Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

BMC AMI DevX vs Rocket ChangeMan ZMF (formerly a Micro Focus product) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

BMC AMI DevX
Ranking in Software Configuration Management
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Debugging (8th), Database Development and Management (20th), Mainframe Application Development (1st), Test Data Management (7th), Mainframe Testing Tools (1st), Data Masking (8th)
Rocket ChangeMan ZMF (forme...
Ranking in Software Configuration Management
5th
Average Rating
7.6
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Software Configuration Management category, the mindshare of BMC AMI DevX is 21.3%, down from 29.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rocket ChangeMan ZMF (formerly a Micro Focus product) is 7.9%, up from 7.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Software Configuration Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
BMC AMI DevX21.3%
Rocket ChangeMan ZMF (formerly a Micro Focus product)7.9%
Other70.8%
Software Configuration Management
 

Featured Reviews

Brian Westerman - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps to make mainframe data management process easier and saves manhours
We plan to replace BMC Compuware File-AID due to its price. Two years back, we paid 11,000 dollars. However, the current price is 27,900 dollars. The price has increased to at least eight times its initial cost. We would need to pay around 60,000 dollars to have all three products together. We also encountered issues during version updates.
reviewer1527093 - PeerSpot reviewer
Very flexible with Johnny-on-the-spot tech support
I would like to see them enable parallel development for online. It's available now for batch stuff on the mainframe. Jenkins, IBM, and Rocket all supposedly already have safe and workable version of Git for the mainframe. With that in mind, we need to know where our feature is. Unfortunately, as good as ChangeMan is, if we're listing downfalls, they should be talking to me about this. Not me having to go talk to them about it. Hopefully, they have this in the works and they are positioning their product for the future. That's just a straightforward comment. It really comes down to whether they are complacent or not. The other thing that should improve is cost. Git, even on the mainframe, a large part of the components "free". They're the way you set them up yourselves and they're self-sustaining and built into the infrastructure. You can't charge me for that. I gave ChangeMan an overall score of eight, but what could drive them to a nine is coming up with a way for all my code that belongs together to be tracked and moved together. Everything should move based upon the mainframe; it needs to be alerted and synchronized.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It helps our staff work by speeding up their documentation process."
"One of the features that the developers like is that they can retrieve what they need with the tool. They don't have to go through some process or request something be done by another team. They can get the programs they need, compile them, retrieve the JCL and alter the JCL if they need to, and put these programs wherever they need to go for their testing."
"I have worked with DB2's great features in the last five years. The IDAA feature transformed the vision of warehousing, business analytics, and big data at my bank. Besides the mainframe, I saw that this solution was evolutionary. It gives real-time information."
"BMC Data Management improved our data recovery process by simplifying it."
"Test data management capabilities are good."
"I like the ability to flow through the source and see what happens to the data as the statements are executed. If there is a fault, it will track the event, and we can then look back to see why it may have caused the fault. You can also reverse engineer your test. You can set it so that you can go backward as well as forward in your test. This is something that I haven't done here at my company. Compuware Xpediter is one of the best debugging tools for mainframe software development. We have currently licensed only the COBOL language for Xpediter, but I know they have other languages, including Assembler, PL/I."
"We had parallel development before, but the way ISPW implements it is better. It has more control and oversight of the process, whereas before, it was like the Wild West. Everybody could have their own package with their own version of the component in it... ISPW is constantly aware of it. It notifies when someone else is using or has a different version of that component."
"It does our CICS NEWCOPYs and our Db2 binds for us, whereas before, that was a manual process. It takes a lot of the workload off of the operations folks and off the DBAs."
"We audit once a year for our ChangeMan access, accurate financial programs, and all of that. Auditors really love ChangeMan for how easy it is to get through and how tight the security is on it. Our internal auditors, external auditors, and SOX editors love this solution. We're in the healthcare business, so HIPAA regulations and all such things are a big deal, and this makes all that really simple."
"Scalability is great. It has absolutely met every need for us so far. We do have some concurrent development paths and we're able to flexibly assign variables. At the same time, our skeletons assemble where we want them to, so the scalability is very good."
 

