# IBM CICS Transaction Server Reviews **Vendor:** IBM **Category:** [Application Server Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/application-server) **Average Rating:** 4.4/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 13 ## About IBM CICS Transaction Server IBM CICS® Transaction Server for z/OS is a robust, secure, and scalable application server designed to host transactional enterprise applications within a hybrid architecture. It supports a variety of programming languages, enabling businesses to modernize applications using languages that align with their developers' expertise and organizational requirements. Key Features and Functionality: - Security: Offers comprehensive controls to safeguard transactions, resources, and networks, working seamlessly with z/OS security managers and compliance authorities. - Scalability: Efficiently scales applications and prioritizes workloads to fully leverage the capabilities of IBM Z and z/OS sysplex environments, meeting diverse enterprise demands. - Flexibility: Provides support for multiple programming languages and frameworks, facilitating the integration and modernization of IBM Z applications and data. - High Performance: Delivers an optimized architecture capable of handling high transaction volumes with low latency, ensuring robust enterprise business processes and adherence to service level agreements (SLAs). Primary Value and Solutions Provided: IBM CICS Transaction Server addresses critical enterprise needs by offering a secure and scalable platform for transactional applications. It enables organizations to modernize their existing applications by supporting a range of programming languages, thus preserving investments in legacy systems while integrating with contemporary technologies. The server's high-performance capabilities ensure efficient transaction processing, which is essential for maintaining business continuity and meeting customer expectations. Additionally, its robust security features help organizations comply with regulatory requirements and protect sensitive data. ## IBM CICS Transaction Server Reviews ### 1. Legacy CICS 3270 Screen with BMS **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vagner B. | IBM Mainframe System Analyst, Banking, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 05, 2025 **What do you like best about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** I work with legacy IBM Mainframe software migration, I like the ease of navigation and clarity of the features, currently online services lack the simplicity and ease that CICS offers. **What do you dislike about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** Windows software to facilitate development, despite the existence of the Visual Studio plugin, we still depend on a mainframe in the back-end to develop. **What problems is IBM CICS Transaction Server solving and how is that benefiting you?** Screen navigation and workflow of online processes in COBOL Mainframe ### 2. CICS- Most efficient TS **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 15, 2024 **What do you like best about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** CICS is a family of mixed-language application servers that provide online transaction management and connectivity for applications on IBM mainframe systems under z/OS and z/VSE. CICS family products are designed as middleware and support rapid, high-volume online transaction processing. **What do you dislike about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** User Interface is too outdated but still being the most efficient and reliable **What problems is IBM CICS Transaction Server solving and how is that benefiting you?** application separation, function separation, avoiding the workload capacity limitations of a single region, or address space, or mainframe instance in the case of a z/OS SysPlex ### 3. CICS Transaction Server is a secure, fexible, modern middleware for real time transactions **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Emilio G. | CICS Systems administrator, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 16, 2023 **What do you like best about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** Flexibility, languages supported, the interfaces, the network management, the task management, the data integrity features, the security features **What do you dislike about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** IPIC CICS-TO-CICS communications doesn't fully replace XM/IRC and ISC/LU62 communication protocols **What problems is IBM CICS Transaction Server solving and how is that benefiting you?** OnLine banking operations, money axchange, cards management and payements ### 4. Working with IBM cics **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Accounting | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 21, 2022 **What do you like best about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** The most valuable features of this solution are speed, resiliency, and mixed language support. **What do you dislike about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** Not easy maintenance . I'd like to be more flexible in terms of maintenance deployment." **What problems is IBM CICS Transaction Server solving and how is that benefiting you?