Control-M vs Stonebranch comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 11, 2023

We performed a comparison between Control-M and Stonebranch Universal Automation Center based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

Features: Control-M offers a range of valuable capabilities such as Managed File Transfer, credentials vault, integration capabilities, Role-Based Administration, file transfer integration, collaboration, scheduling, ease of configuration, web interface, reporting, workload archiving, and forecasting. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center is commended for its strong performance, graphical representation, intuitive interface, job dependencies, rerun function, GUI, task monitor, stability, scalability, and reliable technical support.

Control-M could improve its microservices and API integration, fix bugs in the web interface, develop a lighter web version, enhance reporting capabilities, and improve support and documentation. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could benefit from cloud availability, improved analytics, easier task monitoring, and a mobile app for job hour calculation. Collaborating with the vendor for future releases would also be helpful.

Service and Support: Control-M's customer service has received mixed feedback, with some customers commending the prompt and knowledgeable support team. However, others believe there is room for improvement. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center's customer service has garnered high praise. Users describe support as very good and always available to help.

Ease of Deployment: Control-M's initial setup was simple and aided by useful guides and videos. Upgrades were seamless and caused minimal disruption. While customization and migration posed some challenges, Control-M proved adaptable and offered assistance. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center's setup was rated as mediocre in terms of ease. The infrastructure's complexity led to complications and necessitated the relocation of certain components.

Pricing: The opinions on setup cost for Control-M vary, with some users expressing concern about the expense associated with hardware and licensing for each job. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center is seen as a more cost-effective option compared to its competitors, leading to its popularity among companies.

ROI: Control-M has proven to be more cost-effective than Stonebranch Universal Automation Center, resulting in improved productivity, decreased downtime, and streamlined processes.

Comparison Results: Control-M is highly preferred over Stonebranch Universal Automation Center. Users appreciate Control-M for its user-friendly setup process, stability, easy maintenance, and smooth upgrades. They find its Managed File Transfer, credentials vault, integration capabilities, role-based administration, and dashboard collaboration features to be valuable.

To learn more, read our detailed Control-M vs. Stonebranch Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Ability to handle files remotely through the advanced file transfer feature.""We use Control-M for maintenance on our Oracle and SQL Server databases. It automates maintenance on packages, including standard procedures on the databases themselves, snapshots, checking integrity, verifying the RDBMS of the databases, etc. It ensures they aren't clogged and that they are running smoothly and that there aren't any jobs stuck, eating up the performance of the server or any of the CPU cores.""My organization has been able to script scheduled jobs in Control-M to potentially replace legacy products that are at end of life or end of service. The previous backup applications that were being used for specific files, folders, or applications were no longer being supported, therefore being able to use Control-M to replace that has been very valuable.""It is very stable. We hardly get calls in respect to issues on Control-M, particularly on version 9.0.19.""The multiple scheduling options allow you to do anything you want, whenever you want, and however you want. You can easily be in control when things happen.""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.""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.""Automation of the batch jobs is the most valuable feature."

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"The most valuable feature is the reliability of the agents, because we need them accessible and we need to run stuff. The agent technology and compatibility are top-notch.""When it comes to agent technology and compatibility with other vendors, from a platform perspective it was the one vendor that fit all the platforms that we have, from your old platforms - mainframe, NSK, IBM i - to the new ones, going into cloud and container""We like that it has GUI and is not just a command line.""The Universal Agent is the most valuable feature. Being agent-based and being able to go across multiple technology stacks, which is what our workflows do, Stonebranch gives us the ability to bridge those disparate technologies. It enables us to remove the dependency-gap with the agent so we know the status of the workflow at each step.""The support is good from Stonebranch Universal Automation Center.""I like the dashboard and the various workflows.""The features are upgraded, and every six months they're releasing patches.""The tasks are incredibly capable, and as long as you name them with a nice, uniform naming convention, they are very useful. You can create some interesting workflows through various machines, or you can just have it kick off single tasks. All in all, I really like the Universal Task. You can do some mutually exclusive stuff, such as an "A not B" kind of thing. It has a lot of capabilities behind the scenes."

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Cons
"We have some plug-ins like BOBJ, and we need a little improvement there. Other than that, it has been pretty good. I haven't seen any issues.""The reporting tool still needs a lot of improvement. It was supposed to get better with the upgrade, and it really didn't get better. It needs help, because it's such a useful thing to have. It needs to be more powerful and easier to use.""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.""The reporting functionality needs a lot of work. We have faced problems with different versions where we run the right report, but it gives us blank entries. Then, when we run the same report again, it gives the correct data.""A Control-M on-prem license is based on the number of jobs, which is the number of tasks a particular customer wants to have. These tasks have to be run within 24 hours window. For example, if you have a license for 100 jobs, you can run a maximum of 100 jobs in a 24-hour window. If your operations could not run 10 jobs, and they ran only 90 jobs, they just carry over to the next day, but the next day, they will have 110 jobs. Control-M asks you to buy those 10 more licenses because you were out of compliance in terms of the number of licenses. This is something that needs to be indicated in Control-M GUI so that customers know the number of licenses they're going to use in this time window. Their support and documentation should be improved. I am not that satisfied with their customer support. Sometimes, they don't have the answers. Their documentation is very poor. It is not well written, and it is not in a very logical manner. You can use it on Unix, Linux, Windows, and AIX, but it needs some improvement on iSeries. It needs a built-in mechanism inside the system to give you an option to restore from the last point of failure. If a process crashes, the Control-M needs to have a mechanism in iSeries where the process can be restored from the last point of failure.""I would like to have a web version of Control-M to replace the client. Currently, our support and jobs-creation teams are using the client and that needs to be installed on a PC. It's very heavy, consuming a lot of resources compared to the web portal. I know that they're trying to improve the client with the latest version, but for me, there hasn't been enough improvement yet.""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.""A lot of the areas of improvement revolve around Automation API because that area is constantly evolving. It is constantly changing, and it is constantly being updated. There are some bugs that are introduced from one version to the next. So, the regression testing doesn't seem to capture some of the bugs that have been fixed in prior versions, and those bugs are then reintroduced in later versions."

