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 8.4, while Rocket Software is ranked #20. BMC holds a 18.9% mindshare in WA, compared to Rocket Software’s 2.5% 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 138 Control-M reviews

19,859 Views
14,894 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Rocket Zena

Read 8 Rocket Zena reviews

1,347 Views
1,347 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Control-M

Rocket Zena

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 21, 2025

Control-M and Rocket Zena are leading competitors in the job scheduling and workload automation market. While both have strong offerings, Rocket Zena distinguishes itself with comprehensive features that many find justify its cost.

Features: Control-M provides strong workload automation, integrated predictive analytics, and extensive cloud support. Its capabilities make it versatile for a variety of enterprise needs. Rocket Zena excels with solid cross-platform orchestration, a flexible API, and effective real-time monitoring. Its cross-platform orchestration and API flexibility are particularly noteworthy and set it apart from competitors.

Room for Improvement: Control-M could enhance user accessibility by simplifying its complex setup process and offering more intuitive user experiences. Improving support for smaller businesses could also increase its market presence. Rocket Zena might benefit from expanding its integration offerings to cover additional third-party services and tools. Addressing its higher cost and providing more detailed deployment documentation could also enhance user satisfaction.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Control-M offers streamlined deployment with dedicated support channels, ensuring a smooth implementation process and reliable customer support, beneficial for large enterprises. Rocket Zena offers a simple deployment experience thanks to its intuitive tools, allowing rapid implementation with minimal technical complexity. Its ease of use appeals to businesses of varying sizes looking for agility and quick adaptation.

Pricing and ROI: Control-M may involve a higher initial setup cost but delivers solid long-term ROI through structured support. It is often preferred by larger operations due to its comprehensive system support. Rocket Zena provides a lower entry cost and focuses on delivering immediate value through scalable solutions and efficient automation, making it attractive for a range of implementations.

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

Buyer's Guide

Control-M vs. Rocket Zena

September 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

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

138

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 October 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of Control-M is 18.9%, down from 26.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rocket Zena is 2.5%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Workload Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Control-M	18.9%
Rocket Zena	2.5%
Other	78.6%

Workload Automation

Featured Reviews

Mark_Francome

Senior System Specialist at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

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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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Control-M is infinitely scalable. We only need to add agents. BMC will take care of it if you need anything on the SaaS side, but we can handle the rest using our agent architecture."

"In the client, it provides a unified view for me. I can alter the view that I want to see jobs and conditions. This is nice to have. The fact that you can see everything in one space is very important, especially these days where everything is about data and monitoring as well as because we are working from home on a global basis. So, I can monitor jobs in real-time, along with any failures or anything that might be stuck. The real-time monitoring and the ability to see everything in one place is important for us because we operate 24/7."

"We can tie together all the workloads across the estate and make the whole process reactive to events."

"Control-M provides us with a unified view, where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all our application workflows and data pipelines. It also provides the ability to filter. So, if I don't want to see everything, I can also narrow it down or open ViewPoint. This is very important since we have thousands of jobs to monitor. If we did not have this ability, it would be very difficult to see what is going on."

"In our bank, all new applications need to be implemented with Control-M. We try to look for the best way to establish communication between both products. One of the new features for us is Application Integrator. It is a very interesting feature because it lets us integrate with those applications that are not included in Control-M. By using Application Integrator, we can easily integrate new technologies. With the help of Application Integrator, we recently integrated with Blue Prism, which is a robotic product. We could integrate such processes into Control-M. Now, we are working with Ansible, and we are putting Ansible automated processes into Control-M."

"The initial setup is largely straightforward."

"The best feature is that we can automate everything. Moreover, we can access all the features through one dashboard, which is beneficial."

"It can do anything that I need. We do real-time jobs. We also do jobs that have to run at certain times. I have not been presented with a scheduling need that I was not able to do. It is very flexible and dynamic."

More Control-M pros

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

Cons

"Control-M could be more user-friendly, and while it is user-friendly now, it can be improved to be more intuitive."

"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."

"In my previous project, I experienced lagging with refresh times of six to seven seconds."

"A lot of businesses are using ServiceNow, which is another tool. I would like there to be some integration with ServiceNow or other third-party tools as well as have easily available integrations. Right now, we need to write scripts. Apart from that, if there were some integrations with an ITSM tool, then that would be good. Because at the end of the day, most of our clients are using different ITSM tools. I know that BMC Remedy is easy to integrate with Control-M. However, if there was availability for Jira as well as other ITSM and DevOps tools, that would be a good improvement."

"There is no superiority when compared with other products. All products provide the same functionality."

"The biggest improvement they could have is better QA testing before releases come out the door."

"We've also had a few database bugs within our organization. I think we are migrating to OpenJDK rather than just regular Java and that has since shown some issues with our Control-M instance, timing out and causing our jobs to stop running. We are still working with BMC to fine-tune that and get that resolved."

"I would like to see more auditing capabilities. Right now, it has the basics and I've been trying to set those up to work with what our auditors are looking for."

More Control-M cons

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The documentation has room for improvement."

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

"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."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You're going to spend a lot of money upfront, but the benefits you're going to get out of it are going to quickly pay for it."

"The pricing of Control-M is reasonable."

