Control-M vs Rocket Zena comparison

BMC and Rocket Software are both solutions in the Workload Automation category. BMC is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.8, while Rocket Software is ranked #20. BMC holds a 21.4% mindshare in WA, compared to Rocket Software’s 2.7% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of BMC users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Rocket Software users who would recommend it.

Control-M

Read 123 Control-M reviews

17,368 Views
7,097 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Rocket Zena

Read 8 Rocket Zena reviews

1,457 Views
394 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Control-M

Rocket Zena

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 2025

Control-M and Rocket Zena are competing in the enterprise automation software market. Control-M stands out for its overall reliability and comprehensive automation capabilities, while Rocket Zena impresses with its modern interface and innovative features.

Features: Control-M offers extensive job scheduling and workload automation that integrates across diverse IT environments. It supports advanced analytics and workload monitoring for multi-cloud systems. Rocket Zena emphasizes dynamic workload automation with cloud-first functionality, agile automation processes, and real-time tracking capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Control-M could benefit from a more modern interface and quicker deployment times. Enhancing cloud-native capabilities would also be advantageous. Rocket Zena needs improvements in stability and customization options. Expanding support for legacy systems could increase appeal to a broader market.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Control-M offers mature deployment processes with extensive support infrastructure praised for timely assistance. Rocket Zena excels in quick deployment and customer-centered support, focusing on flexibility and proactive assistance. Differences in approach make Control-M reliable and Rocket Zena adaptable.

Pricing and ROI: Control-M incurs higher setup costs but ensures extensive ROI through reliable performance and comprehensive features, making it a long-term investment. Rocket Zena offers lower setup costs with rapid ROI, appealing to businesses seeking agility and innovation-driven capabilities. Control-M is valued for sustained efficiency, while Rocket Zena emphasizes cost-effectiveness and innovation.

To learn more, read our detailed Control-M vs. Rocket Zena Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Control-M vs. Rocket Zena

June 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Control-M

Ranking in Workload Automation

1st

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

123

Ranking in other categories

Process Automation (2nd), Managed File Transfer (MFT) (4th)

Rocket Zena

Ranking in Workload Automation

20th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of Control-M is 21.4%, down from 26.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rocket Zena is 2.7%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Workload Automation

Featured Reviews

Ujjwal Sachdeva

Data scientist at Advarisk

Efficient automation and boosted workflow but needs better integration methods

Control-M is a bit faster compared to other solutions. The job and coding are easier. Also, my DevOps and Ops teams work collaboratively with it, enhancing its efficiency. The workflow is much easier compared to the ACS services we were using. Automation is more advanced, deployment is fast, and version control has been simplified.

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JuanGonzalez6

IT Solutions Manager at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees

A continuously evolving, stable solution, with responsive support

The visual whiteboard for design and execution included with the solution is very crucial to those who are new to Rocket Zena, especially so that the learning curve is minimized and they can focus on accomplishing the task. We process our system's payroll through Rocket Zena. The fact that it's a multi-process, multi-layered application, means that we can rely on the solution for kicking off processes, notifying user vendors of the steps, completions, error logging, and historic events from the previous run times. Rocket Zena's ability to automate jobs on the mainframe as a distribution workload automation solution is good. The solution continuously improves over time. We're eager to start the latest upgrade this coming year that'll put us on the cloud. Hopefully, this will improve the product even more. We can run things natively without the scheduler if needed. The solution working properly and up to date without the need for a mainframe scheduler is crucial. We use the solution to manage a few complex operational workflows end-to-end across multiple technology stacks. Rocket Zena does a great job of simplifying our cross-platform processes through automation. The solution helps speed operations up and keeps them automated allowing us to focus on other priorities. The solution helps increase our completion rates by working overnight to meet our SLAs. Rocket Zena completes 30 percent of our workload outside of our standard work hours. Rocket Zena's cross-platform job scheduling helped us save around 40 percent of programming time by automating repetitive tasks. We use the solution to transfer our current files and keep up with our infrastructure on a few automated jobs, such as refreshing our database which happens overnight. The solution helped free up around 15 percent of our engineer's time to focus on more value-added work.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Helix Control-M has contributed to the overall stability of our applications and improved user experience."

"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."

"Most of our tasks also deal with databases, and Control-M's purpose-built module for the databases comes in very handy when handling database components."

"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."

"The integration with ServiceNow is good. When a job ends and there are problems with it, we automatically open an incident in this platform, and the number of the incident is forwarded to Control-M. This means that we have a record of it with the log of the job."

"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."

"Control-M has improved our organization's functions by supporting high availability and integrating with CI/CD workflows."

"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."

More Control-M pros

"We haven't had any problems since we installed it. It runs as expected, we haven't had any critical problems. It helps keeps the business running 24/7."

