Control-M vs Tidal by Redwood comparison

BMC and Tidal Software by Redwood are both solutions in the Workload Automation category. BMC is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.8, while Tidal Software by Redwood is ranked #10 with an average rating of 9.3. BMC holds a 21.8% mindshare in WA, compared to Tidal Software by Redwood’s 3.9% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of BMC users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Tidal Software by Redwood users who would recommend it.

Control-M

Read 121 Control-M reviews

18,291 Views
7,440 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Tidal by Redwood

Read 37 Tidal by Redwood reviews

2,525 Views
1,207 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Control-M

Tidal by Redwood

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

Control-M and Tidal by Redwood are competitors in the enterprise workload automation category. Control-M has an advantage in broad integration capabilities and comprehensive automation features, while Tidal by Redwood stands out for its flexible permissions and segmentation of user roles.

Features: Control-M provides extensive integration options such as BPI, DB integrator, and AFT file transfer, enabling automation across various workflows. Its automation and troubleshooting capabilities make it valuable in industries like banking. Tidal by Redwood offers flexible user permissions, intuitive role segmentation, and comprehensive enterprise features, preventing unauthorized access efficiently.

Room for Improvement: Control-M could boost its analytical capabilities by incorporating arithmetic operations and enhance reporting features for better user customization. Tidal by Redwood needs improvement in reporting and UI intuitiveness to simplify integration and navigation. Enhancing drill-down functionality and simplifying initial setup would optimize its efficiency.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Control-M is praised for supporting various environments, including on-premises and cloud, with strong technical support. Tidal by Redwood boasts a streamlined licensing model favored by users for clarity and transparency, focused on on-premises deployments.

Pricing and ROI: Control-M is perceived as costly due to its extensive capabilities, with pricing based on task counts, offering significant ROI through reduced error rates. Tidal by Redwood provides a more predictable, transparent cost structure, often more affordable, with the ability to grow scalability through enterprise contract benefits like unrestricted agent additions.

To learn more, read our detailed Control-M vs. Tidal by Redwood Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Control-M vs. Tidal by Redwood

April 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

121

Ranking in other categories

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

Tidal by Redwood

Ranking in Workload Automation

10th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of Control-M is 21.8%, down from 26.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tidal by Redwood is 3.9%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Workload Automation

Featured Reviews

Pedro Fuentes

System Engineer at Community Loans of America, Inc.

Cost-effective, excellent support, and centralized access and control

They have a department that handles requests for enhancements. I talked to Control-M guys back in October or November when they had a gathering here in Atlanta. We talked about not being able to go back in history in Helix Control-M for more than two weeks. We submitted a request for enhancement. They told us that they are working on it, and they are thinking of expanding that to 30 days. We would like to see it expand to 90 days, but they are working on it. In Control-M, we were able to go back 180 days, but that was on-prem. The storage of that data was on our own servers. We know that storage is money, and we do not expect them to store that much of the data, but at least 30 to 60 days seem proper.

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Steve Mikula

IT Scheduling Manager at Paychex, Inc.

Very reliable processing engine, and scheduling is flawless—crucial elements in our financial transaction processing

Because we've been on it for 20 years, it's pretty easy for us to automate jobs with Tidal at this point. It has become second nature. It's pretty simplistic to set up and get going, although there are different levels of complexity you can have within the product. It depends on how simple you want to keep it. If you just keep it: Job A, Job B, Job C, Job D, that becomes pretty simple. But when you start integrating some complex calendars that use sub-calendars—and you can go three, four, or five deep to set up schedules—it becomes more complicated. The beauty of it is you can go as deep as you need to. We can get really complex or we can keep it simple. We have some use cases for both scenarios. The thing that I like the most is the reliability of the engine. The actual scheduling part of the product is pretty much flawless, but the stability of the product is what I find to be reassuring. We are a financial company, we move billions of dollars a day, and if we don't have our transactions processed in a timely manner we can be penalized and our clients can be penalized. It can have a serious financial impact.

