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Control-M vs Temporal comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 2025

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
7.1
Control-M enhances automation, reduces manual tasks, cuts costs, and accelerates ROI, strengthening efficiency and performance in operations management.
Sentiment score
6.0
Temporal's cost-effectiveness reduces maintenance costs, essential for high-reliability needs, automating processes and saving time and expenses.
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.
The ROI is apparent in terms of business case automation; previously, a bunch of people filled in data in NetSuite or managed stocks between warehouses and Amazon, but now everything is automated, saving time.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.4
Control-M support is praised for responsiveness, knowledgeable staff, and valuable resources, despite occasional ticket initiation challenges.
Sentiment score
6.7
Temporal service excels through active forums and Slack, despite time zone delays; users praise its responsive 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.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Control-M scales seamlessly for enterprises, though some users encounter challenges with costs and cloud integration limitations.
Sentiment score
7.1
Temporal excels in scalability, managing numerous workflows while requiring robust infrastructure like Cassandra and Kubernetes for optimal performance.
It can absorb more workload wherever needed.
As the workload on Control-M increases, its scalability is much higher.
I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Control-M is praised for 99.9% reliability, quick issue resolution, and stable cross-platform performance, with minor MySQL concerns.
Sentiment score
6.7
Users find Temporal stable with minor SDK challenges, suggesting better documentation and diagnostics for enhanced stability perceptions.
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.
 

Room For Improvement

Control-M users seek better reporting, BI tool integration, lower costs, improved automation, web interface, API, and analytics features.
Improving Temporal's user-friendliness, documentation, visualization, features, and support would enhance usability for beginners and non-technical users.
They could provide more documentation and tutorials to make the initial setup easier to understand.
There should be an automation system for developers to set it up more easily and quickly.
What they've done about scheduling, other people are still trying to figure out.
 

Setup Cost

Control-M's pricing may be high for smaller firms, but enterprise buyers appreciate its robust features and flexible licensing models.
Temporal provides cost-effective, flexible pricing with open-source tools, offering savings over competitors, especially for self-hosted deployments.
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.
Pricing is generally affordable, though some features cost a bit more.
 

Valuable Features

Control-M provides automation, robust scheduling, and integration, enhancing workflow management and efficiency with user-friendly tools and analytics.
Temporal streamlines workflow management with robust automation, fault tolerance, language integration, and easy deployment via Kubernetes and Docker Compose.
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 deployment process is quite straightforward as it provides both Kubernetes and Docker Compose versions, allowing us to run it in ECS containers.
 

Categories and Ranking

Control-M
Ranking in Process Automation
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
127
Ranking in other categories
Managed File Transfer (MFT) (3rd), Workload Automation (1st)
Temporal
Ranking in Process Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Process Automation category, the mindshare of Control-M is 4.6%, up from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Temporal is 7.5%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Process Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Control-M4.6%
Temporal7.5%
Other87.9%
Process Automation
 

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.
AbhishekDash - PeerSpot reviewer
Orchestrates infrastructure tasks like deployment, deletion, and management
Temporal focus on developers rather than business users. In contrast to older workflow orchestration engines like Camunda, which are more business-oriented and strongly emphasize UI and workflow authoring, Temporal is geared toward developers. It provides extensive capabilities for building complex workflows. A standout feature of Temporal is its handling of long-running workflows, a significant advantage over many other solutions. Temporal excels in managing distributed transactions and application state durability, especially in microservice environments where transactions might fail due to network issues. Temporal simplifies these challenges by managing retries, fail-safes, and circuit breakers. As a result, developers don't need to implement these features manually; Temporal handles them implicitly, though it also allows for tuning based on specific needs.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
15%
Retailer
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise108
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise6
 

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?
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Temporal?
In terms of pricing, Camunda is indeed costlier than Temporal. The cloud deployment costs differ, and while Camunda 7 can be cheaper due to its integrated setup, comparing latest versions between T...
What needs improvement with Temporal?
The only area for improvement in Temporal is the UI. I know it is a non-UI first product, but comparing Camunda versus Temporal UI, there is a difference. Moreover, n8n, being a no-code platform, i...
What is your primary use case for Temporal?
The main purposes for using Temporal are automation flows, especially financial automations and supply chain automations. Our company name is SR, we are a digital-first CPG brand making company, ma...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Control M
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CARFAX, Tampa General Hospital, Navistar, Amadeus, Raymond James, Railinc
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Control-M vs. Temporal and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
866,300 professionals have used our research since 2012.