** as it is very fast , it allows to solve many problems ### 5. Good and solid age old legacy screens but holds better anyday **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ravi K. | Agile Coach, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 19, 2021 **What do you like best about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** Options to navigate between screens using PF keys, Easy to make changes in backend cobol or pl1 modules, It has option to hold data in TSQ or TDQ which makes easy to transfer data between programs Backend BMS maps are easy to read on which fields are located where as it just uses position horizontally and vertically. DFHCOMMAREA has variety of use in programs which makes developers job easy and standard **What do you dislike about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** CICS modules can’t be reused in batch has it has linkage section defined specifically to use for online modules Downtime and reload of all the screens need specialists Error message handling additional pop up is complex logic compared to other technologies **Recommendations to others considering IBM CICS Transaction Server:** Easy to understand and integrate with legacy system where backend maps and programs can be changed by developers easily **What problems is IBM CICS Transaction Server solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using in selling loan products to customers which is used by advisors or special bank officers Its a age old system which is built in 1980 but still used today in different departments of bank including generating loan documents physically or online ### 6. CICS Benefits **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 01, 2021 **What do you like best about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** Very useful to run your Mainframe application on online mode using BMS macros. Receive output instantly. For eg: ATM, Railway ticket booking etc **What do you dislike about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** When you develop new CICS program from scratch, it required more setup and adding resources in different entries like PCP,PCT, RCT etc. So you can do unit testing for your program program only all the setup completed. **What problems is IBM CICS Transaction Server solving and how is that benefiting you?** Helped lot to convert for one batch process into online process. It reduced the waiting time for the output generated as you can sew results very fast in online processing. ### 7. Bridging the gap between legacy Mainframes and latest technology **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kevin T. | Technical Architect, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 03, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** IBM CICS is basically a medium through which you can make use of data stored on Mainframes which usually is not accessible because you need COBOL language for that. IBM CICS helps you to connect to mainframes with a java or .net or any other language which the front end supports. We have made use of this product extensively because some of our clients were adamant that they don't want to move the data from Mainframes. So we shifted towards CICS and we were pleasantly surprised by the speed of the transaction, the volume it can support and high availability and ofcourse no hacking is possible because its Mainframes after all, most secured systems. **What do you dislike about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** Establishing the initial connection can be challenging task if you are doing it for the first time because there are a lot of things which you need to get absolutely right. There arent a lot of experienced and knowledgeable resources available in market who are good in Mainframes and COBOL or assembly language. **Recommendations to others considering IBM CICS Transaction Server:** If the project need is to interact with data stored on Mainframes then IBM CICS is the number one solution. **What problems is IBM CICS Transaction Server solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have used it to get more business and client satisfaction has also increased because they know the data is safe and secure on mainframes. Secondly we have that data accessible to us all the time through IBM CICS at wire speed, handling massive volume and reliability is top notch because mainframes doesn't go down just like that. ### 8. Making Mainframes accessible to the world **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ridhima B. | Solutions Architect, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 14, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** Customer Information Control System more commonly knows as CICS is a proprietary product developed by IBM. It has been the bridge between mainframes and the latest technologies which want to leverage mainframes. CICS allows the developers to develop and execute online services in a Multiple Virtual Storage(MVS) controlled environment. CICS is an online system you can say where the job submitted are processes immediately and not kept in a buffer or spool. CICS is a transaction processing system which can take millions of requests and still process them at wire speed. We have been using CICS for quite a while now and since our data was present on the mainframes and our application is java based. We decided to use CICS to bridge the gap for the two and it has worked really well for us as well. We had to hire a resource though who understands the COBOL and Assembler language and then we made him work with the MQ person to get this whole thing working. IBM is really supportive as well in the beginning when we are establishing the connectivity for the first time. Slowly we have also learned a lot about CICS and where it should be used and how powerful it is. It is capable of handling massive transaction volumes without ever going down or slowing. The security provided by the mainframes is the best in the world. They have also been making a lot of changes in the CICS system and making it easier for even new people to start using it with a basic understanding of the tool. **What