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ActiveBatch by Redwood vs BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

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

ActiveBatch by Redwood
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
18th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (34th), Workload Automation (19th)
BMC Control-M Managed File ...
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
7th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Managed File Transfer (MFT) category, the mindshare of ActiveBatch by Redwood is 2.2%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is 3.6%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed File Transfer (MFT) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer3.6%
ActiveBatch by Redwood2.2%
Other94.2%
Managed File Transfer (MFT)
 

Featured Reviews

Shubham Bharti - PeerSpot reviewer
Flexible, easy to use, and offers good automation
Occasionally, I find myself contemplating if there is room for improvement in the user interface (UI), and envisioning that with certain enhancements. The UI could potentially offer a more refined and user-friendly experience, fostering smoother interactions and facilitating easier navigation for users engaging with the application. New users might encounter a minor setback due to the absence of readily accessible training videos, which could have otherwise proven to be an invaluable resource in aiding their initial familiarization with the platform, potentially hindering their seamless onboarding process and delaying their ability to harness the software's full range of capabilities to its utmost potential.
SirajShaik - PeerSpot reviewer
Improve operational efficiency through workflow orchestration
Its stability and the feature list are rich compared to other tools in the market. I have experienced a thirty percent reduction in operational time for developers, increasing efficiency in workflow orchestration design. The UI is great, with a minimal learning curve and caters to both click-and-monitor users and those who want to code.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The nice thing about ActiveBatch is once we have created a specific job that can be easily be replicated to another job, then minimal changes will have to be made. This makes things nice. Reduction of coding is substantial in a lot of cases. The replication of one job to another is just doing a few minor tweaks and rolling it into production. This decreases our development costs substantially."
"The product offers a centralized platform for managing activities across many environments, applications, etc."
"Since we are no longer waiting for an operator to see that a job is finished, we have changed our daily cycle from running in eight hours down to about five. We had a third shift-operator retire and that position was never refilled."
"One of the most valuable features is the job templates. If we need to create an FTP job, we just drag over the FTP template and fill out the requirements using the variables that ActiveBatch uses. And that makes it reusable. We can create a job once but use it for many different clients."
"For developers, it is easy to orchestrate the workflows and the integration has been very easy."
"Error Handling is one of the best standout features of ActiveBatch."
"What ActiveBatch allows you to do is develop a more efficient process. It gave me visibility into all my jobs so I could choose which jobs to run in parallel. This is much easier than when I have to try to do it through cron for Windows XP, where you really can't do things in parallel and know what is going on."
"ActiveBatch's Self-Service Portal allows our business units to run and monitor their own workloads. They can simply run and review the logs, but they can't modify them. It increases their productivity because they are able to take care of things on their own. It saves us time from having to rerun the scripts, because the business units can just go ahead and log in and and rerun it themselves."
"The file transfer, database, and integration features are the most valuable."
"The job scheduling and file transfer are two major, important features."
"It is a highly scalable solution...I rate the product's initial setup a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy."
"I find the customer service to be excellent."
"The most important aspect is the ability to integrate different platforms."
"The solution supports all file transfers."
"Our customers find the self-service feature the most valuable. Control-M offers great value to businesses by providing an option to see different flows and control and orchestrate the sequence of the execution. It is easy to use and integrate with different solutions. It is a good solution that is easy to implement and deliver."
"I am a partner and an implementer for Control-M. Once purchased by my clients, I implement this solution and provide daily support for this scheduling tool."
 