Cons

"It often doesn't play well with other plugins in the environment."
"I'm always looking for improvement in things like the documentation, to make things a little bit easier and simpler to understand, a place where people can go to troubleshoot issues."
"I'm waiting to see what 19.2 for Topaz looks like, but I have a problem with the JES Explorer right now. It limits you to a certain prefix for job names and there are some groups that have multiple prefixes that they'd like to see all at once in their job names, because of how they work in a group. And they can't see that in the JES Explorer."
"Technical support has gotten better over the years, though there's always room for improvement."
"The area for improvement is related to the testing tools that are available for unit testing or acceptance testing. I know they have some out there that we are not licensed for at this time, but it seems like some of the Eclipse tools that are used for other programming languages, they're all just built-in and they're a little more intuitive to the developers. Making those testing tools as intuitive as possible, and as integrated as possible into the workbench, would be really beneficial."
"Their technical support could be better. There were times where, when we reported bugs, they would fix one bug but add another one. That's probably because of their support model. A lot of organizations are developing software using Agile rather than the Waterfall method, so things are happening all over the place. You get things quicker, but sometimes one fix will break another one or add other bugs."
"We plan to replace BMC Compuware File-AID due to its price. Two years back, we paid 11,000 dollars. However, the current price is 27,900 dollars. The price has increased to at least eight times its initial cost. We would need to pay around 60,000 dollars to have all three products together. We also encountered issues during version updates."
"Better discussions to identify inventory prior to the start of any migration would be helpful for potential clients that have applications with code that is not modified often."
"I would like to see them enable parallel development for online. It's available now for batch stuff on the mainframe. Jenkins, IBM, and Rocket all supposedly already have safe and workable version of Git for the mainframe. With that in mind, we need to know where our feature is."
"As such, there's nothing wrong with the product. It is great, but there are small things that can be better to make it much more friendly. The way you navigate through fields can be improved. If I'm going to stage a component over something that exists and that I've created in another library, and I want to pull it in and write it over what I've got there in my package, I've got to type in that data set name every time. That can be aggravating. It is not a big deal. The way things are sorted can also be improved. If you're doing a delete of a bunch of components, you can't sort those out by type or anything. Some things are just standard, and you can't look at them in a way that would be helpful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It has saved our developers time and effort when working on documentation, which is now more readable and fluent."
"The price point is great."
"In terms of pricing, there isn't an extra charge for the parts of it we use. It comes with the licenses we purchased for other products, so no complaints there. The licensing is built in with the other products that you purchase from Compuware."
"The only thing I would mention related to the licensing and/or the pricing, is that they have some visualization features in there that are licensed by concurrent users. We're starting to trip up on that. We're looking to probably increase the number of concurrent licenses that we have. But those types of licensing strategies, where they license by concurrent users or the number of seats is confusing for some people. They don't understand why it works sometimes and doesn't work other times."
"I like the seat-based licensing much more than MSU-based licensing, and that the cost has been competitive."
"In general, Compuware tools are very competitive."
"It's on a yearly basis. I am not aware of any additional costs."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Software Configuration Management solutions are best for your needs.
868,706 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
37%
Insurance Company
12%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Insurance Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise16
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Compuware File-AID?
The product has made our mainframe data management process easier. It has helped us save manhours. The tool's most valuable feature is the ability to edit tape files. Its ability to clone files is ...
What needs improvement with Compuware File-AID?
We plan to replace BMC Compuware File-AID due to its price. Two years back, we paid 11,000 dollars. However, the current price is 27,900 dollars. The price has increased to at least eight times its...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

File-AID, Data for Db2, Code Debug, Data Studio, Workbench for Eclipse, Code Pipeline
Open Text, Micro Focus ChangeMan ZMF
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Helvetia, The IMT Group, Hapag-Lloyd, Royal Bank of Canada, Chunghwa Telecom
SPTS Technologies, Generali France, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. (BBH), Kutxa-Vital-Banco Madrid, Space and Naval Warfare Information Technology Center (SPAWAR ITC)
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC, Broadcom, Microsoft and others in Software Configuration Management. Updated: September 2025.
868,706 professionals have used our research since 2012.