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"There is room for improvement with its connectivity with the Microsoft SRS system. It is very weak. They keep telling us it works with it, and technically it does, but it does not provide a lot of visibility. We have lost a lot of visibility migrating to Stonebranch, compared with just running tasks on the SRS server. That's really about the only thing that is a sore point for us.""It can be hard to manage the task monitor.""Occasionally, we have an agent that doesn't come back up after patching. That doesn't happen very often... It's really just a restart of the agent and it comes back up. But that might be one thing that could be improved.""Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics.""The Universal Controller is decent for the money it costs... It needs some work to have full features, compared to other products that are out there, specifically IBM's Workload Scheduler.""One hiccup we've had is due to the fact that we have other internal scheduling tools. We're able to talk to them, but we have trouble with some of the networking between them, so we're still trying to work out the kinks there.""I have a request regarding our agent on the mainframe. It may time out when communicating to the Universal Controller, when the mainframe is extremely busy. That can cause a task which is running at that time to not see the results of the job that ran on the mainframe. It happens sporadically during times of really busy CPU usage. We're expecting that enhancement from them in the fourth quarter.""It would be ideal if they had the exact same features as the CA Workload Automation DE series. It would be helpful to have calendaring options."

More Stonebranch 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 →

  • "When we reviewed this solution against other vendors, Stonebranch blew everybody out of the water in terms of cost."
  • "Outside of licensing fees, there aren't any other costs."
  • "I don't have pricing information, but I do know it's cheaper than our old legacy system. Other than the standard licensing fees there are no additional costs."
  • "We're transaction-based, as far as our licensing goes. We have 50,000 transactions a month and our licensing cost is $55,000 a year..."
  • "The price of the solution is at a medium level compared to the competition."
  • "Stonebranch is cheaper than Control-M, so many companies are using Stonebranch."
  • More Stonebranch 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:We like that it has GUI and is not just a command line.
    Top Answer:The pricing is good. I would rate it eight out of ten. The pricing is similar to AutoSys. It's lower than Redwood, which was on the higher side in terms of pricing.
    Top Answer:It can be hard to manage the task monitor. We are still working with the vendor, and we are trying to make the changes as per our requirements. We are asking them to build some new solutions so they… more »
    Ranking
    1st
    out of 49 in Workload Automation
    Views
    29,467
    Comparisons
    10,507
    Reviews
    20
    Average Words per Review
    1,502
    Rating
    9.1
    16th
    out of 49 in Workload Automation
    Views
    3,058
    Comparisons
    1,288
    Reviews
    4
    Average Words per Review
    499
    Rating
    7.5
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Control M
    Stonebranch Universal Automation Center
    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

    The Stonebranch Workload Automation solution, part of our Universal Automation Center platform, helps organizations automate, manage, and orchestrate their IT processes - across hybrid IT environments. 


    1. Workflow Orchestration and Automation: Holistically control scripts, jobs, tasks, and IT processes running across your on-prem, hybrid cloud, and/or multi-cloud environments.

    2. Real-Time Automation: With our event-driven automation technology, it is now possible to achieve real-time automation across your entire hybrid IT environment.

    3. Self-Service Automation: With a focus on ease-of-use, you can empower your workforce with self-service automation using member roles and permissions.

    4. BI & Analytics: Centralize operational control and insight with proactive monitoring, reporting, and alerts

    Product Features:

    - Drag-and-drop Workflow Creation: You don’t have to be a developer to create automation. Custom scripting is a thing of the past. Easily create workflows with an intuitive drag-and-drop user interface.

    - DevOps enabled: Align priorities between IT Ops and DevOps with Jobs-as-Code, Infrastructure-as-Code, and bundle-and-promote features.

    - Limitless 3rd Party Integrations: Integrate into any platform or application from the mainframe to the cloud. Use pre-packaged integrations, build your own, or download integration blueprints from the community-driven opensource marketplace.

    - Available on-premises or as a SaaS-based deployment, the UAC is a modern platform built to scale with your business.

    Sample Customers
    CARFAX, Tampa General Hospital, Navistar, Amadeus, Raymond James, Railinc
    Nissan, Coop, United Supermarkets, Groupon, CSC, Orbitz, Johnson & Johnson, BMW, Qantas.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm34%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Retailer9%
    Healthcare Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm29%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Insurance Company7%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm36%
    Insurance Company12%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Manufacturing Company12%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm26%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Insurance Company8%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business11%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise80%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business15%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise76%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business4%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise79%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business16%
    Midsize Enterprise10%
    Large Enterprise74%
    Buyer's Guide
    Control-M vs. Stonebranch
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Control-M vs. Stonebranch and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Control-M is ranked 1st in Workload Automation with 109 reviews while Stonebranch is ranked 16th in Workload Automation with 26 reviews. Control-M is rated 8.8, while Stonebranch is rated 8.8. 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 Stonebranch writes "Allowed us to develop workflows without having to train and develop very specialized skillsets". Control-M is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Rocket Zena, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence and Tidal by Redwood, whereas Stonebranch is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence, IBM Workload Automation and Automic Workload Automation. See our Control-M vs. Stonebranch report.

    See our list of best Workload Automation vendors.

    We monitor all Workload 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.