomplish this it includes the APIs that users need in order to fully benefit from the integrations. 


    • Centralized interface. Ansible Automation Platform comes with a centralized GUI interface that enables users to manage all of their network automation and application creation activities from a single location. Businesses can guarantee that their operations are going to be handled efficiently and according to a single standard. The management process is greatly simplified. All of the tools that users need are located in one place.


    Reviews from Real Users

    Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a highly effective solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Two major advantages it offers are its automation manager and its comprehensive centralized GUI-based management interface.

    MD J., a solution architect at STBL, says, “The automation manager is very good and makes things easier for customers with multi-cloud platforms.”

    Aankit G., a Consultant at Pi DATACENTERS, writes, “We like the GUI-based interface for the tower. Before, we only had a command-line interface to run all the Ansible tasks. Now, the Ansible tower provides the complete GUI functionality to run, manage, and create the templates and the Ansible jobs. This includes the code and YAML file we can create. The GUI interface is the added advantage of this solution, including some integration with the different plugins.”

    Sample Customers
    CARFAX, Tampa General Hospital, Navistar, Amadeus, Raymond James, Railinc
    HootSuite Media, Inc., Cloud Physics, Narrative, BinckBank
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm34%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Retailer9%
    Healthcare Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm29%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Insurance Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm22%
    Healthcare Company13%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Government9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization25%
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Government7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business11%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise80%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business15%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise76%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business30%
    Midsize Enterprise10%
    Large Enterprise60%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise32%
    Large Enterprise55%
    Buyer's Guide
    Process Automation
    April 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Camunda, Pega, Appian and others in Process Automation. Updated: April 2024.
    768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Control-M is ranked 4th in Process Automation with 110 reviews while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 58 reviews. Control-M is rated 8.8, while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6. 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 Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Capable of broad integrations with easy-to-operate infrastructure and user controls". Control-M is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Rocket Zena, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence and Stonebranch, whereas Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, Microsoft Configuration Manager, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps and Cisco DNA Center.

    We monitor all Process Automation reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.