

Appian and Control-M compete in the enterprise software space, particularly focusing on automation and process management. Appian seems to have the upper hand in deployment flexibility and customer service, while Control-M excels in scheduling and comprehensive integration features.
Features: Appian offers robust low-code development capabilities, flexible record and data management, and mobile readiness, which streamline app deployment and usage. It also provides extensive integration options, facilitating connectivity with various systems. Control-M focuses on comprehensive scheduling and automation, supporting cross-platform operations and integration with third-party applications. It combines centralized management capabilities with exhaustive job monitoring.
Room for Improvement: Appian faces limitations in UI customization and offline capabilities. Enhancements in reporting and team collaboration are needed. Control-M struggles with a complex licensing structure, scalability issues, and high costs, and could benefit from improved reporting tools and easier integration.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Appian offers flexible deployment models across cloud and on-premise systems, backed by strong customer service, which suits smaller companies. Its technical support, while strong, may be slightly stretched. Control-M focuses mainly on on-premise deployment, supported by solid technical assistance.
Pricing and ROI: Appian is competitively priced with flexible licensing models, offering clear ROI through faster break-even points and improved efficiencies. While Control-M's features justify its higher cost, its pricing model is often debated, and its high upfront costs may challenge smaller enterprises.
Using Appian is saving us five full-time employees, which is significant since we currently have only four team members.
They see return on investment in terms of cost savings, time savings, more efficient processes, and more efficient employees.
The Return on Investment is significant.
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.
I would give Appian's customer support 10 out of 10 due to their next-level support.
Their customer service is responsive, and the team is very prompt for support.
The technical support for Appian rates as 10 out of 10 because they have a great support team.
They quickly evolve with changing technology trends, easily adopt new features, and incorporate them into the product.
The support is accurate, and BMC is always ready to help with queries and complex incidents.
The technical support is very polite, helpful, and available 24/7.
On a scale of one to 10, Appian rates as a nine for scalability.
Our volume has increased by 20% in the two years since using Appian, and it can handle the increased volume effectively.
Initially, without much coding, I can easily handle five thousand records.
Our license doesn't limit our ability to configure Control-M as needed, allowing us to easily create new agents or environments.
I am paying for a top-end tool which rarely experiences issues, with most problems stemming from the applications being managed rather than the tooling itself.
It can absorb more workload wherever needed.
We have tested Appian during peak usage and off-peak times, and we have not experienced any issues such as lagging or system disruptions.
It depends on how it has been designed and how it has been configured.
The stability of Appian would rate as nine, as it's a stable environment.
Control-M itself is robust, and it would receive a rating of 10.
The downtime is higher compared to AWS.
The testing and development phases need to be more rigorous before releasing patches.
It has room to improve for use cases where the users are public facing, where anonymous users could come to a site and run a business workflow or interact with some data.
Appian can be improved by adding a geo-location tagging feature, which would be really helpful for identifying remitter addresses.
It also suggests the best automation process that can be configured within Appian.
They could provide more documentation and tutorials to make the initial setup easier to understand.
We've experienced main problems with MFTE where having one setup means when an error occurs, the entire service goes down.
Documentation should be maintained for all versions since they provided the application.
Appian provides value for money, is easy to use, has a straightforward setup procedure, and offers great support from the Appian team.
On the pricier side, both Appian and Pega are enterprise-level solutions, placing them on the slightly higher side.
The pricing of Appian is based on the number of users and generally ranges from 70 to 100 USD per user per month.
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.
Control-M is among the highest-priced solutions in the market.
The zero-code integration feature is remarkable, allowing for ease of data transfer and workflow enhancement.
Appian is aiding in leveraging AI technologies in multiple ways: one way is for developers, as they make development efficient and quick by enabling developer co-pilots across various phases of the application, which helps design Appian quickly and provides suggestions along the way.
After switching to Appian, it can extract data from MT103, eliminating the need for manual data entry.
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.
If I have a staff that operates Control-M on Windows Server, they will easily pick it up if they need to run it on Unix or mainframes. It's the same interface, saving time and improving efficiency.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Control-M | 3.7% |
| Appian | 4.5% |
| Other | 91.8% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 20 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 9 |
| Large Enterprise | 44 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 37 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 23 |
| Large Enterprise | 140 |
Appian is a unified low-code platform and solution used by businesses to build enterprise applications and workflows. This product adapts to the needs of clients and the technologies they are already using to combine their data in a single workflow and maximize resources. The platform has four main components through which it transforms the work process for companies of various sizes. They are:
Appian is utilized across a diverse set of industries, including automotive and manufacturing, energy and utilities, education, financial services, telecom and media, transportation, retail, insurance, healthcare, and life sciences. The most frequent use cases of Appian are customer journey, governance, risk and compliance, operational efficiency, supply chain, distributed order management, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) management.
Appian Features
Appian has various features that allow users to create solutions for their businesses. These features can be separated into a few groups according to function, including automation, low-code application development, and integrations and data. Some of the most frequently used features of Appian include:
Appian Benefits
The benefits of using Appian include:
Reviews from Real Users
A practice leader - digital process automation at a computer software company values Appian highly because the product is easy to develop, low-code, and has a good user interface.
Alan G., an advisory board member at Codecon VR, Appian offers a clear application life cycle, easy to learn documentation, and comes with a fundamentals course.
Control-M SaaS by BMC is tailored for growing teams, offering essential orchestration for managing hybrid cloud workflows starting at $29,000 annually.
Control-M integrates automation, orchestration, and a user-friendly interface to streamline workflows across banking, DevOps, and cloud environments. Key modules like Managed File Transfer and cross-platform support simplify job monitoring, while Batch Impact Manager enhances scheduling. Despite its capabilities, improvements in output analysis, reporting customization, offline access, and API integration are desired by users.
What are Control-M's key features?Control-M is implemented in industries such as finance and enterprise operations, aiding in automating batch processing across platforms like SAP and Teradata. It integrates with secure file transfers, ERP systems, and databases, whether deployed on-premises or cloud, ensuring seamless operation optimization.
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