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Control-M pros and cons

Vendor: BMC

4.3 out of 5

127 reviews
98% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Control-M delivers cross-platform support for integration and dependency management across operating systems, with advanced file transfer and automation features enhancing efficiency. It supports Amazon and Azure, enabling scalability. API integrations boost orchestration, but reporting and documentation need improvement. Scalability issues pose challenges in job-rich environments, and the installation process is complex. Licensing and feature costs are high, impacting affordability compared to other solutions.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Control-M supports cross-platform automation, enabling dependencies between diverse systems like Linux, Windows, and various hardware/software configurations.

It enhances enterprise batch automation, allowing 24/7 operations with minimal human intervention.

Control-M significantly speeds up processes and workload management, reducing reliance on manual efforts and increasing efficiency.

It integrates well with databases and supports advanced file transfer capabilities, making data manipulation seamless across different environments.

The orchestration and automation capabilities in Control-M reduce errors, improve productivity, and facilitate comprehensive CI/CD integrations.

CONS

Control-M reporting capabilities are limited, lacking robust features and customization options needed for comprehensive analysis.

Control-M's installation and setup process can be complex and labor-intensive, requiring attention to detail and significant customization.

Control-M's cost is notably high, posing a challenge for affordability and competitiveness in the market.

Control-M faces scalability challenges with increasing demands, particularly in on-premise setups, potentially reaching bottleneck limits.

Control-M licensing can be costly and restrictive, with the need to buy additional licenses to remain compliant with usage.

Control-M Pros review quotes

reviewer1657833

AVP - Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Feb 28, 2023

The File Transfer component is quite valuable. The integration with products such as Informatica and SAP are very valuable to us as well. Rather than having to build our own interface into those products, we can use the ones that come out of the box. The integration with databases is valuable as well. We use database jobs quite a bit.

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reviewer1631958

Maintenance Manager at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

Jul 21, 2021

If they have ad hoc requirements, then they can theoretically schedule their own file transfers with the Self Service. We are trying to push as much work back to the customers or developers that have that requirement, because they prefer to help themselves, if possible. We try empowering them and enabling them through Control-M, especially for file transfers, because it is a much broader base of the business then just with batch scheduling. Typically, with SAP batch scheduling, it would work with dedicated teams. With file transfers, the entire business is involved. There are business users, end users, etc. It definitely needs to be as simple as possible and as managed as well as possible. They need to manage it themselves, if possible, because our team is not growing but the number of customers, applications, and jobs are growing. We need to hand back some of the responsibility to the customer for them to resolve and action it.

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RS

Sr. Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 18, 2021

Technical support is very helpful and available 24/7.

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AL

IT Supply Chain Manager at Alicorp

Mar 31, 2024

First of all, the shift from manual to automation has been valuable. We have a tool that can automate.

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System Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Jun 12, 2022

It gives us the ability to have end-to-end workflows, no matter where they're running.

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RS

Robert-Stinnett

Sr. Automation Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 26, 2022

It has certainly helped speed things up.

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

Aug 22, 2025

The best features of Control-M include the fact that you can easily connect different platforms—for anybody coming to it, if you needed to script a solution that connected Windows and Unix and mainframe, that would be difficult, but with Control-M, you can just sit back and connect a COBOL program running on the mainframe, trigger something on the Windows platform, then do a file transfer on Linux, and that's all basically just drag and drop.

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AS

AbhishekSaxena2

Subject Matter Expert at a consumer goods company with 10,001+ employees

Jul 24, 2021

Workload Archiving is a very good feature for us. It helps with our customer requirements in terms of reporting and auditing... Previously, when we didn't have any archive server, we managed the data in Control-M with man-made scripts, and we would pull the data for the last 365 days, or three or four months back. Since we installed the archiving, we have been able to pull the data, anytime and anywhere, with just one click.

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reviewer1631409

Lead Consultant at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 20, 2021

We have a team called pro-mon and they monitor all the jobs for us. A single view for them makes it easy for them to monitor things.

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System Engineer at Community Loans of America, Inc.

Jan 9, 2024

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.

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Control-M Cons review quotes

reviewer1657833

AVP - Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Feb 28, 2023

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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reviewer1631958

Maintenance Manager at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

Jul 21, 2021

The high availability that comes from BMC with its supplied Postgres database is very limited. Even using your customer-supplied Postgres database is problematic. We have engaged with them regarding this, but it is difficult. My company doesn't want to do this and BMC doesn't want to do that. We just need to find some middle ground to get the proper high availability. We're also moving away, like the rest of the world, from the more expensive offerings, like Oracle. We are trying to use Postgres, which is free. The stability is good. It is just that the high availability configuration is not ideal. It could be better.

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RS

Sr. Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 18, 2021

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.

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Free Report: Control-M Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Control-M. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: August 2025.

866,218 professionals have used our research since 2012.

AL

IT Supply Chain Manager at Alicorp

Mar 31, 2024

Whenever I pull an S4HANA job to the Helix Control-M tool, it pulls it naturally with all the steps. A job can have several steps, and in this case, it is very easy to control the steps taken. However, in the case of the SaaS IBP tool, it can pull the job but cannot identify the steps. So, when I want to take an action in a step, I have to split the job.

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System Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Jun 12, 2022

The stability of Control-M has Not been great. A big thing we've been trying to work on with BMC is observability. Modern applications should be observable and resilient, but we're finding that sometimes Control-M is not very resilient and many times Control-M is not very observable.

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RS

Robert-Stinnett

Sr. Automation Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 26, 2022

They can improve their interface.

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

Aug 22, 2025

It can be very labor-intensive to get this information out.

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AS

AbhishekSaxena2

Subject Matter Expert at a consumer goods company with 10,001+ employees

Jul 24, 2021

With the current version update, I'm not sure why we needed a separate database upgrade. Why not put it all in one package? Previously, you could do it either via a manual upgrade or an in-place upgrade but it wasn't separate.

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reviewer1631409

Lead Consultant at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 20, 2021

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.

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System Engineer at Community Loans of America, Inc.

Jan 9, 2024

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.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 95)

Product Categories

Product Categories

Process Automation

Managed File Transfer (MFT)

Workload Automation

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Process Automation

Managed File Transfer (MFT)

Workload Automation

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Camunda vs Control-M

Appian vs Control-M

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Control-M

Pega Platform vs Control-M

IBM BPM vs Control-M

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Control-M

Automic Automation vs Control-M

SnapLogic vs Control-M

IBM Workload Automation vs Control-M

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Control-M

IBM Sterling File Gateway vs Control-M

MOVEit vs Control-M

GoAnywhere MFT vs Control-M

AWS Step Functions vs Control-M

Nintex Process Platform vs Control-M

See all alternatives

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