We performed a comparison between Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Ansible comes out on top in this comparison due to its easy setup, high performance, open-source license, and proven ROI.
"...Intune itself integrates with that entire Microsoft ecosystem. As an individual product itself, it's okay. It holds up. But when you start saying "I've bought this as part of a wider solution, as a company we are going Microsoft throughout," then it makes more sense to have Microsoft Intune... so you have that single dashboard."
"With on-premises Active Directory, the main challenge was that we had no control when a user was working from home. We didn't know what exactly a user was doing and whether the AV was up to date or not. Intune provides better control of their machines."
"The central administration con dashboard is very easy to use and provides very good oversight on all that needs to be monitored."
"As the solution is a software as a service, the scalability is unlimited."
"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."
"If the product works, remote access will be a benefit. To this point we have not had reason to have confidence in achieving that access."
"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."
"The ability to switch between Affinity and non-Affinity enrollment is great."
"The solution doesn't require any maintenance from our end because it is a cloud-based solution and Microsoft takes care of everything."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager is the software deployment. Additionally, Microsoft integrates most of the other solutions well with one another."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager is the availability of being able to manage the Microsoft estate. It handles many areas, such as asset management and tracking."
"This solution has made life easy with respect to patching, compliance, and OSD."
"What's valuable is the basic management of the systems, being able to control who can access the systems."
"Microsoft has done a good job with authentication solutions, such as single sign-on, or open authentication."
"The ease of usability is the most valuable feature. It's user-friendly."
"Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager is valuable in keeping our systems updated. We are able to send updates to all the systems. Additionally, the Intune integration is helpful."
"The user interface is well-built and very easy to navigate around."
"Having the Dashboard from an admin point of view, and seeing how all the projects and all the jobs lay out, is helpful."
"The most useful features are the playbooks. We can develop our playbooks and simplify them doing something like a cross platform."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"Feature-wise, the solution is a good open-source software offering broad support. Also, it's reliable."
"It is all modular-based. If there is not a module for it today, someone will write it."
"RBAC is great around Organizations and I can use that backend as our lab. Ingesting stuff into the JSON logs, into any sort of logging collector; it works with Splunk and there are other collectors as well. It supports Sumo and that helps, I can go create reports in Sumo Logic. Workflows are an interesting feature. I can collect a lot of templates and create a workflow out of them."
"Ansible Tower offers use a UI where we can see all the pushes that have gone into the server."
"I have a lot of Apple products in my environment. It would be nice to have an improved integration of Apple products with Microsoft Intune without Jam."
"The solution can have some compliance problems in general and the end-point user can bypass easily the company policies in Intune."
"Could benefit from user having more control over devices."
"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"
"Intune doesn't provide much control over Windows servers. It's something we struggle with."
"Intune does not provide real-time visibility."
"The product needs to upgrade itself when the server is overloaded."
"Technical support is not that great."
"I would like to see some improvements in WSUS and control of other, non-Microsoft, product updates."
"Built in PowerShell cmdlets would be a nice feature because managing clients remotely can be a pain without knowing the WMI calls to run."
"It would be better if reporting were more user-friendly. I would like to see an upgrade in the reporting structure in the next release. At the moment, you have to use an SQL query or configure it to pull reports through the graphical user interface. Their updates could be more regular. I think Mircosoft updates it every six months. They are also moving many things to Intune, and Microsoft decided to move the deployment solution there. I think SCCM is getting old, and Intune is new."
"The ability to integrate MDM would be great."
"The App to upgrades to the server needs to be improved."
"Could do with some cosmetic improvements on the user interface."
"Not everything is readily available, and there are a lot of commands that are only executable via PowerShell."
"We'd like the solution to make it easier to manage remote users."
"From Red Hat Insights point of view, the product is not on top as it is not responding as per the demand...Like on cloud platforms, you can see the main parts of Red Hat Insights, along with the inventory of all your apps. So, that is missing in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform."
"There is always room for improvement in features or customer support."
"The communication on it is not probably where it could be. We could use some real life examples where we could point customers to them and say, "This is what you are trying to do. If you follow these steps, it would at least get you started a bit quicker.""
"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."
"Additional features could be added."
"In Community, there's a lot of effort towards testing, standardizing, and testing for module development to role development, which is why Molecule is now becoming real. Same thing with Zuul, which we are starting to implement. Zulu tests out modules from third-party sources, like ourselves, and verifies that the modules work before they are committed to the code. Currently, Ansible can't do this with all the modules out there."
"We are not using the Dashboard a lot because we have higher expectations from it. The default Dashboard from Tower doesn't give that much information. We really want to get down into more than if the job succeeded or what was the percentage of success. We want to get down to task-level success. If, in a job, there are ten tasks, we want to see this task was a success, and this was not, and how many were not. That's the kind of granularity we are looking for, that Tower does not give right now."
"It would be good to make the solution more user-friendly,"
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Microsoft Configuration Manager is ranked 2nd in Configuration Management with 78 reviews while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 58 reviews. Microsoft Configuration Manager is rated 8.2, while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Microsoft Configuration Manager writes "Seamless system updates, useful integration, and reliable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Capable of broad integrations with easy-to-operate infrastructure and user controls". Microsoft Configuration Manager is most compared with ManageEngine Endpoint Central, BigFix, Tanium, AWS Systems Manager and Red Hat Satellite, whereas Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps, BMC TrueSight Server Automation and BigFix. See our Microsoft Configuration Manager vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform report.
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