We performed a comparison between Chef and Quest KACE Systems Management based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Configuration Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."We have a BYOD policy, and this solution helps us manage our devices."
"A valuable feature is user enrollment, where users can enroll their devices in their organizations themselves."
"The most important thing for me is the autopilot feature."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Intune is having all our devices compliant with our policies."
"It is very easy to use. It has a very easy interface."
"The solution is stable."
"I would say the biggest benefit is the single-pane view. There's no jumping around multiple UI's to do your overall management."
"Microsoft's cloud comes with a lot of extra features that are free of charge."
"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."
"It has been very easy to tie it into our build and deploy automation for production release work, etc. All the Chef pieces more or less run themselves."
"The scalability of the product is quite nice."
"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."
"Manual deployments came to a halt completely. Server provisioning became lightning fast. Chef-docker enabled us to have fewer sets of source code for different purposes. Configuration management was a breeze and all the servers were as good as immutable servers."
"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."
"One thing that we've been able to do is a tiered permission model, allowing developers and their managers to perform their own operations in lower environments. This means a manager can go in and make changes to a whole environment, whereas a developer with less access may only be able to change individual components or be able to upgrade the version for software that they have control over."
"It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."
"The information available via KACE is up to date, critical to our normal operations, and has become the go-to tool of our IT teams for extended support."
"The scripting is a very valuable feature, as it saves us time on pushing certain things out to the users, such as software and patches."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to monitor updates—the software versions—on machines so that we can keep everything compliant."
"There is ease of use, and its pricing was a driving factor."
"It is excellent in terms of updating and configuring everything the way we need. For anything more complex, we do professional service engagements, and they're exceptional. For anything less complex, we just need to ask questions. Their support division is extremely good too."
"Asset management is most valuable. It is essential for all customers. The other features are also useful, but asset management is most important."
"We're able to deploy software and push out fixes to endpoints faster than ever."
"We can get the majority of what we need with this product and do not have to spend money on something else."
"Intune's third-party patch management could be better. It should be easier for the average system admin to keep non-Microsoft applications updated."
"I'm still playing around with it and haven't had any issues with the product yet, but support can definitely be improved."
"Due to the abundance of features, there's a lot to organize, which makes managing and setting up the solution challenging. The setup is immense, and it would be good to see improvement in this area."
"They should improve its compatibility with other operating systems such as iOS and Linux. It supports Linux but they still need to work on the iOS part."
"The documentation about the custom image setup could be better. Although Microsoft provides the steps to configure Intune or set up or deploy Intune, it doesn't have much information related to custom images. If you ask, "how can we deploy the custom image?" There is no information. The steps they mention ask you to connect to your on-premises environment or create your own image on the cloud itself once there is connectivity. But I needed to go to multiple websites to get all this information. I had to figure out how to upload the custom image if you want to use the on-premise custom image for Cloud PC. If you have the proper subscription, you must have the right access, like global admin or owner. Then you can add your custom image to that. There are no steps mentioned over there. Microsoft Intune doesn't have Chrome browser support. I would like to have that support because they will want it if we pitch the product to clients."
"It doesn't economize when you scale up. We have over 14,000 employees, and we have between 7,500 and 8,000 city-owned or personal devices being used to conduct city business. Its price can be improved. It is not a cheap solution."
"There is room for improvement, particularly in terms of compatibility, extending beyond the well-known major brands."
"The synchronization could be improved."
"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."
"I would rate this solution a nine because our use case and whatever we need is there. Ten out of ten is perfect. We have to go to IOD and stuff so they should consider things like this to make it a ten."
"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."
"It is an old technology."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"There is always room for improvement. However, the system does most of what we need at this moment."
"Scalability is my primary concern right now."
"I think it should have the ability to have the applications automatically update. It would be really helpful if this would override what the user might choose to do."
"I would like them to implement VBScript language in KACE Systems Management. Currently, we can only use PowerShell."
"The KACE Go Mobile App crashes a lot, and it always has. I would love to see that get fixed because it's very convenient when it does work properly, but most of the time it does not."
"The problem is that it's harder to directly emulate a lot of the stuff that the group policies do, using the KACE solution. With regular group policies, you just specify the various settings you want to change on the workstations, and then you specify the workstations and—while it's kind of an ugly mess—it does it. Whereas on KACE, you really have to know what you're doing with scripting to effectively script those exact same changes."
"There isn't a lot they need to improve with the solution itself at this point. It is pretty close to providing a single pane of glass for everything that we need for endpoint management specifically on all devices. There is very little that it doesn't provide for us, and for those, we have to go to other methods. There are some of the patching solutions that it doesn't take care of for us. So, we have to do those manually on the devices, and that's really the biggest thing. It doesn't do patching really well for non-Microsoft applications. The major application updates, particularly Windows updates, don't function nearly as well, but, for the vast majority of things, it does just fine. If they could improve in this aspect, that'd be great, but I don't know if they're going to be able to do that."
"The solution needs to have the ability to push out managed feature updates from Microsoft in a more seamless way."
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Chef is ranked 16th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews while Quest KACE Systems Management is ranked 9th in Configuration Management with 38 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while Quest KACE Systems Management is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Chef writes "Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Quest KACE Systems Management writes "Easy to use, saves us time, and increases IT productivity". Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, BigFix and SaltStack, whereas Quest KACE Systems Management is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, BigFix, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Automox. See our Chef vs. Quest KACE Systems Management report.
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