We performed a comparison between Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 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, Red Hat Ansible comes out ahead of BigFix. While both services provide valuable endpoint protection, BigFix’s ability to integrate with certain applications and its dashboard leave room for improvement.
"Based on my experience, I find Intune very flexible for managing Windows devices. We can use scripting, and we can make use of the self-service portal or the company portal to publish some of the applications for Windows."
"It is user-friendly, and the performance is also good. It is a convenient product"
"It is a stable solution."
"The dashboards, the security, and the customization capabilities work very well for us."
"We have one MDM that works with Windows, iOS, and Android."
"Conditional access helps me control uncontrolled access."
"There are so many features, but Windows Autopilot is one of the features that are very valuable for most customers."
"The product has eased the deployment of Microsoft apps to the devices. We can manage it properly. We can control it and push the updates. Another company helped us with the deployment. However, we can do it internally."
"BigFix is incredibly fast and accurate in patching, reporting, and remediation."
"Software distribution and patch management are the most valuable."
"The most valuable feature of BigFix is the reporting tool and patching Windows."
"It is pretty secure, and it gives extensive vulnerability features as compared to other applications. It supports multiple languages, and the security checks are pretty high as compared to other tools in the market."
"Desktop patching is the most valuable feature, because with servers, we have complete control over them, and we can simply push patches to the servers."
"Pre-packaged support for many third-party applications such as Adobe, Google, Mozilla, Sun (Java), WinZip, and others."
"It is for multiple use cases. A lot of people are looking at it just for security, and that's really endpoint security. The endpoint management part of it in terms of being able to constantly do patching for Windows, Unix, macOS, Cloud, Raspberry, VMware, and all Linux flavors is important, and they are very good at that. They have support for virtually every OS on the market."
"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."
"Since it is in YAML, if I have to explain it to somebody else, they can easily understand it."
"There are no agents by default, so adding a new server is a matter of a couple lines of configuration (on a new server and the configuration master)."
"This solution allows us to stitch a lot of different parts of the workflow together."
"Ansible provides great reliability when coupled with a versioning system (git). It helps providing predictability to the network by knowing exactly what's being pushed after validating it in production."
"It is all modular-based. If there is not a module for it today, someone will write it."
"The initial setup is easy and takes a few hours to complete."
"It increases our company's efficiency, automating all the simple tasks which used to take hours of somebody's time."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don’t need an agent for it to work."
"It would help if administrators could pinpoint the exact location of a stolen device to help law enforcement retrieve it and apprehend the suspect."
"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 should make it easier to order it, however, that's generally true for everything from Microsoft."
"They need to add more group policies. Intune currently does not have many group policies that you can deploy. Its reporting, which is very limited at the moment, also needs improvement. It will be great if they can add report customization. Its stability needs to be improved. Sometimes, when you register a device in Intune, it doesn't show up instantly on the engine portal on the admin side. They need to provide better support for complicated issues. They also have a long turnaround time."
"There are a few security features that are not available in Microsoft Intune, when compared to other products."
"The UI also needs improvements because it is complex for end-users. We have had feedback from a few users in our organization who found the UI is not feasible for tracking and analyzing all the processes and monitoring all the devices."
"There can be some added features, such as an improved dashboard. Any new feature that could be a benefit to our customers would be good."
"Areas for improvement in Intune include expanding support beyond Samsung devices to accommodate other Android manufacturers like Redmi and Motorola."
"I'm looking for them to make big web UI improvements."
"I would like to see much better web reporting because as it is now, it's convoluted, basic, it's not modern, and there are limitations to it."
"There is no support for patch management on SLES on IBM pSeries (only the Intel platform is supported)."
"I would request them to build a robots, or an easier way for integration with the other tools, like ITSM tools."
"The product is quite buggy and complicated to use."
"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."
"Sometimes there is a lag time for our users."
"I remember doing restarts a few times. So, making sure that it is rock solid from an executable perspective is important."
"The solution must be made easier to configure."
"The solution should add a nice self-service portal."
"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."
"For Ansible Tower, there are three tiers with ten nodes. I would like them to expand those ten nodes to 20, because ten nodes is not enough to test on."
"Ansible is great, but there are not many modules. You can do about 80% to 90% of things by using commands, but more modules should be added. We cannot do some of the things in Ansible. In Red Hat, we have the YUM package manager, and there are certain options that we can pass through YUM. To install the Docker Community Edition, I'll write the yum install docker-ce command, but because the Docker Community Edition is not compatible with RHEL 8, I will have to use the nobest option, such as yum install docker-ce --nobest. The nobest option installs the most stable version that can be installed on a particular system. In Ansible, the nobest option is not there. So, it needs some improvements in terms of options. There should be more options, keywords, and modules."
"Ansible could use more public relations and marketing."
"It could be easier to integrate Ansible with other solutions. No single tool can do everything. For example, we use Terraform for infrastructure and other solutions for configuration management and VMs."
"The scalability of the solution has some shortcomings."
More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
BigFix is ranked 5th in Configuration Management with 91 reviews while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 59 reviews. BigFix is rated 8.6, while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of BigFix writes "Very stable and easy to deploy with excellent patch compliance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Its agentless, making the deployment fast and easy". BigFix is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, Tanium, ManageEngine Patch Manager Plus and Red Hat Satellite, whereas Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, Microsoft Configuration Manager, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps and AWS Systems Manager. See our BigFix vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform report.
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