We performed a comparison between Control-M and VisualCron based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Managed File Transfer (MFT) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."We're also starting to use its Self Service and Solution Manager. My team in the data center and some of the development team use the Self Service. Developers are using the Self Service for upon-request jobs for their testing. They used to have to go through us to schedule testing and now they can just go on and kick it off all they want. They have also really appreciated that they have access to view and/or submit jobs."
"Often times there are criteria that cannot be determined by the system, which allows a human to make the determination and use the Self-Service Solution Manager to trigger a job."
"File Watcher can run jobs when files are made available in a folder."
"The biggest example in which OpCon has improved my organization is that we have to download and process files from the federal reserve several times a day. If we don't do it in a certain timeframe, we can be penalized. It's the fact that we can download these files, process them, get our accounting teams the information they need to work the exceptions that is one of the most important roles."
"Reliability is always important, and the reliability of the system is outstanding."
"Last year, we added a second environment and the OpCon Deploy product. This has allowed us to build a testing environment. This has been a great addition for us as we can work through our workflows without disrupting our production environment."
"There's also a self-service solution manager... that allows us to enable staff to run complex automation tasks by clicking a button and entering some information. They don't have to have access to the OpCon environment to kick off those kinds of events."
"It seems like it would scale well."
"It is an enterprise tool that integrates with all the applications in our organization. It has made our life easier because we don't need to wake up at midnight and do monitoring, etc. It does everything. It also sends precautionary alerts. If a job or activity is running for more than the specified time, it alerts the application team. So, our teams do not need to sit in front of a laptop or any open application to watch the jobs. They can do their other regular activities while Control-M takes care of all the jobs. It notifies them when there is job completion, delay, and error."
"The scheduling and management were really good. Monitoring was also better. It had a good visual presentation. It showed me charts and all such things. It was really good on that side."
"It provides a unified view where you can orchestrate and monitor all your application workloads and data pipelines. That's very important because with cloud, software as a service, edge computing, traditional data center, and legacy apps, there are all these environments. If you don't have that single pane of glass or that one place to look at, you're going to invest a lot of time and resources into tracking things down when they go wrong."
"BIM is helpful because we do not miss any SLAs, as we get to know the issue well in advance. It is the topmost service that has helped us provide better solutions for the business."
"Before Control-M, we didn't have a centralized view and could not view what happened in the past to determine what will happen in the future. The Gantt view that we have in Control-M is like a project view. It is nice because we sometimes have some application maintenance that we need to do. So, in a single console, we can hold the jobs for the next hour or two. We can release that job when it is finished. This is a really nice feature that we didn't have before. It is something really simple, but we didn't previously have a console where we could say, "For the next two hours, what are the jobs that we will run? And, hold these jobs not to run." This is really important."
"The initial setup is largely straightforward."
"Our ability to integrate with many different solutions has been invaluable. The new approach of the automation API and jobs-as-code is also valuable."
"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."
"What I found most beneficial from VisualCron is that you can directly connect it with different databases, user accounts, and credentials. You can run queries from one machine to another using the credentials, unlike PowerShell, that's run by the machine itself. With VisualCron, you can directly ask other machines and run requests through user credentials. Suppose you have an AWS or Azure environment. In that case, you can maintain the connection between on-premises and cloud-based machines, which is the type of setup in the organization I'm working for. You can directly call some of the services via VisualCron on your local on-premises machine, and I found that an excellent feature of the tool."
"What I like about VisualCron is that like its name, it's a very visual tool. In my previous company, there were a lot of scripts for all kinds of services, and through VisualCron, you get to group all flows and get a nice visual overview. VisualCron also has an alerting feature, so you receive alerts from it. VisualCron makes everything clearer and easier to maintain. Every other solution that I was looking for almost always needed a programmer, but with VisualCron, you can do what you need to do without programming skills, so this is another valuable feature of the tool."
"We don't have to do any coding. We just plug and play and it works."
"The only downside to OpCon is that its features can be complicated and really must be taught. Most of our users don't have training beyond the free Basic Training that SMA provides, so for fresh eyes, it is kind of difficult to understand some of the language used."
"The products are extremely powerful and capable. Anytime you have such capability, the programming/configuration that goes into making it work can be complicated."
"More functionality within self-service would be greatly appreciated."
"Licensing would be the first part I would overhaul. Each time a new licensing paradigm comes out, more features are removed and costs are added. They "add" features that are rarely used and increase charges for the number of jobs run. I'm sure someone in finance got a raise for their brilliance but the end-users won't thank them one bit. Expect price hikes and threats when you hold them to account at every opportunity."
"Upgrading to newer versions remains complex."
"Of course they have a RESTful API within OpCon, but they have that new web services agent that we installed because we have some SOAP APIs and we had to interact with SMA to get things running. Our developers did do some tweaks, but we have now been able to get some test jobs running, and understand how the workflow goes back and forth."
"The logs are a little daunting to look at the first few times, however, as you begin to understand what you're looking at, it becomes easier."
"I would like to see OpCon being accessible using a mobile app."
"Some of the documentation could use some improvement, however, it gets you from point A to point B pretty quickly to get the solution in place."
"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."
"The documentation could be improved, and I'd also like to see automatic upgrades."
"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."
"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."
"The stability could be improved. I ran into an issue with a recent Control-M patch. The environment would become unstable if security ports were scanned. This is an area they need to improve on, but ultimately it's a relatively small improvement."
"Some of the features are not available. We were about to deploy the REST API, but we had some challenges. We had to use a third-party application. So, it should be improved in terms of integrating REST API jobs. That was something that was lacking. The customer was not that happy in terms of getting the desired output. So, we had to use a third-party application called Hangfire. We would like to have more videos on REST API integration, and we would like to have easy integration with the Control-M application through the REST API."
"An issue we have run into in our lower environments is that Control-M can log you out frequently."
"I want to improve the UI in VisualCron, as it's not as user-friendly, particularly when setting up the task scheduler. If you're familiar with the tool, then no problem, but if not, you'll have a problem typing text because sometimes, the cursor points to other places, so there's an issue with text box alignment in VisualCron. That was painful for me when I was just a VisualCron novice, but when you become used to it, there won't be a problem."
"An area for improvement in VisualCron is its cluttered interface. It isn't always easy to find all functionalities, so what VisualCron needs is a user interface expert who can improve the interface. There's a learning curve in terms of finding what you need from the interface of VisualCron. The technical support for VisualCron also needs improvement in terms of response time. Currently, there's no live support or hotline you can call to get quick answers, so this is what I'd like to see in the next version of VisualCron. A less cluttered and more streamlined interface, where you don't need to hunt for some of the features, is also what I'd like to see in the next VisualCron update."
"The only problem I face when I use the tool is that it doesn't contain much documentation or it doesn't have many video tutorials on its features."
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Control-M is ranked 1st in Managed File Transfer (MFT) with 50 reviews while VisualCron is ranked 10th in Managed File Transfer (MFT) with 3 reviews. Control-M is rated 8.8, while VisualCron is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Control-M writes "Allows us to integrate file transfers more readily, resolve issues quickly, and orchestrate a diverse landscape of vendor products". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VisualCron writes "Has many features and plugins but it's not easy to set up". Control-M is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, CA Workload Automation ESP, ASG-Zena and Micro Focus Operations Orchestration, whereas VisualCron is most compared with Microsoft Power Automate, UiPath, WinAutomation by Softomotive, ActiveBatch Workload Automation and AutoSys Workload Automation. See our Control-M vs. VisualCron report.
See our list of best Managed File Transfer (MFT) vendors and best Workload Automation vendors.
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