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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 useful to automate all critical and non-critical processes. Using Control-M, we can automate application workflows as well as file transfers involved in application workflows. We can also use it to run batches related to applications. Automating these processes reduces the RTO and RPO, which helps in the case of failures. It also helps us to identify bottlenecks and take corrective measures."

"It is very stable. We hardly get calls in respect to issues on Control-M, particularly on version 9.0.19."

"I find Control-M for SAP and Control-M for Informatica good. You can connect to the Linux or Windows servers, and you can run multiple jobs."

"If a job fails, that development team is notified right away, which improves reliability. Previously, it was on the operators to notify the developers that their job failed, erred, or aborted. Now, it's all automated."

"Automation of the batch jobs is the most valuable feature."

"BIM is a good tool to monitor SLAs, and being a financial organization, this is a very good feature for us."

"The product has improved dramatically over the years; it offers a lot in terms of features and capabilities and integration with third-party tools. A wide range of models available with the product is critical in reducing manual and mundane work such as custom script writing. This saves significant amounts of time and, by association, money for the organization."

"The best part about this product is that it has a lot of features. Control-M doesn't limit us and we can use it for a lot of things."

More Control-M pros

"We had a number of different schedulers in this organization and we've been porting everything that was running out of these other, unrelated schedulers into this scheduler. That has afforded us the ability to set up direct dependencies between processes that couldn't talk to one another before. Over the 15 years, we've definitely gained a lot from that. What had been manual controls have become automated controls..."

"Tidal integrates with other third-party systems, which makes it easy to connect and exchange data."

"We use the solution for cross-platform and cross-application workloads. That's one of the core reasons we chose it. It's one of a few things in the industry that can be used for cross-platform integration."

"Tidal helps administrators and users to see the information that is relevant to them in that single pane of glass. They can see jobs running, they can see job history, and they can see job progression. If you look at alternatives like Airflow and clouds, you'd have to design your own UI to monitor the progress of the different jobs that you've created in Airflow. So Tidal is huge for us."

"We use the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads. That's the biggest use for us and that's the biggest advantage."

"The best feature of Tidal Workload Automation Software is its ease of integration with other systems, including ERP, CRM, and BI tools."

"The thing that I like the most is the reliability of the engine. The actual scheduling part of the product is pretty much flawless, but the stability of the product is what I find to be reassuring."

"It's the most efficient tool in doing repetitive tasks and saves a lot of time with minimum possibility of error."

More Tidal by Redwood pros

Cons

"Control-M is the number one leading product in the world. What they've done about scheduling, other people are still trying to figure out, so it's difficult for me to propose anything new. There is not so much AI at this point in time, but I guess it's coming. However, predictive analysis is built into it."

"But for some issues, BMC will suggest to upgrade to new version which will not be feasible to standards of the organisation. Hence some work around should be shown to run the business until new version was upgraded."

"Its installation can be better. Currently, we have to install it manually. The file transfer feature can also be improved. It is not very easy to transfer a file from business to business. In terms of new features, they can include new technologies. It can have API integration."

"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."

"While they have a very good reporting facility, the reports that I'm asked to produce, a lot of times aren't necessarily what we need."

"Finding documentation on the website can be a bit confusing."

"A developer sandbox could be very helpful to try out new features or experience them."

"We develop software. More frequently, we are working with microservices and APIs, using our integration tool, MuleSoft. While Control-M is really a good tool to integrate with other tools, it is important for them to continue improving their microservices and API."

More Control-M cons

"The product’s UI is outdated. They should work on this particular area."

"I'm still hoping with Explorer to be able to see end-to-end job streams. That's not really something that's easy to see today in the web client. However, I haven't worked with Explorer yet. One of the things that we have found frustrating is not being able to see an end-to-end job stream across multiple applications within Tidal. We use jobs for that right now, but I have high hopes that we'll be able to see that in Explorer."

"Some users have complained that the initial setup process is complicated and time-consuming, while others have suggested that the software could offer more freedom in customizing processes."

"When we patch to the next version, there is often a little thing that breaks. It has rarely been a big deal, but I always seem to have to follow up on one tiny issue. It would help if they had some better QA testing of their patches."

