We performed a comparison between Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and BigFix based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison results: Based on the parameters we compared, Red Hat Ansible comes out ahead of BigFix. While both services provide valuable endpoint protection, BigFix’s ability to integrate with certain applications and its dashboard leave room for improvement.
"The policy and compliance monitoring of devices and the software deployment are most valuable."
"We are using the mobile feature, and we are also using MDM to lock the devices, to push restrictions, et cetera"
"I can see that the patch management process is much improved with the bundled patch management option available in Microsoft Intune compared to the KPI deployment required by the other deployment solutions."
"The solution is scalable. We currently have tens of thousands of users within our organization using the solution."
"The most valuable feature is the policy CSPs."
"Technical support, in general, has been quite helpful."
"The features I found most valuable in Intune are its user visibility and troubleshooting options."
"We use a local Active Directory, but we weren't able to manage all our on-site systems without a solution like Intune, and we needed to deploy software like VPNs and other things. It's seamless now to to this through Intune."
"BigFix can manage lost devices, so you can wipe them remotely to ensure the IP doesn't get out in public. Unified endpoint security is a new perspective. I know that HCL is also collaborating with IBM, but I'm not sure if there is any cooperation between them and MaaS360 or other endpoint components."
"The technical support for BigFix is really amazing."
"The patch management and the BigFix Inventory have been the most valuable features."
"BigFix is easy to use."
"The most valuable point is when you deploy an application, you have to make sure that the application has been deployed to all computers and that is working perfectly. This solution works well at deployments."
"The use of fast query has been extremely valuable providing insight in real time of the endpoints."
"Before we had BigFix, we had problems with some malware. BigFix allows us to immediately patch all instances of endpoints that were vulnerable to antivirus and initiate scans. That's key."
"The most valuable feature of BigFix is the software deployment."
"The playbooks and the code the solution uses are quite useful."
"It has an easy-to-use interface. It is REST API driven, and it integrates with Active Directory. It provides the ability to grant permissions to other users who would not necessarily have those permissions via the GUI so that they could run other people's jobs. For example, you could have the Oracle team grant permissions to the Linux team so that they can use each of those playbooks or each other's code. It is called shift-left."
"Some colleagues and other companies use it and comment that it is easy to use, easy to understand, and offers good features."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its configuration management, drift management, workflow templates with the visual UI, and graphical workflow representation."
"Managing our inventory is a big pain point. Right now, we have Satellite, but we can tie it in with Satellite, so we can actually manage things and automate the entire deployment stack, instead of trying to grab things from tickets, then generating Kickstart, and using that to get things in Satellite. That doesn't work well. We can do the whole deployment stack using the inventory share between Tower and Satellite."
"We can manage all the configuration consistency between all our servers."
"Ansible Galaxy is helpful for roles and Git Submodules: No dependency in managing playbooks. Also, fact caching in redis for host/role grp information speeds up execution. Finally, variable management is easy."
"Since it is in YAML, if I have to explain it to somebody else, they can easily understand it."
"The pricing can be expensive if you are not combining it with other products."
"I wanted to check if there is any provision at the Intune level to restrict certain things, such as a website, but unfortunately, that feature is available only in Microsoft Defender. Intune has web filtering capabilities, but they are only useful for protection from malicious websites, whereas we would like to be able to restrict a website. For example, YouTube is a clean website. No one would identify it as a malicious website, but if we want to stop the end-users from going to that website, we have to go for another product, such as Microsoft Defender or another third-party proxy solution. It would be great if this capability is included in Intune."
"For an existing customer who has an SCCM, it would need to be upgraded to an MECM first before I can introduce Microsoft Intune."
"Regarding mobile devices, Intune is good, but there are other services that I would say are ahead of Intune from an administration and reporting point of view."
"I would like to see micro VPN. I like the way that some of the other providers have done something similar where, as you open that app on an end-point device, it creates a micro VPN straight into your device, which is quite a nice little feature. Also, Microsoft Intune relies heavily on its fellow products in the suite. It would be nice if Microsoft Intune could stand on its own two feet."
"Reporting could be improved. It needs to be more expensive and robust."
"There could be more wizard-driven policy development or creation. Some of the policies can get quite complex. If they have a wizard that assists the administrators in creating the policy, that will be a great job."
"They need to add more group policies. Intune currently does not have many group policies that you can deploy. Its reporting, which is very limited at the moment, also needs improvement. It will be great if they can add report customization. Its stability needs to be improved. Sometimes, when you register a device in Intune, it doesn't show up instantly on the engine portal on the admin side. They need to provide better support for complicated issues. They also have a long turnaround time."
"BigFix can improve the way machines report back to the console. In the external relay management environment, it has become more of a hybrid environment with most of the machines not being on-site. The need of having public-facing reporting items interconnected is becoming more and more crucial. In general, the reporting could use some enhancement."
"Maybe the online help could be improved. It'd be nice if you would have a lot more phrases and keywords that you could search for and find answers with the help."
"I'd definitely like to see additional feature parody in the web UI versus the console. There are certain things that you can only do in the console and they're very cumbersome to do, like secure parameters, for example. That's definitely something that has a wide degree of utility but it needs to be easier to surface. At this particular juncture between the transition, between the legacy console and the web UI, it's hard to justify dealing with the cumbersome aspects of the legacy console when theoretically everything's been through the web UI."
"The self-service application seems to need some work to replace the client UI. There are a lot of pop-ups if you use a baseline as the object that you're setting to a workstation. Unless you're using web UI, the message is not customizable in the user notification."
"I would like to see more emphasis on using the web console, to have the same power as the full fat client console that they do they now. It's a lighter way to log in and it would be faster for our operators to do their work. The console tends to take a long time for a large number of clients."
"I would like to see the Self Service section made more user-friendly."
"We would like to see a different license plan, e.g. to include features from lifecycle with Patch Management, as an example."
"I'm looking for them to make big web UI improvements."
"It would be good to make the solution more user-friendly,"
"The job workflow needs to be worked on. It's not really clear to how you actually link things together. What they probably could do is provide an example workflow on how to stitch things together. I think that would be very helpful."
"On the Dashboard, when you view a template run, it shows all the output. There is a search filter, but it would be nice to able to select one server in that run and then see all that output from just that one server, instead of having to do the search on that one server and find the results."
"Accessibility. Ansible uses a CLI by default. Those accustomed to it can find their way and adopt the YAML files easily over time. But, some users are more comfortable using UIs..."
"It can use some more credential types. I've found that when I go looking for a certain credential type, such as private keys, they're not really there."
"I have seen indications that the documentation needs improvement. They are providing a "How to Improve Your Documentation" presentation at this conference."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is not the best at server provisioning. Terraform is better."
"There needs to be improvement in the orchestration."
More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
BigFix is ranked 5th in Configuration Management with 91 reviews while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 58 reviews. BigFix is rated 8.6, while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of BigFix writes "Very stable and easy to deploy with excellent patch compliance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Its agentless, making the deployment fast and easy". BigFix is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, Tanium, ManageEngine Patch Manager Plus and Red Hat Satellite, whereas Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, Microsoft Configuration Manager, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps and AWS Systems Manager. See our BigFix vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform report.
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