We performed a comparison between Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Satellite based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Ansible has a slight edge over Satellite in this comparison since it is a free solution and easier to deploy than Satellite.
"We are a remote company, and the product helps us manage the global endpoints. It helps us natively manage the endpoints in the cloud from anywhere."
"This product works very well for companies already using the full Microsoft suite."
"The key benefit of Intune is its integration with the Microsoft ecosystem."
"Microsoft Endpoint Manager is not expensive overall, especially for small environments."
"The biggest benefits of Intune are the ability to push changes and the added security. When we moved forward with Defender, we onboarded all those machines automatically. That helps dramatically. For a while, we were left with machines that weren't protected. We could see where people had done things they shouldn't have done, and Defender saved our skins a few times. It didn't happen a lot, but it happened enough that it made us glad we made that decision."
"I can reach devices or computers over the internet. I don't need to worry about the network connectivity between the offices. I can manage any device. That is the most important part."
"I like the group policy management feature, which performs application monitoring and device enrollment."
"Microsoft's cloud comes with a lot of extra features that are free of charge."
"There are so many models that I don't have to create one."
"It has improved our organization through provisioning and security hardening. When we do get a new VM, we have been able to bring on a provisioned machine in less than a day. This morning alone, I provisioned two machines within an hour. I am talking about hardening, installing antivirus software on it, and creating user accounts because the Playbooks were predesigned. From the time we got the servers to the actual hand-off, it takes less than an hour. We are talking about having the servers actually authenticate Red Hat Satellites and run the yum updates. All of that can be done within an hour."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"I like the fact that Ansible is agentless."
"The reason I like Ansible is, first, the coding of it is very straightforward, it's very human-readable. I'm also on a contract, and I can clearly iterate and bring people up to speed very quickly on writing a Playbook compared with writing up a Puppet manifest or a Salt script."
"Ansible Tower offers use a UI where we can see all the pushes that have gone into the server."
"Some colleagues and other companies use it and comment that it is easy to use, easy to understand, and offers good features."
"On the network side, I already have a lot of our firewall related processes automated. If it's not automated all the way from the ticket system, our network team members, our tier-one guys in India, can just go into the Tower web interface and fill in a couple of survey questions."
"The compliance auditing helped me a lot."
"The most valuable feature is the fact that you don't have to expose your mission-critical environment to the Internet. With the Satellite system in place, it acts as a barrier between your Red Hat infrastructure and the public Internet."
"Technical support has been good."
"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to process patching and updates completely offline without an internet connection."
"Previously, we were using one server to update from a different repository over the HTTP. We had to manually manage the updates on the repository server. Satellite made the process easier."
"Fixing is the most valuable. When you deal with a lot of hardware and software and you have a lot of packages, fixing is a bit difficult. You need to track and pull up all such things, but Satellite makes this task easy. We have branches in other locations, and I can manage other branches by using Satellite Capsule, which is a great feature."
"We've been getting reasonable support from Red Hat."
"The most valuable feature is the management of the distributed tool we use in the Red Hat Linux Servers."
"The backend of Microsoft Intune needs to be improved. We have seen a little bit of delay as compared to other MDM solutions. That needs to be improved. A little bit more granularity should also be added"
"I'd like some more reporting so that I don't have to delve into PowerShell and I can pull more of the local device information such as memory, apps installed, etc. It would be nice to be able to see the apps that are present there but might not be managed. For example, if they installed 7Zip, it could report that back via an installed program or feature to see what was currently installed."
"More integration with monitoring tools is needed."
"The initial setup is a little bit complex."
"Once it's configured it is unobtrusive, but it does take some hands-on to configure and deploy it properly."
"The synchronization could be improved."
"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."
"Intune has limited integration with non-Microsoft solutions."
"There is always room for improvement in features or customer support."
"When you set up Playbooks, I may have one version of the Playbook, but another member of the team may have a different vision, and we will not know which version is correct. We want to have one central repository for managing the different versions of Playbooks, so we can have better collaboration among team members. This is our use case for using Git version control."
"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."
"Ansible has just been upgraded, and the only issue that we are seeing at the moment is that the user interface can be slow. We're currently investigating the refresh period with Red Hat when you click a job and run a job. It seems that the buffer no longer runs in real-time. We haven't discovered whether that's partially an issue with our environment, but Red Hat has come back and said that they're working on a couple of bugs in the background. We've upgraded to that version in the last six months, and that's the only issue that we've seen."
"It is a little slow on the network side because every time you call a module, it's initiating an SSH or an API call to a network device, and it just slows things down."
"It needs better documentation."
"The governance features could be improved."
"Networking needs to be improved."
"I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. The licensing is a bit expensive."
"Red Hat Satellite has a short life cycle and we constantly need to update."
"They could make it more easy to use and improve the GUI so that it's more intuitive."
"It wasn't easy in the beginning, and some effort was required to work it out. I already had the product documentation, but it was not well organized. It wasn't easy to follow. There were a lot of documents here and there."
"There could be a feature to simplify the process without the requirement of any patch manager subscription."
"Red Hat Satellite's pricing needs improvement."
"The product could have more diversity in what it is able to deploy and might do better if it was not dedicated to Red Hat products only."
"It has not been significantly updated in a while."
More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 58 reviews while Red Hat Satellite is ranked 4th in Configuration Management with 22 reviews. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6, while Red Hat Satellite is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Its agentless, making the deployment fast and easy". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Red Hat Satellite writes "A good product for managing patches and updates that could be more robust and up-to-date". Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps, BMC TrueSight Server Automation and BigFix, whereas Red Hat Satellite is most compared with SUSE Manager, Microsoft Configuration Manager, AWS Systems Manager, BigFix and Chef. See our Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs. Red Hat Satellite report.
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