Control-M vs OpCon comparison

BMC and SMA Technologies are both solutions in the Workload Automation category. BMC is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.7, while SMA Technologies is ranked #10 with an average rating of 9.1. BMC holds a 23.1% mindshare in WA, compared to SMA Technologies’s 1.8% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of BMC users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of SMA Technologies users who would recommend it.

Control-M

Read 120 Control-M reviews

18,934 Views
7,626 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

OpCon

Read 59 OpCon reviews

1,845 Views
716 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Control-M

OpCon

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

We performed a comparison between Control-M and OpCon based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

Features: Control-M offers a range of valuable features such as Managed File Transfer, credentials vault, integration capabilities, Role-Based Administration, file transfer integration, collaboration dashboard, scheduling, configuration ease, reporting, workload archiving, and forecasting. OpCon shines in its flexibility, integration capabilities, self-service, automation of manual tasks, GUI, database functionality, deployment concept, testing environment, self-service solution manager, on-demand access, file watcher, MAS feature, reliability, process linking, and automation capabilities.

Control-M can be improved by enhancing its microservices and API integration, addressing bugs in the web interface, developing a lighter web version, improving reporting capabilities, streamlining the upgrade process, and integrating with third-party tools. OpCon needs improvement in the functionality of its web-based interface, upgrading process, documentation, and accessibility through a mobile app.

Service and Support: Control-M's customer service has a range of opinions, with some customers appreciating the quick and knowledgeable support team, while others feel that the support could be more proactive and faster. OpCon's customer service and support have been consistently praised, with customers commending the technical support team for their timely responses and effective solutions.

Ease of Deployment: The setup process for Control-M is typically considered simple and user-friendly, aided by informative guides and videos. Nevertheless, a few users noted that manually converting jobs and scripts introduced complications and delays. OpCon's initial setup may be intricate, but with the support of SMA consultants, the procedure becomes more seamless.

Pricing: Control-M is seen as costly, particularly for smaller businesses, whereas OpCon is acknowledged as a pricier but high-quality option. Control-M's pricing is dependent on the number of jobs or endpoints, while OpCon offers tiered pricing based on usage.

ROI: Control-M is a valuable solution that enhances efficiency, minimizes maintenance windows, and offers cost-efficiencies. OpCon saves time, decreases errors, improves productivity, and provides cost benefits.

Comparison Results: Control-M is the preferred choice when comparing it to OpCon. Users find the initial setup of Control-M to be straightforward and easy, with a clear understanding of the architecture and installation process. Control-M's Managed File Transfer feature is highly praised, as it eliminates the need for manual file transfers and offers a unified view for monitoring and orchestrating workflows and data pipelines.

To learn more, read our detailed Control-M vs. OpCon Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Control-M vs. OpCon

March 2025

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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

Control-M

Ranking in Workload Automation

1st

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

120

Ranking in other categories

Process Automation (3rd), Managed File Transfer (MFT) (4th)

OpCon

Ranking in Workload Automation

10th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of Control-M is 23.1%, down from 26.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpCon is 1.8%, down from 2.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Workload Automation

Featured Reviews

Pedro Fuentes

System Engineer at Community Loans of America, Inc.

Cost-effective, excellent support, and centralized access and control

They have a department that handles requests for enhancements. 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. In Control-M, we were able to go back 180 days, but that was on-prem. The storage of that data was on our own servers. We know that storage is money, and we do not expect them to store that much of the data, but at least 30 to 60 days seem proper.

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Jose Rivera Hernandez

Senior VP of Technology at Triangle Credit Union

Helps automate all kinds of jobs and it's worth the price because it saves a lot of time and money

One problem that I had with them when we got SMA Technologies is that sometimes the jobs fail, but they automatically restart. SMA Technologies automatically gets a notification that the job has failed, and they restart it on their end, so now, we have the job restarting twice. There were times when we came into the office in the morning, and we had two files because the job ran twice. I do not know if the system can prevent a job from running the second time. If a job has run successfully, or it is running, it should not run again.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We are using Control-M for day-to-day operations only. It is helpful for us in our day-to-day operations. It is a key in our financial sector. We are automating via Control-M in our treasury operations, including any evening updates. Control-M makes things easier and faster by helping our treasury operations go without any interruptions."

"Control-M has enabled true enterprise batch automation, which combined with the other BMC Control products on our mainframe platform, allows us to run a 24/7 site with the lights out."

