We performed a comparison between BigFix and Chef 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."It is a very helpful solution."
"The Microsoft Windows Autopilot and Defender policies are the most valuable features of this solution."
"The stability of Microsoft Intune is good."
"Application deployment and keeping the devices secure no matter where they are, by having this cloud solution — that has been great."
"It has improve our organization through the remote management of non-domain joined devices."
"Microsoft's cloud comes with a lot of extra features that are free of charge."
"Internet-based access with security is what I have found to be most valuable. It is also a stable and scalable solution."
"There are so many features, but Windows Autopilot is one of the features that are very valuable for most customers."
"The technical support for BigFix is really amazing."
"Pre-packaged support for many third-party applications such as Adobe, Google, Mozilla, Sun (Java), WinZip, and others."
"BigFix is easy to use."
"The best feature of BigFix is its multi-platform support."
"BigFix is a great product. The flexibility of putting together your own relevance and retrieving custom data from any one of your agents is a valuable feature. It is one of my favorite features because if a boss asks me, "How many of these devices do we have?", I can put together a report in two seconds."
"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."
"It's easy to use, not complicated."
"The patch management and the BigFix Inventory have been the most valuable features."
"The product is useful for automating processes."
"The most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."
"The scalability of the product is quite nice."
"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."
"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."
"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 reports that are generated aren't so great. They don't give a lot of meaning so far, but that could be down to user knowledge than the actual reporting side of things. I'm not a big user of it, but I was a bigger user of MaaS360, and we used to be able to run weekly and monthly reports. In the case of any deviations. we'd get a warning immediately. That's not so easy to do or to get in place for Intune. This could be just a user issue, but when I compare both, that's the only thing that's lacking for me."
"There is improvement needed in integrating with the installed Office solutions versions, such as Office 2019. The Office 365 integrates without a problem."
"It should be easier to define policies and comply with those policies."
"Intune lags all of its competitors in terms of report generation."
"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."
"It's only good for a Microsoft environment."
"A new Intune feature allows application packaging, but it incurs additional licensing costs for a significant number of applications."
"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."
"The scalability of the web UI product doesn't scale to the size that we need for our implementation so it needs to expand. I would also like to see the capability to develop on the back of the web UI capability. There are lots of web features and integrations that we could do with web UI that it would be nice to be able to put on top of what's already there, rather than waiting for IBM to develop what we need."
"The product should become cloud-based. Also, the peer nesting ability of the product is a little backward."
"The console interface is not friendly, and requires training before using it in production."
"The product is quite buggy and complicated to use."
"The main shortcoming of BigFix was integration with vulnerability management. If you had a vulnerability in your software and BigFix on the endpoint, you needed integration with Qualys, Tenable, or another vulnerability management solution to fix that. It was like, "Okay, we can identify issues, and get that information back from the endpoint, but what are we doing about it?""
"I would like to see API connectivity, built-in API connectors to the standard toolsets, whether it's for your ServiceNow or your Qualys. More API connectivity to make it easier to integrate to other tools."
"I want to see a solution for being able to deploy automated software to a Mac running OS X 10.13, something that's going to deal with kernel exceptions and answering prompts for user permissions for data folders and whatnot. They need to really streamline and automate the Mac software deployment."
"One aspect that could be improved is the speed of the console. Sometimes it can be slow, which is something that needs to be addressed."
"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."
"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"It is an old technology."
"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 appears to be no effort to fix the command line utility functionality, which is definitely broken, provides a false positive for a result when you perform the operation, and doesn't work."
"I would also like to see more analytics and reporting features. Currently, the analytics and reporting features are limited. I'll have to start building my own custom solution with Power BI or Tableau or something like that. If it came with built-in analytics and reporting features that would be great."
BigFix is ranked 5th in Configuration Management with 91 reviews while Chef is ranked 16th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews. BigFix is rated 8.6, while Chef is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of BigFix writes "Very stable and easy to deploy with excellent patch compliance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Chef writes "Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation". BigFix is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Tanium and ManageEngine Patch Manager Plus, whereas Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, SaltStack and Microsoft Configuration Manager. See our BigFix vs. Chef report.
See our list of best Configuration Management vendors.
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