"The price is right because of the licensing schema, which is based on nodes and processes. You purchase what you use, no more and no less, and you can grow with time."

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

"Its cost is a little bit higher than other solutions such as AutoSys or DAC. For the demo, there were some plans, such as start plan, scale plan, etc. Pricing was based on the plan."

"This product saves hours in a day based on my experience working here versus other companies with manually operations."

"The license model is based on the number of jobs we run on the SaaS application or the number of executions, unlike the on-premise model options. If we have a handful of jobs, it's always good to consider Control-M, but if it's a large number of jobs, Control-M might not be a great option."

"This is an expensive product compared to other solutions, although I think that it is a good one. We are in a good position with licensing, as we can run 10,000 jobs."

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

27%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

29%

Insurance Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	26
Midsize Enterprise	13
Large Enterprise	114

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Large Enterprise	6

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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

Control-M is expensive and not cheap at all.

See all answers

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

Comparisons

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Control-M

Compared 12% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Control-M

Compared 8% of the time

Automic Automation vs Control-M

Compared 7% of the time

IBM Workload Automation vs Control-M

Compared 5% of the time

ESP Workload Automation Intelligence vs Control-M

Compared 4% of the time

More Control-M Competitors

IBM Workload Automation vs Rocket Zena

Compared 16% of the time

Rocket Zeke vs Rocket Zena

Compared 13% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Rocket Zena

Compared 6% of the time

ActiveBatch by Redwood vs Rocket Zena

Compared 6% of the time

JAMS vs Rocket Zena

Compared 5% of the time

More Rocket Zena Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Control-M

October 2025

Download Control-M product report

Buyer's Guide

Rocket Zena

October 2025

Download Rocket Zena product report

Also Known As

Control M

ASG-Zena

Interactive Demo

BMC

Demo not available

Rocket Software

Overview

Control-M by BMC is engineered to manage hybrid cloud workflows, offering orchestration capabilities starting at $29,000 annually. Aimed at helping growing teams, it efficiently supports cross-environment scheduling and automation needs.

Control-M offers robust cross-platform scheduling, automation, and integration with applications such as SAP and Informatica. Users appreciate its ease of use with a graphical interface, centralized management, and monitoring capabilities. Advanced features, including Managed File Transfer, automated error handling, and real-time alerts, enhance productivity. The ability to unify workflows and support diverse environments makes Control-M a trusted tool in many sectors. While improvements in reporting flexibility and API integration with tools like ServiceNow are needed, addressing performance issues during upgrades could enhance its value. Offering improved support for new technologies and cloud environments is beneficial, with cost-effectiveness being a consideration.

What are the key features of Control-M?

Cross-Platform Scheduling: Facilitates seamless task management across various OS environments.
Automation: Provides efficient workflow automation for complex processes.
Third-Party Integration: Ensures smooth integration with applications like SAP and Informatica.
Graphical Interface: Simplifies job management and monitoring with user-friendly design.
Managed File Transfer: Enhances data transfer processes with structured handling.
Real-Time Alerts: Offers notifications for immediate response to workflow issues.

What benefits should organizations expect from Control-M?

Increased Efficiency: Streamlines operations and reduces manual workload.
Enhanced Productivity: Automation and monitoring features boost operational output.
Improved Compliance: Supports SLA achievement and regulatory requirements.
Operational Agility: Provides flexible and adaptable task management across platforms.

Control-M is leveraged in industries like finance for enterprise scheduling and data management, supporting mainframe, Linux, Unix, Windows, and cloud platforms. It contributes to workflow orchestration and workload automation, improving operational efficiency and enhancing IT infrastructure across those environments.

BMC

Rocket Zena offers scheduling and dependency mapping, intuitive interface, and containerized deployment. It simplifies workflow automation, enhancing efficiency across platforms.

Rocket Zena's strengths lie in its scheduling capabilities, graphical interface, and efficient deployment. It supports users in task management with cross-platform scheduling, streamlining repetitive tasks through automation. The web-based client facilitates process visualization and workflow management, while the notification system enhances task handling. Users can manage mainframe, Linux, and Windows environments while integrating with SAP and Oracle, ensuring comprehensive automation and efficient job execution.

What are the key features of Rocket Zena?

Scheduling and Dependency Mapping: Manages tasks efficiently with a graphical interface.
Containerized Deployment: Simplifies deployment and improves efficiency.
FTP Capabilities: Facilitates secure file transfers and backups.
Web-based Client and Whiteboard: Enhances process visualization and control.
Cross-Platform Scheduling: Automates repetitive tasks, reducing manual intervention.

What benefits and ROI should users expect?

Enhanced Efficiency: Automates complex tasks, freeing time for value-added work.
Improved Accuracy: Minimizes manual errors with reliable automation.
Streamlined Task Management: Simplifies workflow with intuitive notification systems.
Easy Integration: Supports SAP, Oracle, and other enterprise platforms.

In industries like finance and manufacturing, Rocket Zena plays a vital role in scheduling batch jobs and automating file transfers. It helps adapt task scheduling to business calendars and integrate with existing platforms, ensuring a smooth workflow that meets business objectives.

Rocket Software

Sample Customers

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

Fraternidad Muprespa

Buyer's Guide

Control-M vs. Rocket Zena

September 2025

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