"You can click Ctrl-G and bring a diagram view. You're able to view in a diagram format. The view that it provides is easy, and you can move to the left, up, or down. You can double-click on a certain process. It'll drill into that process and all of its underlying components. You can double-click on an arrow or a component, and it'll bring up a screen that'll have all the variables that are assigned to that particular piece, as well as the values at run time. So, the diagram feature of it, at least for me, is pretty valuable."

"I have found the scheduling feature the most valuable. I can map dependencies by using ASG-Zena. It gives a nice, quick visualization as to where things are."

"Its FTP feature is very good, as is scheduling any process or task with the Zena client. I have found it to be very helpful. If a task fails, it gives you a prompt."

"In the latest upgrade, Zena added a web-based client. The more I use it, the more I like it. It's an excellent interface. They do a good job of steadily improving the solution to make it more useful."

"From a Linux configuration point of view, Rocket Zena is straightforward. It's fairly easy to set up the server and agents once you know how to do it."

"I like the whole product, but specifically, I like the license part. It's very easy to acquire a license for this product."

"The most valuable feature is the FTP file transfer."

Cons

"With earlier versions, the support was not accurate or delivered in a timely manner. What would happen is that I would be in production mode and I would have an issue and would want to get someone on a call to see what was happening. But they would always say, “Hey, provide the log first and then we'll review and we'll get back to you." I feel that when a customer asks about a production issue, they should jump onto the call to see what is going on, and then collect the logs."

"You need to pay for extra features if you need them."

"They really need to work on improving the web interface, as there are still a lot of bugs... In general, they need to do a lot of work on shoring up their testing and quality assurance. A lot of bugs seem to make it into the product."

"There can be some complexities with the UI part, especially with the advanced features."

"The company has been working with BMC on the MFT. There are still some things about MFT which don't work the way that we want with our needs. So, we would like to see that improved."

"The unifying features between Control-M for different platforms needs improvement. The scheduling options on the Control-M mainframe jobs are different than they are on our Linux server. There are a few differences here and there."

"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."

"There are numerous boxes to tick and things to check to ensure everything is in order before the upgrade happens. The process is very long"

More Control-M cons

"Another one that is probably a little bit bigger for me is that when there is an issue or there's an error, it writes on a different screen. I have to find the actual process name and go to a different screen to view the alert that got generated. On that screen, everyone's processes, not just the processes of the folks in my department, are thrown. It takes me a while to find the actual error so that I could go in there and look at the alert. It could be because of the way it was set up, but at least for me, it isn't too intuitive."

"The scheduling mapping is a little disjointed. There is no wizard-type approach. There are a lot of different things that you have to do in completely different areas. They could probably add the functionality for creating all components of a mapping or an OPA schedule. The component creation could be done collectively rather than through individual components."

"Rocket Zena is a mainframe-based job scheduler. I would like it to be more open so that we can use it on a distributed platform."

"One area where it could be improved is communication between the different servers. Sometimes there are processes that have already been completed but we get a status notification that they're still active."

"In the next release, I would like the user experience to be improved. The user interface should be more appealing to gen-z."

"The UI is not intuitive, and it would be nice if there was a web interface."

"The documentation has room for improvement."

"In the web interface, it stacks the tasks across the top, and they accumulate until you close or clean those out. That seems a little cumbersome. You must right-click and close all tabs constantly to keep the console clean and manage your views."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"BMC does NOT have a great licensing model from my perspective."

"Its pricing is a little bit high. They could provide an enterprise-level license for an unlimited number of jobs. Currently, it is based on the number of jobs, and if you exceed the number of jobs, there are charges. For example, if your license is for 3,000 jobs per day, but you run 3,050 jobs, you will have to pay for the extra 50 jobs. They charge $120 per job. So, it is too costly."

"It is not bad. The company can afford it, and it pays for itself. We have those jobs running automatically."

"Pricing is generally affordable, though some features cost a bit more."

"The pricing is moderate, not too low or too high compared to other solutions."

"The product price is reasonable. I rate the pricing an eight."

"The solution is not cheap, it comes with quite a hefty price tag. Control-M is the market leader, but we still want the price to be as friendly as possible."

"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."

More Control-M pricing and cost advice

"The pricing and the licensing are good. It is affordable and can be used to improve and optimize productivity."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

28%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

30%

Insurance Company

12%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

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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.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Control-M?

Its cost can be more competitive. One of the main things customers look at is the cost. It's not affordable. The cost is very high, according to my customers. The licensing cost is very high, and t...

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What are some of the things you've done to recession-proof your tech stacks?

Automation can play a pivotal role here. Many users understood that during an economic downturn, they needed to achieve more with limited resources. Automation emerged as a powerful solution to fil...

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Do you have any tips for managing my company's modernization, without any disruptions?

Today, we will look at the legacy systems, the red flags that point at the system getting old and rusty, and the ways a reliable custom software. This guide: https://www.cleveroad.com/blog/legacy-s...