"Control-M is useful to automate all critical and non-critical processes. Using Control-M, we can automate application workflows as well as file transfers involved in application workflows. We can also use it to run batches related to applications. Automating these processes reduces the RTO and RPO, which helps in the case of failures. It also helps us to identify bottlenecks and take corrective measures."

"We can tie together all the workloads across the estate and make the whole process reactive to events."

"In the client, it provides a unified view for me. I can alter the view that I want to see jobs and conditions. This is nice to have. The fact that you can see everything in one space is very important, especially these days where everything is about data and monitoring as well as because we are working from home on a global basis. So, I can monitor jobs in real-time, along with any failures or anything that might be stuck. The real-time monitoring and the ability to see everything in one place is important for us because we operate 24/7."

"The File Watcher utility, cyclic jobs, and email alert notification are valuable."

"It has multiple features. You can plan your execution in Control-M. It provides one single window where you can define workflows regardless of geographic boundaries and platforms. A batch process can be executed from this single window. It provides insights into your processes. Your business people will know what process they are running and what is the state of the process. Instead of knowing that they're not going to meet the SLA the next morning, the business people immediately know the changes in their process. Control-M is very easy. I can tell a non-technical person that this is how it works, and he would be able to easily understand it. Business people can understand the methodology of Control-M and the intuitive features that it has. It has a fantastic graphical user interface and is easy to understand. You just have to drag and drop but in a very intuitive way. Monitoring features are also good. It has different color coding schemes, which can help you to understand the status of your workflow. An operator who is not that technical and is just monitoring the status of the application can see by color-coding the status of a process. If anything goes wrong or a process is stuck, it gives you a hint. You can just right-click and see the logs and the output. Even if the system is not right there in the data center and is located somewhere else, you can monitor it right from there and see the workflows."

"BIM is a good tool to monitor SLAs, and being a financial organization, this is a very good feature for us."

More Control-M pros

"The solution has streamlined operations. We have written custom jobs to do particular things, but OpCon is definitely the one that manages running them at particular times. Often times, those jobs have to run after hours. So while we still develop and spend time and man-hours writing code, once it's done, OpCon is running that in the afternoons or evenings. This is usually done during off hours when a person would normally be required to be here and do it. Instead, OpCon is available, consistent, reliable and easy to get things in and working quickly once we develop and get them working. OpCon takes care of the entire process, including notifications that we define if something were to happen so we know what to do next. Again, it's simplifies the entire process."

"It allows us to have more information and more control than we previously had over the processes that are running in host systems."

"One of the advantages of OpCon is the ability to use the API and web services. We couldn't do that with our previous solution. We have been able to change our procedure for ticketing. When a job is down, we can immediately create a ticket from OpCon in our ticketing solution, which is ServiceNow, using the web services."

"When a lot of jobs are scheduled on different platforms, without any interaction possible between them, it's very difficult to manage things. With OpCon we avoid this difficulty. It's very visual."

"File Watcher can run jobs when files are made available in a folder."

"The image scanning and anti-malware features are really valuable."

"The solution has freed up employees to do more meaningful work as a result of automation. They don't have to sit there and wait for files to download. They don't have to stare at the screen while a process is running. It all runs in the background, doing it for them."

"The biggest thing that we like about OpCon is how easy it is to trust it once we put the automation in place. Once we put whatever that job or schedule is, if we have the proper settings and conditions and we understand the components of OpCon in itself, we can go from a manual process to an automated process. We allow our team to get time to rest and have time to handle other things."

More OpCon pros

Cons

"A developer sandbox could be very helpful to try out new features or experience them."

"The performance could be better. Control-M Enterprise Manager tends to slow the system down even on a server with a six-core processor and 32 gigabytes RAM. The console is Java-based, so maybe OpenJDK 16 or 17 would be a performance improvement."

"The next major release needs to focus on the lightweight web client."

"The licensing cost can be improved."

"Everybody's biggest gripe is the reporting capability option. It is a gripe because there is a lot of information in Control-M, but the solution doesn't have a good reporting tool to extract that information. Now, if you want all that information, you need to rely on another third-party BI tool to extract the information out of Control-M."

"I would like to see automatic license management. And probably more importantly, some kind of machine learning to help identify the optimum automation path."

"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."

"They really need to work on improving the web interface, as there are still a lot of bugs... In general, they need to do a lot of work on shoring up their testing and quality assurance. A lot of bugs seem to make it into the product."