"The job failure alerts can be updated with more details for better troubleshooting."

"My complaint about their pricing model is that every year or every time technology changes or somebody has a new requirement, it usually means that I can schedule that with Tidal, but I would need another adapter. So, every time there is a change, I need a different adapter that I don't have. That's why it is harder to plan for Tidal growth because you have to buy a new adapter every time."

"The solution needs more advanced reporting and data visualization capabilities to enable deeper analysis of job performance and trends."

"There are several improvement points that our team has provided to the vendor."

More Tidal by Redwood cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"We have a license till 2024. We are good and satisfied with it."

"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."

"They are expensive. If we were a small company, it would be complicated because we have to have strong sales and operations to be able to afford a tool of this level. Being a large company, the cost-benefit is covered, but it is not within the level of cheap solutions."

"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."

"We are paying way more for Control-M than we've paid for any of our other scheduling tools."

"The annual licensing within BMC Control-M is on a per task basis. Three- and five-year contracts are also offered. The customer usually buys a bundle of tasks, e.g., 5,000 tasks, then my team configures Control-M for their usage."

"BMC's price is based on the number of jobs."

More Control-M pricing and cost advice

"This solution is a bit expensive in the current world where everybody is trying to cut down on certain things."

"We pay maintenance annually through Blue House of about $9,000. That's for our two environments: production and test."

"Our annual maintenance cost is competitive for what we have and what they do."

"The new prices that we've received seem reasonable and comparable to the marketplace."

"Their pricing seems very fair. It is more than the other solutions, but the functionality and the support are very much there. You pay for the job scheduler, and then they have certain things that are built into it, such as the FTP processes. If you then want to do JD Edwards jobs, you need an adapter. If you want to do SQL jobs, there is another adapter. Similarly, if you want to do Oracle jobs, there is an adapter. It is like there is the base and then there are the adapters for the jobs that you want to do, but it seems that's also how they pay for each of those adapters and keep them up to date."

"...it is a pretty affordable scheduler tool that lets us do a lot. You get a lot of bang for the buck... The licensing model is hugely flexible."

"We've been able to purchase more adapters because the cost of the product has been very reasonable."

"I have had no issues with the licensing."

More Tidal by Redwood pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

28%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

22%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Computer Software Company

10%

Insurance Company

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.

See all answers

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

It depends. It's packaged in such a way that you can buy the base model without all of the fancy stuff. You can try and keep your price similar to competitors. I guess it's natural throughout the w...

See all answers

What do you like most about Tidal Automation?

Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Tidal Automation?

The price is reasonable in terms of the product’s functionality.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Tidal Automation?

Initially, it is complicated to understand the functionalities as there is limited product documentation. The setup and configuration of the software is a bit complicated. Providing the training vi...

See all answers

Comparisons

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Control-M

Compared 16% of the time

Automic Automation vs Control-M

Compared 9% of the time

IBM Workload Automation vs Control-M

Compared 7% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Control-M

Compared 6% of the time

ServiceNow Orchestration vs Control-M

Compared 3% of the time

More Control-M Competitors

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 43% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 8% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 7% of the time

IBM Workload Automation vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 5% of the time

ActiveBatch by Redwood vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 5% of the time

More Tidal by Redwood Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Control-M

May 2025

Download Control-M product report

Buyer's Guide

Tidal by Redwood

April 2025

Download Tidal by Redwood product report

Also Known As

Control M

Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler

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

Tidal Software is a leading provider of enterprise workload automation solutions that orchestrate the execution of complex workflows across systems, applications and IT environments. With a comprehensive portfolio of products and services, Tidal optimizes mission-critical business processes, increases IT cost efficiencies and satisfies legal and regulatory compliance requirements. Hundreds of customers around the world count on Tidal for modernizing their workload automation and driving their digital transformation. Tidal Software is headquartered in Chicago with offices in Houston, London, Minsk, Belarus and Chennai, India. For more information, visit tidalsoftware.com.

Tidal Software by Redwood

Sample Customers

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

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Control-M vs. Tidal by Redwood

April 2025

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