Cons

"Whenever there is an overload, we are seeing crashes happening."
"The reporting needs improvement. There is a real need for the ability to generate audit reports on the fly. It needs to be a lot easier than what I can do right now. This is a major item for me."
"They should offer pricing that is more affordable."
"They have some crucial design flaws within the console that still need to be worked out because it is not working exactly how we hoped to see it, e.g., just some minor things where when you hit the save button, then all of a sudden all your job's library items collapse. Then, in order to continue on with your testing, you have to open those back up. I have taken that to them, and they are like, "Yep. We know about it. We know we have some enhancements that need to be taken care of. We have more developers now." They are working towards taking the minor things that annoy us, resolving them, and getting them fixed."
"ActiveBatch is a little complex."
"Some improvements can be made to the user interface."
"Any product is going to have some room for improvement, no matter what. I see the company has already ventured into AWS and they're constantly trying to improve the managed file transfer which they have recently improvised. I think they bought a software called JSCAPE and they're trying to improve it, which is good. I am not sure if JSCAPE would be part of the base product but currently, you have to buy a separate license for it, which doesn't make sense. If it was Microsoft, ServiceNow, or integrating with other software vendors, I would understand but JSCAPE is now in-house and I'm not sure if they can justify having a separate license for JSCAPE. I would probably expect them to be packaging JSCAPE into the base product. They did switch over from a perpetual license model to a subscription model, which hurt the company a little bit. Nobody is offering the perpetual model anymore. As long as the transition is fair for both the companies, I think it should be fine and not burn us out."
"There are some issues with this version and finding the jobs that it ran. If you're looking at 1,000 different jobs, it shows based on the execution time, not necessarily the run time. So, if there was a constraint waiting, you may be looking for it in the wrong time frame. Plus, with thousands of jobs showing up and the way it pages output jobs, sometimes you end up with multiple pages on the screen, then you have to go through to find the specific job you're looking for. On the opposite side, you can limit the daily activity screen to show only jobs that failed or jobs currently running, which will shrink that back down. However, we have operators who are looking at the whole nightly cycle to make sure everything is there and make sure nothing got blocked or was waiting. Sometimes, they have a hard time finding every item within the list."
"Most improvements are related to cloud connectivity."
"This solution could be improved by making it possible to better control GUI when interfacing with other systems."
"We're only using the functionality that we need to use. However, we've had an opportunity to work with one application owner here who wanted to do some transfers in the cloud and things like that. I know that there were some challenges on that, but they finally got all that set up. There was a learning curve though."
"BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer has a scheduler and what they do is capture the steps based on the script, and then they put it into the Control-M job, or task. Any system that has the script behind it the solution can do it."
"Its current functionalities can be upgraded."
"We have some issues on the SAP side of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer...So, there are some stability issues when it comes to SAP side."
"I'd like to see MFT included as part of the overall product and not a cost add-on as AFT used to be included and they stopped supporting that and now have come up with MFT and you now have to pay for it separately."
"Offering it as open source for free would be great, however, that's unlikely."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If you compare ActiveBatch licensing to Control-M, you're looking at $50,000 as opposed to millions."
"ActiveBatch is currently redesigning themselves. In the past, they were a low cost solution for automation. They had a nice tool that was very inexpensive. With their five-year plan, they will be more enhancement-driven, so they're trying to improve their software, customer service, and the way that their customers get information from them. In doing that, they're raising the price of their base system. They changed from one pricing model to another, which has caused some friction between ActiveBatch and us. We're working through that right now with them. That's one of the reasons why we're why we were evaluating other software packages."
"Currently, we are paying approximately $7,000 yearly, which includes support."
"It allows for lower operational overhead."
"The price was fairly in line with other automation tools. I don't think it's exorbitantly expensive, relatively speaking."
"The pricing was fair. There are additional costs for the plugins. We have the standard licensing fees for different pieces, then we have the plugins which were add-ons. However, we expected that."
"I like ActiveBatch Workload Automation's licensing model because they're not holding you down on an agentless model or agent model, where every server needs to have an agent. That's the main selling point of the solution and I hope they stay that way."
"I don't think we've ever had a problem with the pricing or licensing. Even the maintenance fees are very much in line. They are not excessive. I think for the support that you get, you get a good value for your money. It's the best value on the market."
"Apart from the standard license, if we avail any additional features, there's an extra cost. For example, Workload Archiving is an additional feature from the standard product, so we pay extra for that."
"This solution is very expensive compared to others in the market. Previously it was the only solution in our country to offer this kind of functionality. However, technology has caught up and many competitors offer the same at a lower price."
"I rate the solution's price a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is low or really affordable, and ten is high or really expensive. It is a really expensive tool."
"I switched to this solution within the last year. I switched from the servers payment package to the job payment package, and it is very expensive."
"The license model is based on the number of tasks or jobs required. The price overall is expensive. In my country, we don't have any choice but to use them because no one can match their capability."
"The licensing is a bit more expensive than other tools, so if a client is focused on the cost, that would be something to consider. The licensing should be cheaper."
"It is an expensive solution."
"It was a little bit pricey. They were proud of the product. A particular module was not free. However, BMC was able to negotiate that particular module into our whole contract itself without having to negotiate an individual price for that module. All that was included in a one-time negotiation, and we've signed a five-year contract on that."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Insurance Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
7%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise46
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer?
It is a highly scalable solution...I rate the product's initial setup a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer?
The pricing for licensing has increased. I'd rate the pricing three out of ten.
What needs improvement with BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer?
BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer already works great, though there could be improvements for transferring large files, particularly those that are in gigabytes, as it sometimes poses problems.
 

Also Known As

ActiveBatch
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Informatica, D&H, ACES, PrimeSource, Sub-Zero Group, SThree, Lamar Advertising, Subway, Xcel Energy, Ignite Technologies, Whataburger, Jyske Bank, Omaha Children's Hospital
British Sky Broadcasting
Find out what your peers are saying about ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
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