See all answers

How can hybrid cloud solutions benefit our organization’s infrastructure?

Hybrid cloud solutions can be really beneficial for organizations' infrastructure. The flexibility and versatility they provide can enable users the ability to adapt to changing business needs and ...

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Comparisons

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Control-M

Compared 15% of the time

Automic Automation vs Control-M

Compared 8% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Control-M

Compared 7% of the time

IBM Workload Automation vs Control-M

Compared 7% of the time

ESP Workload Automation Intelligence vs Control-M

Compared 4% of the time

More Control-M Competitors

Rocket Zeke vs Rocket Zena

Compared 17% of the time

IBM Workload Automation vs Rocket Zena

Compared 13% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Rocket Zena

Compared 6% of the time

JAMS vs Rocket Zena

Compared 6% of the time

Stonebranch vs Rocket Zena

Compared 4% of the time

More Rocket Zena Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Control-M

June 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Rocket Zena

June 2025

Download Rocket Zena product report

Also Known As

Control M

ASG-Zena

Overview

Control-M is used for enterprise workload automation, orchestrating finance, retail, healthcare, and supply chain processes. It handles batch job scheduling, managed file transfers, cloud integrations, and compliance auditing across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.

Organizations leverage Control-M to efficiently monitor and manage business-critical processes like payroll, HR, SAP, Informatica, and database tasks. It enhances visibility, security, and error resolution. Automating and optimizing workflows in data centers, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, Control-M supports diverse technological environments. The platform's robust capabilities make it suitable for effective centralized management of applications and data pipelines, ensuring enhanced collaboration and scalability.

What are Control-M's most important features?

Integration capabilities: Seamlessly integrates with various systems
Automation API: Facilitates automation through APIs
Managed File Transfer: Simplifies secure file transfers
GUI console: Intuitive graphical user interface
Role-based administration: Provides access control
Single-pane view: Centralized monitoring dashboard
Scheduling options: Flexible job scheduling
Workflow orchestration: Coordinates complex workflows
Reporting: Generates insightful reports
Monitoring: Tracks and manages tasks
Forecasting: Predicts future workloads
Self-service portal: Empowers users with self-service tools
Plugins: Extends functionality through additional plugins

What are the benefits or ROI of using Control-M?

Enhanced visibility: Centralized view of all processes
Ease of use: User-friendly interface
Error reduction: Minimizes manual errors
Improved collaboration: Facilitates teamwork
Scalability: Supports growth and scale
Support: Comprehensive customer support

Control-M is implemented in industries like finance to handle payroll and HR tasks, in retail for inventory management and supply chain processes, and in healthcare for compliance auditing and patient data processing. Organizations benefit from streamlined workflows and automated processes across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments, ensuring efficient and secure operations.

BMC

Rocket Zena automates and schedules tasks across mainframe, Linux, and Windows environments, reducing human errors and managing dependencies.

Rocket Zena serves as a powerful tool for scheduling and automating tasks across multiple platforms. Its capabilities extend to managing batch jobs, ETLs, SFTP transfers, database backups, organizing workflows, running scripts, managing payroll tasks, and customizing schedules to avoid manual interventions. Users benefit from a user-friendly interface and efficient containerized deployment with clear process visualization through diagram and whiteboard features. The platform supports file transfers, automates workflows, saves time, and reduces errors, with straightforward licensing and commendable technical support.

What are the most important features?

User-Friendly Interface: Easy to navigate for efficient task management.
Cross-Platform Job Scheduling: Simplifies task automation across different environments.
Containerized Deployment: Ensures efficient resource use and deployment.
Diagram and Whiteboard Features: Visualizes processes clearly for better understanding.
FTP File Transfers: Facilitates seamless file transfer between systems.
Workflow Automation: Saves time and minimizes errors with automated workflows.
Straightforward Licensing: Offers clear and simple licensing options.
Commendable Technical Support: Provides reliable customer support and assistance.

What benefits or ROI should users look for?

Reduced Human Errors: Automation lowers the chance of mistakes in repetitive tasks.
Time Savings: Efficient scheduling and automation allow for quicker task completion.
Improved Process Management: Enhanced organization and visualization of workflows.
Dependable Support: Access to reliable technical assistance when needed.

Rocket Zena sees implementations in industries requiring robust task scheduling and automation such as finance for managing payroll and database backups, healthcare for handling ETL operations and workflow organization, and IT for running scripts and managing batch jobs. Adaptation to industry-specific needs showcases its versatility, although users seek improvements in scheduling mapping, UI navigation, and desire cloud availability.

Rocket Software

Sample Customers

CARFAX, Tampa General Hospital, Navistar, Amadeus, Raymond James, Railinc

Fraternidad Muprespa

Buyer's Guide

Control-M vs. Rocket Zena

June 2025

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