We performed a comparison between ManageEngine Endpoint Central 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, BigFix comes out ahead of ManageEngine Endpoint Central. While both solutions offer useful patch management and endpoint protection features, ManageEngine Endpoint’s lack of support for different operating systems, and the fact that not all of its features come in the same box, leave room for improvement.
"It provides control over all mobile devices that are being connected to the corporate network."
"The aspects I find most valuable are the managing the data and applications. I can also restrict the users to install any applications. I can also wipe the data if the phone was missplaced or stolen. These are the basics for me."
"Intune's security features for Apple iOS and Mac OS are helpful. We can check enrollment, manage public and private settings, and manage the organization's data using security key features."
"The solution is stable."
"I like that it's very good and very simple. I found that we just needed to have a proper subscription for an Intune tenant, and from the subscription, if we have the right role assigned, like the global admin role or the owner role, we can use Microsoft cloud resources. With the help of that, we can do many things like setting up Microsoft Intune in the cloud to create our virtual machines. All these can be done, and the steps are very simple. I really liked it. I like features like Windows Auto-Enrollment. I like it very much because whenever you supply it to the end-user, it will be ready to use immediately. The end-user only needs to provide the user credentials, and then they are good to go. I also really like Cloud PC, which was recently launched on Azure."
"Being able to manage the devices remotely is most valuable. We can push security requirements through Microsoft Intune."
"Internet-based access with security is what I have found to be most valuable. It is also a stable and scalable solution."
"There has been a noticeable increase in productivity for both my organization and clients."
"The most valuable feature of BigFix is the software deployment."
"From a security standpoint, it allows us to make sure that we're not leaving ourselves vulnerable to exploits and things like that. That's the biggest advantage that we see to the product from a security standpoint."
"Between the user groups, the community, the AVP support, the direct access via technical route and the PMR support, half the time I don't even need to do a formal PMR because the solutions from the community resolve whatever issues we're having. It's the best community and support based system I've ever used."
"It has improved my organization because we can automate a lot of tasks. We went from manually patching machines or doing our best and having very little visibility into it to us being able to set it and forget it and getting really good results on first-pass patching."
"BigFix is incredibly fast and accurate in patching, reporting, and remediation."
"This has very much improved our organization by saving time to deploy thousands of endpoints to our customers."
"The technical support for BigFix is really amazing."
"The architecture for patching and the 100% correct reporting makes BigFix stand apart from other solutions."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the Patch Management."
"The solution's most valuable features are its patch management capabilities, especially for third-party applications, along with quick and easy configuration and deployment processes."
"The stability is very good."
"One of the benefits of Desktop Central is it made the provisioning process simpler because now we have a provisioning package. We have around 1,500 laptops at the moment and all these PCs were provisioned by a provisioning package. In the provisioning package, we have integrated every aspect of renaming, deploying applications, patching, etc., so we simply execute the provisioning package and as soon as it's executed, it will install the management agent. Once the agent is installed, it will take care of all the tasks, so we don't have to sit in front of the computer to prepare the machine. This really helps us to provision the PC quickly with our agent."
"The solution is stable."
"ManageEngine Desktop Central's most valuable features are remote desktop control and image management. We can send things out from the desk here, it is a very good tool for us."
"The patch manager is good, and it's easy to use."
"The initial setup process is good."
"It would help if administrators could pinpoint the exact location of a stolen device to help law enforcement retrieve it and apprehend the suspect."
"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."
"The add-ons must be integrated into the solution."
"The biggest problem we ever have is when something goes out of date after 30 days when nobody has logged into it. We do have a problem trying to get those back online. We've been working with Microsoft to resolve that problem, but that's been the only issue that we've had in the last few years."
"They could also make it easier to use because there are some other products that may be easier to use in terms of the look and feel of the dashboard."
"It should be simplified. I've worked with many different mobile device management solutions, and Intune is one of the more complex ones. It could be more simplified, and some of it is related to the wording that is being used, such as a configuration profile versus a policy. They really should have had different names to make it less confusing."
"We only have major classifications for iOS and Android, but there are different brands that have different cycles of updates. If they can fine-tune it to make it more brand-specific, that would be even better."
"There should be more support for macOS. Even though macOS is supported by Intune and Microsoft is working very hard to get more features into Intune to manage macOS, that's one thing they can give a lot more attention to."
"The product is quite buggy and complicated to use."
"There is no support for patch management on SLES on IBM pSeries (only the Intel platform is supported)."
"I self-taught for this online, so the initial setup was a little difficult to pick up at first. I had to create a couple of testing environments and destroy them in order to learn how to use it. There was a lot of trial and error, a lot of reading of the manuals."
"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."
"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?""
"Needs to improve Network Access Protection (NAP) technologies to prevent computers with vulnerabilities from gaining access to networks."
"The reporting and dashboard parts have room for improvement."
"I would like to see a web UI SDK so we could take what is provided currently and be able to build our own customized web UI for particular customers that want to sell service."
"The support could be faster."
"I would like to see them come out with a SaaS version of the product in the future."
"The solution should be better at integrating with other solutions."
"It might be helpful if they offered a simpler way to use the OS deployment function. It's a bit complicated for most of the customers."
"There are occasional glitches."
"ManageEngine Desktop Central should keep up with some of the features that other major vendors are providing, such as Microsoft."
"We would like to see options for deploying Microsoft 365 accounts into Outlook. For now we only can use it to deploy exchange accounts. Also we would like to see an option do decline Windows 7 ESU patches in a bulk."
"The solution is expensive."
More ManageEngine Endpoint Central Pricing and Cost Advice →
BigFix is ranked 4th in Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) with 91 reviews while ManageEngine Endpoint Central is ranked 3rd in Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) with 60 reviews. BigFix is rated 8.6, while ManageEngine Endpoint Central is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of BigFix writes "Very stable and easy to deploy with excellent patch compliance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of ManageEngine Endpoint Central writes "An in-depth and intuitive product with good cross-platform capabilities, but they should have a more global support channel". BigFix is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Tanium, whereas ManageEngine Endpoint Central is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, VMware Workspace ONE, Jamf Pro, ManageEngine Patch Manager Plus and ManageEngine Mobile Device Manager Plus. See our BigFix vs. ManageEngine Endpoint Central report.
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