More Control-M cons

"The products are extremely powerful and capable. Anytime you have such capability, the programming/configuration that goes into making it work can be complicated."

"We would like a display of the created date, created by, and last modified date, as well as modified by."

"It is a complex product to use. Programming the schedules is complex. It does require training from OpCon... I would like to see some online training, some videos. When I bring in a new employee... it would be nice if there was some basic information for her to look at to understand this program. Even for my systems administrator, it would be helpful if there were tips and tricks available."

"The ability to retrieve information from logs in variables to display relevant information would be helpful."

"I might like to see a little bit more of a seamless user interface. That would be good. They're moving towards a browser-type interface, rather than the Java application that we currently use. Also, a little bit more built-in self-service would be good, rather than a standalone product."

"There is one feature that has been a difficult problem, and right now, OpCon can't do it. I'm not sure if it should be expected to, but we have tried to get it to where it could start a process on an external database."

"I would like to see OpCon being accessible using a mobile app."

"The initial setup was fairly complex."

More OpCon cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is moderate, not too low or too high compared to other solutions."

"The pricing is reasonable. It's not an exorbitant amount. The licensing is pretty reasonable for the number of jobs that we run."

"The product price is reasonable. I rate the pricing an eight."

"We have a five-year contract with task-based licensing."

"You're going to spend a lot of money upfront, but the benefits you're going to get out of it are going to quickly pay for it."

"The price is right because of the licensing schema, which is based on nodes and processes. You purchase what you use, no more and no less, and you can grow with time."

"This is now from my previous years as support for banks and big companies. If it's not enterprise scale, I find that it's too expensive for smaller companies. You really have to be quite big and need to have a dedicated support staff to run it, then you'll be fine. What we've seen at smaller companies, it's too expensive because they want to automate everything. Now, stuff that can literally run once a day for the rest of their lives is costing them $3 a job a day. It becomes too expensive, eventually. They are not seeing the return on investment because it's not business critical. Nobody is going to die or they're going to lose money if that job didn't run exactly at 11 minutes past 4:00. It's definitely for bigger enterprise companies, especially banks or healthcare providers. We have had an instance where Control-M was unavailable due to external factors for 20 minutes and there was a loss of almost a million euros because the solution involved logistics."

"The pricing of Control-M is reasonable."

More Control-M pricing and cost advice

"Our licensing is on a yearly basis."

"Yearly, it's around $30,000."

"This solution is certainly not the cheapest, but we win in time."

"I am the one who signs the contract. In the beginning, when I started working here, it seemed very expensive, but after I learned everything that it does, I found it worth the price."

"It was substantially less expensive than ASG-Zeke... I would suggest that someone who is only looking at price when evaluating workload automation tools take a very hard look at OpCon because it is well-priced."

"Cost depends on your environment. We are doing stuff now with failover and recovery, so we have boosted our costs."

"It used to be per machine, so we had X number of devices licensed. Now it's not. If we had a lot of machines, the new license might've decreased the cost. Unfortunately, we didn't see the same gains."

"The pricing is over $100,000 for our credit union and I believe it's $89,000 for our clients, in total, annually."

More OpCon pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

28%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

44%

Financial Services Firm

21%

Government

Real Estate/Law Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

How does Control-M compare with AutoSys Workload Automation?

Control-M acts as a single, centralized interface for monitoring and managing all batch processes, which is helpful because nothing gets left unattended since it is all visible in one place, and th...

See all answers

What do you like most about Control-M?

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

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Control-M?

It is a little bit expensive.

See all answers

What do you like most about OpCon?

My favorite feature is the dashboard feature, which shows jobs that are running, and completed, any failures, and provides dashboard reporting.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OpCon?

I am the one who signs the contract. In the beginning, when I started working here, it seemed very expensive, but after I learned everything that it does, I found it worth the price. I would recomm...

See all answers

What needs improvement with OpCon?

