We performed a comparison between AWS Systems Manager and Chef 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."Intune can wipe devices. For example, if a disgruntled employee wants to leak the data on their company phone, Intune can terminate their access and wipe the entire device with a click."
"I like the fact that it's integrated with the rest of the Microsoft products, so customers can manage it from their Office 365 portal or Azure portal."
"We have not experienced any bugs or glitches with this solution."
"It is quite policy-enabled, so you can build pretty much any policy to manage remote endpoints."
"Fortunately, now everything is streamlined into a single, unified platform."
"It works well if you have a Microsoft environment."
"The biggest thing for us is enforcing logins only from devices that are managed by Intune."
"Mobile device management is most valuable."
"Has a variety of automation options."
"AWS provides Auto Scaling groups."
"Systems Manager has a feature where it analyzes the logs and gives us a performance overview in the form of a graph. We know when it's taking up more resources and when there are spikes, so we can predict the usability."
"The solution's ability to scale is good."
"When we do the automation in the cloud, we use the SSM agent. This helps us to test our automation and documents, and monitor the cloud."
"The solution is user-friendly"
"With AWS Systems Manager, our company can patch our systems directly from it, so we don't need to patch our systems manually."
"The most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."
"It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."
"The product is useful for automating processes."
"This solution has improved my organization in the way that deployment has become very quick and orchestration is easy. If we have thousands of servers we can easily deploy in a small amount of time. We can deploy the applications or any kind of announcements in much less time."
"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."
"It has been very easy to tie it into our build and deploy automation for production release work, etc. All the Chef pieces more or less run themselves."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"A new Intune feature allows application packaging, but it incurs additional licensing costs for a significant number of applications."
"Areas for improvement in Intune include expanding support beyond Samsung devices to accommodate other Android manufacturers like Redmi and Motorola."
"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."
"It needs incorporation of Knox, ZeroTouch, etc."
"The UI is not user-friendly and has room for improvement."
"The Mac integration has room for improvement."
"There should be more focus on mobile device security and integration."
"The solution could improve its flexibility."
"AWS does not have EKS cluster backup."
"The current challenge is that we can't pull any incidents from other accounts."
"The fact that AWS Systems Manager takes time to complete the patching process, makes it an area where improvements are required."
"Lacks sufficient integrations."
"Additional features can be added as per customer requirements."
"The AWS UIs are not the most intuitive. Also, the usability needs room for improvement."
"We formerly used third-party products to analyze the log, give us information, and find bottlenecks. Systems Manager could provide more tools that conduct this analysis, so we don't have to do it ourselves."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."
"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."
"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."
"They could provide more features, so the recipes could be developed in a simpler and faster way. There is still a lot of room for improvement, providing better functionalities when creating recipes."
"There appears to be no effort to fix the command line utility functionality, which is definitely broken, provides a false positive for a result when you perform the operation, and doesn't work."
"It is an old technology."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
AWS Systems Manager is ranked 6th in Configuration Management with 7 reviews while Chef is ranked 16th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews. AWS Systems Manager is rated 8.0, while Chef is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of AWS Systems Manager writes "Offers a variety of automation options; simplifies governance and administration ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Chef writes "Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation". AWS Systems Manager is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Red Hat Satellite, AWS CloudFormation and SaltStack, whereas Chef is most compared with Jenkins, Microsoft Azure DevOps, BigFix, SaltStack and Microsoft Configuration Manager. See our AWS Systems Manager vs. Chef report.
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