do you dislike about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** CICS has been a wonderful experience for us but in the start finding a resource who is well versed in COBOL and Assembler language, that was really tough. The learning curve associated with it is quite steep as well if you want to work on it on daily basis. Abend and Error handling needs to be worked on a lot to make it easier to find the issue. **Recommendations to others considering IBM CICS Transaction Server:** This is a good choice for you if you are dealing with massive volume of data and you can not afford to go down each for very small time. This again is the correct choice if your data is sensitive and you want the system to grow as your business grows and do real time processing without any lags. **What problems is IBM CICS Transaction Server solving and how is that benefiting you?** IBM CICS has proved to be very useful and scale-able because our volumes of online transactions has just got bigger and bigger with time but it was able to handle all that traffic without even going down or throwing an error because of the sheer volume. The security provided is again top notch and we never had a data breach. ### 9. Connecting Mainframes to the world **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 11, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** IBM CICS is a proprietary product from IBM which provides online transaction management and connectivity for applications on IBM mainframe systems under z/OS. It is essentially a bridge between modern technology applications such as Java, .Net, C# to communicate with data stored on mainframes. The speed, security, and reliability are top of the line since mainframes are the most secure system ever. So, the backend in these cases usually is the Mainframes and since you can directly talk to mainframes, IBM made this transaction management system which makes it accessible of any application to converse with mainframes because a lot of applications still have their data present on mainframes. **What do you dislike about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** Well, this isn't as easy as it sounds because making the initial connection to the mainframes is a tough nut to crack because of all the security parameters which you should possess before connecting to mainframes. Secondly finding people with that kind of a skill set is very rare because you can make changes at the front end but if you need something to be changed in COBOL at mainframes end then you might be in trouble. **Recommendations to others considering IBM CICS Transaction Server:** If your backend is mainframes and you need a fast, reliable and secure connection and transactions to be done at wire-speed, this is the answer to all your problems. **What problems is IBM CICS Transaction Server solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have increased our client base because now we can entertain clients whose data is stored on mainframes which earlier was not the case. The clients also feel safe with their data residing on the mainframes. The speed of fetching the data and performing the operations is wire-speed with top-notch security features and reliability and stability of mainframes. ### 10. IBM Mainframes made more accessible **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Raghav V. | Technical Architect, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 26, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** IBM CICS is middleware designed to support rapid, high-volume online transaction processing. It is essentially a collection of mixed language application servers that supports online transaction management and connectivity for applications on IBM mainframe systems under z/OS. It helps you to interact with Mainframes, even if your application is not written in Cobol. It has many connectors and can support almost any language which you are working on. You can make a call to IBM Mainframes through CICS and fetch the data as per the requirement of your applications through Java language or MQ or .Net or any other language which you are working on. **What do you dislike about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** The main thing which bothers me is that when we face an error and have to debug from the logs, that is a very cumbersome process. The cost associated with using IBM CICS and Mainframes is pretty substantial since these are legacy systems and their maintenance require a lot of resources. IBM is always there to help you out but again finding good resources to hire and train in your organization is going to be a challenge. **Recommendations to others considering IBM CICS Transaction Server:** You should definitely give this a try if your data is residing on Mainframes or if you want to keep your data on Mainframes. It is highly scaleable, available and secure. **What problems is IBM CICS Transaction Server solving and how is that benefiting you?