See all answers

Comparisons

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Control-M

Compared 16% of the time

Automic Automation vs Control-M

Compared 9% of the time

IBM Workload Automation vs Control-M

Compared 8% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Control-M

Compared 6% of the time

More Control-M Competitors

Automic Automation vs OpCon

Compared 13% of the time

VisualCron vs OpCon

Compared 12% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs OpCon

Compared 11% of the time

UiPath vs OpCon

Compared 9% of the time

IBM Workload Automation vs OpCon

Compared 7% of the time

More OpCon Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Control-M

March 2025

Download Control-M product report

Buyer's Guide

OpCon

March 2025

Download OpCon product report

Also Known As

Control M

No data available

Overview

Control-M is used for enterprise workload automation, orchestrating finance, retail, healthcare, and supply chain processes. It handles batch job scheduling, managed file transfers, cloud integrations, and compliance auditing across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.

Organizations leverage Control-M to efficiently monitor and manage business-critical processes like payroll, HR, SAP, Informatica, and database tasks. It enhances visibility, security, and error resolution. Automating and optimizing workflows in data centers, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, Control-M supports diverse technological environments. The platform's robust capabilities make it suitable for effective centralized management of applications and data pipelines, ensuring enhanced collaboration and scalability.

What are Control-M's most important features?

Integration capabilities: Seamlessly integrates with various systems
Automation API: Facilitates automation through APIs
Managed File Transfer: Simplifies secure file transfers
GUI console: Intuitive graphical user interface
Role-based administration: Provides access control
Single-pane view: Centralized monitoring dashboard
Scheduling options: Flexible job scheduling
Workflow orchestration: Coordinates complex workflows
Reporting: Generates insightful reports
Monitoring: Tracks and manages tasks
Forecasting: Predicts future workloads
Self-service portal: Empowers users with self-service tools
Plugins: Extends functionality through additional plugins

What are the benefits or ROI of using Control-M?

Enhanced visibility: Centralized view of all processes
Ease of use: User-friendly interface
Error reduction: Minimizes manual errors
Improved collaboration: Facilitates teamwork
Scalability: Supports growth and scale
Support: Comprehensive customer support

Control-M is implemented in industries like finance to handle payroll and HR tasks, in retail for inventory management and supply chain processes, and in healthcare for compliance auditing and patient data processing. Organizations benefit from streamlined workflows and automated processes across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments, ensuring efficient and secure operations.

BMC

OpCon automates batch processing, core system operations, file transfers, and daily processing. Integrated across Unisys, Windows, and cloud systems, OpCon is used in financial institutions, credit unions, and multi-platform environments for job scheduling, report generation, SQL queries, scripting, and FTP processes, handling thousands of jobs daily.

Users value OpCon for comprehensive automation capabilities, particularly the scheduling feature that allows advance planning and streamlined workflows. The self-service functionality enables non-IT staff to manage tasks efficiently. OpCon's integration with core banking systems, robust job management, and error notification system significantly improve operational efficiency. Features like Solution Manager enhance accessibility and control, ensuring process continuity and ease of use.

What are the Key Features of OpCon?

Advanced Scheduling: Allows users to plan and automate workflows efficiently.
Self-Service Functionality: Empowers non-IT staff to manage tasks independently.
Integration with Core Systems: Works seamlessly with core banking systems and other platforms.
Error Notifications: Provides robust error management and notifications for quick resolution.
Solution Manager: Enhances control and accessibility for managing automated processes.

What Benefits Should You Look for in Reviews?

Operational Efficiency: Users often report improved operational performance and reduced manual effort.
Time Savings: Automation of repetitive tasks leads to significant time savings.
Improved Accuracy: Automated systems minimize human error, leading to higher accuracy in processes.
Cost Reduction: Optimized resource usage results in cost savings.
Enhanced Flexibility: Customizable workflows meet unique business requirements.

Users find OpCon complex with a steep learning curve. Desired improvements include better separation of environments, enhanced graphical display, finer user authorization, simpler notification and alerts, more templates, increased web functionality, seamless interface, integration tools, online training, smoother scheduling, better reporting, mobile accessibility, smarter self-service, improved mainframe support, and integration with third-party systems. Pricing model and licensing could be more streamlined.

In financial institutions and credit unions, OpCon is implemented to handle thousands of daily jobs, automate internal processes, and integrate workflows across various platforms. It ensures secure file transfers, generates detailed reports, executes SQL queries, and supports seamless third-party integrations.

SMA Technologies

Sample Customers

CARFAX, Tampa General Hospital, Navistar, Amadeus, Raymond James, Railinc

LOHR, Carnival Cruise Lines, Herbalife, Digital Federal Credit Union, Synergent, Frandsen Bank & Trust

Buyer's Guide

Control-M vs. OpCon

March 2025

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