We performed a comparison between Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and SaltStack 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."The technical support of Microsoft Intune is good."
"The ability to (somewhat) manage full Windows 10 computers including EXE-based or MSI-based application deployments using Azure Active Directory as Identity."
"...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."
"We already use a lot of Microsoft products in our company, and therefore, it made sense to also use this product."
"I haven't used other mobile device management solutions, but compared to SCCM, we eliminate a lot of on-premises infrastructure and maintenance by using Intune."
"The many policies available in Microsoft Intune for managing our devices are valuable."
"Autopilot is a great feature. Most users are looking for a zero-touch deployment."
"The ability to push applications on devices is valuable. You do not have to manually install applications one by one. If you like to use ten different applications, you do not have to manually go and download them one by one. Intune can compile a package for you, and then you can just push them from the admin center."
"The solution can scale."
"The automation manager is very good."
"It is agentless. I don't have to think about which client system my unit has understanding in or not, because I can execute from my system. It will go and configure it, and any module that it is looking for will be shipped out."
"I like the inventory management. It's a very nice, simple, concise way to keep all that data together. And the API allows us to use it even for things that are not Ansible."
"Being a game-changer in configuration management software is what has made Ansible so popular and widespread. Much of IT is based on SSH direct connectivity with a need for running infrastructure in an agentless way, and that has been a big plus. SSH has become a great security standard for managing servers. The whole thing has really become an out-of-the-box solution for managing a Unix estate."
"It is very easy to use, and there is less room for error."
"It is quick to production. It has an API in the back which allows for integrations."
"Ansible is agentless. So, we don't need to set up any agent into the computer we are interacting with. The only prerequisite is that the host with which we are going to interact must have the Python interpreter installed on it. We can connect to a host and do our configuration by using Ansible."
"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."
"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."
"We monitor the configurations against CIS standards. We run CIS benchmarks and maintain configurations with higher CIS values for each server."
"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."
"The reporting could be improved, as it's pretty poor compared to other products of this type."
"Integrating certain group policies can be challenging and may necessitate using on-premises systems to integrate them with Microsoft Intune."
"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."
"Deploying an app can be a complex process due to dependencies."
"Intune should be much more granular in terms of supporting more Android cellular devices."
"For an existing customer who has an SCCM, it would need to be upgraded to an MECM first before I can introduce Microsoft Intune."
"The solution could improve by having better integration with Apple."
"The documentation about the custom image setup could be better. Although Microsoft provides the steps to configure Intune or set up or deploy Intune, it doesn't have much information related to custom images. If you ask, "how can we deploy the custom image?" There is no information. The steps they mention ask you to connect to your on-premises environment or create your own image on the cloud itself once there is connectivity. But I needed to go to multiple websites to get all this information. I had to figure out how to upload the custom image if you want to use the on-premise custom image for Cloud PC. If you have the proper subscription, you must have the right access, like global admin or owner. Then you can add your custom image to that. There are no steps mentioned over there. Microsoft Intune doesn't have Chrome browser support. I would like to have that support because they will want it if we pitch the product to clients."
"The governance features could be improved."
"They should think of this product as an end-to-end solution and begin to develop it that way."
"Additional features could be added."
"It would be helpful to have templates for common configurations. It would make it much easier and faster rather than creating a whole script. The templates would decrease the learning curve as well."
"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."
"On the Dashboard, when you view a template run, it shows all the output. There is a search filter, but it would be nice to able to select one server in that run and then see all that output from just that one server, instead of having to do the search on that one server and find the results."
"It should support more integration with different products."
"What I would like to see is a refined Dashboard to see, when I log in: Here are all my jobs, here are how many times they've executed; some kind graphical stitching-together of the workflows and jobs, and how they're connected. Also, those "failed hosts," what does that mean? We have a problem, a failed host can be anything. Is SSH the reason it failed? Is the job template why it failed? It doesn't really distinguish that."
"SaltStack's features are minimal."
"There is a little bit of pain when it comes to libraries and what is needed to run the product."
"Web UI."
"It is difficult to set up."
"Its configuration process could be better."
"This solution could be integrated with more hardware for an improved offering."
"A hardened set of tests would be much appreciated."
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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 58 reviews while SaltStack is ranked 14th in Configuration Management with 33 reviews. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6, while SaltStack is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Capable of broad integrations with easy-to-operate infrastructure and user controls". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SaltStack writes "Orchestration tool that powers automation of processes with the click of a button". Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, Microsoft Configuration Manager, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps and BMC TrueSight Server Automation, whereas SaltStack is most compared with VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Configuration Manager, HashiCorp Terraform, Red Hat Satellite and Automic Workload Automation. See our Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs. SaltStack report.
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