We performed a comparison between Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Satellite based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Ansible has a slight edge over Satellite in this comparison since it is a free solution and easier to deploy than Satellite.
"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."
"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."
"The initial setup is not overly complex or difficult."
"I believe that the solution is actually in Gartner's top quadrant at the moment for mobile device management."
"It is a helpful tool to manage BYOD policies."
"A valuable feature is user enrollment, where users can enroll their devices in their organizations themselves."
"Fortunately, now everything is streamlined into a single, unified platform."
"The performance of Microsoft Intune is good."
"It enabled me to take the old build manifest and automated everything. So when it came time to spin everything up, it was quick and simple. I could spin it up and test it out. And then, when it came time to roll production, it was a done deal. When we expanded to multiple data centers, it was same thing: Change a few IP addresses, change some names, and off we went."
"One of the most valuable features is automation. We are doing automation infrastructure, which allows us to automate regular tasks. This solution provides us with a service catalog, like building new services and automating daily tasks."
"Its checking and validating ensures our packages are properly patched."
"It is quick to production. It has an API in the back which allows for integrations."
"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."
"The most valuable features of the solution are automation and patching."
"The automation manager is very good."
"It has made our infrastructure more testable. We are able to build our infrastructure in CI, then are more confident in what we are deploying will work, not breaking everything."
"The compliance auditing helped me a lot."
"The most valuable feature is the fact that you don't have to expose your mission-critical environment to the Internet. With the Satellite system in place, it acts as a barrier between your Red Hat infrastructure and the public Internet."
"The product allows us to handle patching for multiple servers at a time manually."
"We've been getting reasonable support from Red Hat."
"The most valuable feature is the management of the distributed tool we use in the Red Hat Linux Servers."
"Patch management is, for sure, most valuable. For license management and patch management, I would rate it a 10 out of 10."
"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to process patching and updates completely offline without an internet connection."
"It has been a stable solution...It is a totally scalable solution."
"There is improvement needed in integrating with the installed Office solutions versions, such as Office 2019. The Office 365 integrates without a problem."
"Onboarding of endpoint devices is not straightforward. The onboarding process was a little heavier than I thought it would be. That's the key improvement area. Obviously, the more control you have over the devices, the better it is."
"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."
"Intune should be much more granular in terms of supporting more Android cellular devices."
"Having a dedicated configuration server that assists in modifying the configuration service, and creating personalized structures, interfaces, and web services could enhance usability."
"The solution can have some compliance problems in general and the end-point user can bypass easily the company policies in Intune."
"It would be nice to have a location tracker for the mobile device management tool. I'm not sure if it exists but hasn't been configured or if it's missing, but we've been unable to utilize the location features."
"Intune's reporting and logging could be improved. When troubleshooting, it's difficult to collect the logs and determine what's happening. If I want to filter out the compliant devices, I can see it from the logs, but I would like the option to drill down further."
"The solution should add a nice self-service portal."
"The product could do a better job at building infrastructure."
"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."
"The support could be better."
"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 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."
"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."
"The documentation for the installation step of deployment, OpenStack, etc., and these things have to be a bit more detailed."
"Regarding the product's ability to support third-party tools, Red Hat doesn't support all the layers from the open-source version of Linux."
"Red Hat Satellite's pricing needs improvement."
"There needs to be some margin for improvement in terms of the way Satellite manages subscriptions. It is still very confusing when we have different contracts or different bundles of subscriptions, and we need to manage those within Satellite in a way that's very user-friendly."
"I would like to see the scalability, user interface, and reporting features improved and for the solution to be simplified. Instead of having complex engineering, it should be simple for the user."
"The product could have more diversity in what it is able to deploy and might do better if it was not dedicated to Red Hat products only."
"I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. The licensing is a bit expensive."
"The product's automation capabilities need enhancement."
"Improving integration could lead to a more unified management experience for multiple operating systems within our data center."
More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 58 reviews while Red Hat Satellite is ranked 4th in Configuration Management with 22 reviews. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6, while Red Hat Satellite 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 Red Hat Satellite writes "A good product for managing patches and updates that could be more robust and up-to-date". Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps, BMC TrueSight Server Automation and BigFix, whereas Red Hat Satellite is most compared with SUSE Manager, Microsoft Configuration Manager, AWS Systems Manager, BigFix and Chef. See our Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs. Red Hat Satellite report.
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