** It has made our project much more reliable, fast and secured since our data is stored on Mainframes and we all know Mainframes are the most secure option for storing data. Our Connectors once established didn't face any issues when the project scaled and the volume grew. It has been working very smoothly and all the stakeholders are pretty happy with the choice we made. ### 11. I've worked with IBM and CICS green screens for 20 years **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Media Production | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** The people I worked with were the best around, I spent 20 years making the green screens web based, unfortunately assembler and cobol progammers are hard to come by. Those that know what they are doing can do it really well, and facilitate Java guys like me to make the most of things. Very stable in a highly controlled environment (assuming you have an operations team on hand 24/7, most large companies do). In my 20 years depending on it, I don't recall it ever going down, **What do you dislike about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** lack of talented people , IBM support is great if you can narrow down the problem for them, they work 24/7 to help you in a crisis. Probably the cost would prohibit most companies from using it, as an employee, that's not my issue, it really is a workhorse that can handle anything. **Recommendations to others considering IBM CICS Transaction Server:** I threw RESTFul services on top of CICS, had to write a lot of specialized XML and MQ calls, but in the end it all worked. **What problems is IBM CICS Transaction Server solving and how is that benefiting you?** super fast, sub second processing, never managed to write something to bog it down. We are able to process millions of web transactions a day with no issues, there seems to be no limit to the amount of code under the hood it can handle. At one point we had over 100 CICS developers, but all the people that know Cobol and Assembler are starting to retire, so that can be an issue. ### 12. Great tool for Connecting to IBM Mainframes on z/OS **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 13, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** IBM CICS(Customer Information Control System) is a great platform to connect to IBM Mainframes and leverage the data stored on the Mainframes. It supports many languages and connectors. In my project we used JAVA and MQ calls basically. We use to integrate our new JAVA-based tool with IBM CICS to get the required information from the backend servers which were IBM Mainframes in this case and then present it to the customer on a webpage. It never slows down and the ability to handle volume is unparallel. **What do you dislike about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** I am not sure if I disliked anything about IBM CICS. Although it is a little complicated when you are making the connections for the first time since there isn't much documentation around this subject on the IBM website. Second is the lack of well-experienced resources who have worked on CICS and have a deep understanding of the same. **Recommendations to others considering IBM CICS Transaction Server:** If you are looking to connect to IBM Mainframes and that too in a fast, reliable and secure manner. Then look no further it will solve all your issues with ease. **What problems is IBM CICS Transaction Server solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have safely launched our new tool which connects to IBM CICS and fetches the information from the legacy systems which otherwise would have taken ages to first transfer to Oracle or any other database. Directly referencing the Mainframes is the fastest, secure and reliable way to scale as well. ### 13. Great request Management! **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alex S. | Writer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 08, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** The Best thing i liked about IBM CICS is the platform provided to integrating new Web applications while leveraging the Mainframe systems. **What do you dislike about IBM CICS Transaction Server?** In a Multi web application using CICS as the middleware to queue transaction , there is a downside to performance during peak timings **Recommendations to others considering IBM CICS Transaction Server:** Great Product to leverage your existing Mainframe Servers while modernizing the Software **What problems is IBM CICS Transaction Server solving and how is that benefiting you?** We were able to integrate our JAVA web application with our old mainframe servers , utilizing the IBM CICS. ## IBM CICS Transaction Server Discussions - [Some of org are looking to integrate latest java or .net screens with CICS can we do that?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/some-of-org-are-looking-to-integrate-latest-java-or-net-screens-with-cics-can-we-do-that) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [View IBM CICS Transaction Server pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/ibm-cics-transaction-server/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-17+18%3A43%3A21+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=e4e53527-d286-4a21-9d88-a0606caf2679&secure%5Btoken%5D=ca66a5215b3ed388fb07d1a6839f3f92f0aab71b01ca59092dd85d2a6301fb2c&format=llm_user) ## IBM CICS Transaction Server Features **Data Management** - Data Redundancy - Server Management - Version and Profile Support - Web-based frameworks - Data exchange **User Features** - Centralized offering - Security updates - Real-time visibility **Modernization** - Cloud deployment - Microservices development - On-premises support - Modular architecture **AI Performance Improvement - Application Server** - AI Application Scaling - AI Error Prediction - Intelligent Resource Forecasting - AI Anomaly Detection - AI Intrusion Detection **Agentic AI - Application Server** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance - Decision Making ## Top IBM CICS Transaction Server Alternatives - [Plesk](https://www.g2.com/products/plesk/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (247 reviews) - [Apache Tomcat](https://www.g2.com/products/apache-tomcat/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (124 reviews) - [Apache HTTP Server Project](https://www.g2.com/products/apache-http-server-project/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (137 reviews)