We performed a comparison between SaltStack and VMware Aria Automation based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat, Microsoft, HCLTech and others in Configuration Management."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."
"For Windows services, there are multiple options within Intune to modernize it to be more internet-facing and dynamic."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Intune is having all our devices compliant with our policies."
"Configuration profiles, remediation, scripts, and auto-pilot features are very good."
"The ability to switch between Affinity and non-Affinity enrollment is great."
"If you need only to load a specific profile and you don't have deep security functionalities, et cetera, Intune is very nice and good."
"The security-related tools are excellent; these features allow us to secure devices, lock them down, and ensure compliance."
"Autopilot is the most valuable feature of Microsoft Intune."
"The automation functionality has been most valuable. With a click of a button, we are able to automate provisioning, the build of new hardware and apply patches. These are all extremely important and differentiated tasks that can be automated in SaltStack."
"The product’s most valuable feature is its ability to provide environmental security."
"I want to build automation that is intelligent, part of the fabric of our environment, and is somewhat self-sustaining. I think SaltStack can help me do this."
"It is a highly stable solution."
"SaltStack has given us the ability to deal with systems at scale and rectify issues at scale."
"The ability to programmatically describe the desired state of a single, or an entire fleet of servers, on-premises, and in a cloud environment."
"We monitor the configurations against CIS standards. We run CIS benchmarks and maintain configurations with higher CIS values for each server."
"One of the most valuable features is lifecycle management. It allows my teams to create, manage, and retire all of our infrastructure objects in the data center."
"The feature of automated balancing which implemented between two data centers solely for the purpose of a recovery plan is valuable."
"The automation part is valuable, especially where vRA integrates with vRO, because it reduces the amount of effort we have to make."
"Scalability is perfect. We haven't had any issues."
"We needed vRA to easily integrate with our hypervisor, orchestration, security (tenant segmentation, PCI), workflows, custom code, and internal monitoring/management tools. Since we didn’t have time to develop our own web front-end during the development sprints, vRA saved considerable time and resource cycles. Its ability to easily integrate with all of the VMware cloud products as well as public cloud providers, like AWS and Azure, out-of-the-box, makes it an even more powerful tool."
"It benefits the speed of our development, and the speed of anything we test and send through to production."
"vRealize Automation has improved the speed of provisioning just by automating things, making people think about whether a human really needs to do something or can we make the machines do it for us. It is a lot faster to deploy things now."
"The solution is intuitive and user-friendly. E.g., you have less number of logins."
"I know that their AI pieces are at the infancy stage, but allowing users to do more tagging for information would be an interesting thing because Intune also directly integrates with Azure. Because a lot of the devices are hosted with that, you also get a lot of tagging of user data and other things like that."
"There is room for improvement in integrating additional features such as Purview and SharePoint activities into Intune."
"More integration with monitoring tools is needed."
"The main disadvantage seen today is regarding Linux clients. We have a lot of development resources that have Linux on their clients, and we can't manage them on the same platform, as we do with other clients such as macOS and Windows. So, it should have support for Linux clients. It should also have better support for macOS."
"It would be nice to have a location tracker for the mobile device management tool. I'm not sure if it exists but hasn't been configured or if it's missing, but we've been unable to utilize the location features."
"While Intune works perfectly well, the only potential downside is that the deployment could be a bit complex for some users."
"The Mac integration has room for improvement."
"The feature that allows us to import the business application from the configuration manager to Intune is not very good at this time."
"This solution could be integrated with more hardware for an improved offering."
"SaltStack's features are minimal."
"A hardened set of tests would be much appreciated."
"Its configuration process could be better."
"There is a little bit of pain when it comes to libraries and what is needed to run the product."
"It is difficult to set up."
"Web UI."
"There is certainly room for improvement with some of the little things I was talking about, like either better managing of the upgrade process, or just making the infrastructure deployment a little bit easier. It feels like all of the pieces have been automated on one level or another, like with the PowerShell scripts, doing all the IS, Windows boxes preparation. They just need to get it to be more end-to-end."
"They should make it a little bit more dynamic, a little bit easier to deal with large-scale AD deployments. They need to make it a little more enterprise-ready. That is the one thing that kills us."
"It needs to be more dynamic with variable customization to make new workloads more reliable. It also needs to be faster. We are exploring vRA version 8 right now and maybe what I'm requesting is available in the new version, but we haven't yet explored it fully."
"Something as simple as formatting the catalog in a different way would be helpful because there is no option for doing so. A lot of the contents for the virtual machine, blueprints that you can request, are hidden from view and there's no way to change the view."
"The stability is why I rated it a seven and not higher. There were several cases where we had to restart some services because it wasn't working correctly anymore. People cannot extend their machine or replay their machine. There is no alert to say that there is a problem and that we should stop the service. The monitoring system is not very good."
"The stability is 95 percent. There are some situations where it gets a little bit clumsy. When it gets really big, when you're dealing with a very large deployment, it can be a little bit difficult, but it's better than nothing. It does a significant job, given what it's tasked to do."
"It is not intuitive or user-friendly. It's complicated as heck. We actually hired VMware Professional Services to come in. I understand the newer version, which we're not quite on yet, is easier and that the interface is better. But the product is really a profession unto itself. The user interface could be improved on."
"I don't find the solution to be intuitive and user- friendly. The GUI is really complicated. Tracking down logs and errors is very hard. Then, it takes a specialized JavaScript person to build. Also, I'm not sure how the upgrades are going now, but they definitely need to evolve the upgrade process. Finally, the logs are very generalized. Giving more of an indicator of what's actually going wrong, rather than just a generic error code, would help."
SaltStack is ranked 14th in Configuration Management with 33 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 133 reviews. SaltStack is rated 8.2, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of SaltStack writes "Orchestration tool that powers automation of processes with the click of a button". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Automation writes "Allows for a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment to suit our customers". SaltStack is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, HashiCorp Terraform, Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and ServiceNow, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director, Morpheus and OpenNebula.
We monitor all Configuration Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
