We performed a comparison between Chef and Quest KACE Systems Management 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."It provides control over all mobile devices that are being connected to the corporate network."
"The ability to (somewhat) manage full Windows 10 computers including EXE-based or MSI-based application deployments using Azure Active Directory as Identity."
"The biggest thing for us is enforcing logins only from devices that are managed by Intune."
"It has a useful device management feature."
"Autopilot is the most valuable feature."
"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."
"It's easy to manage."
"The synchronization of Intune with other Microsoft solutions is a valuable feature."
"If you're handy enough with DSL and you can present your own front-facing interface to your developers, then you can actually have a lot more granular control with Chef in operations over what developers can perform and what they can't."
"The product is useful for automating processes."
"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."
"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."
"Chef can be scaled as needed. The Chef server itself can scale but it depends on the available resources. You can upgrade specific resources to meet the demand. Similarly, with clients, you can add as many clients as you need. Again, this depends on the server resources. If the server has enough resources, it can handle the number of servers required to manage the infrastructure. Chef can be scaled to meet the needs of the infrastructure being managed."
"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."
"Stable and scalable configuration management and automation tool. Installing it is easy. Its most valuable feature is its compliance, e.g. it's very good."
"I like how when you click on the device, it shows you everything that has changed as well as the software versioning. I am really enjoying the inventory aspect of it."
"The ability to push an image to a machine, wake that image up, and just blast a new image to a computer without even having to touch it, and then push the software to that machine. This just made things so much more convenient for us and so much more efficient."
"It is excellent in terms of updating and configuring everything the way we need. For anything more complex, we do professional service engagements, and they're exceptional. For anything less complex, we just need to ask questions. Their support division is extremely good too."
"The most valuable feature of KACE is the mass package deployment. There are a lot of endpoint management solutions in the market. The way KACE responds is with the installation management feature, which is done in a very intelligent way, as well as scripting. It's wow. It's really wow. On top of that, there is a mass undeployment feature as well."
"We can get the majority of what we need with this product and do not have to spend money on something else."
"This solution makes it easy to control assets and upgrade all types of software."
"There is ease of use, and its pricing was a driving factor."
"My company had bought some new machines. We used the tool to do some basic settings to ship every machine the same way and undertake the Windows deployment. We did the scripted installation. The tool helped us deploy custom software for specific departments. We also did Windows updates with the product."
"While Intune works perfectly well, the only potential downside is that the deployment could be a bit complex for some users."
"The scalability could be improved, and like most other MDM products, Intune is good but not 100% there yet."
"Areas for improvement in Intune include expanding support beyond Samsung devices to accommodate other Android manufacturers like Redmi and Motorola."
"I wanted to check if there is any provision at the Intune level to restrict certain things, such as a website, but unfortunately, that feature is available only in Microsoft Defender. Intune has web filtering capabilities, but they are only useful for protection from malicious websites, whereas we would like to be able to restrict a website. For example, YouTube is a clean website. No one would identify it as a malicious website, but if we want to stop the end-users from going to that website, we have to go for another product, such as Microsoft Defender or another third-party proxy solution. It would be great if this capability is included in Intune."
"Microsoft Intune needs to improve the initial login process."
"I would like to see easier pushdowns. Currently, we have to package our own software and then push it. Intune can make that way easier and integrate applications, such as Zoom and Adobe Acrobat, that are used by a lot of enterprise or corporate organizations."
"Having a dedicated configuration server that assists in modifying the configuration service, and creating personalized structures, interfaces, and web services could enhance usability."
"Sometimes, updating a client policy is very difficult. This needs to be improved."
"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."
"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."
"It is an old technology."
"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."
"I would rate this solution a nine because our use case and whatever we need is there. Ten out of ten is perfect. We have to go to IOD and stuff so they should consider things like this to make it a ten."
"The time that it takes in terms of integration. Cloud integration is comparatively easy, but when it comes to two-link based integrations - like trying to integrate it with any monitoring tools, or maybe some other ticketing tools - it takes longer. That is because most of the out-of-the-box integration of the APIs needs some revisiting."
"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."
"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."
"The problem is that it's harder to directly emulate a lot of the stuff that the group policies do, using the KACE solution. With regular group policies, you just specify the various settings you want to change on the workstations, and then you specify the workstations and—while it's kind of an ugly mess—it does it. Whereas on KACE, you really have to know what you're doing with scripting to effectively script those exact same changes."
"Paying for the product should come with full and extended training anytime it is needed."
"We'd love to see support for larger dependencies in the scripting feature."
"The only pain point I have is with their salespeople. They call too often. They're too aggressive in trying to upsell. We know what we need, and we know if we want to expand. I don't mind quarterly calls from them, but sometimes, it is weekly. They need to get their sales team under control. The main goal of their support people and professional services is to make sure they deliver the service, and they deliver it well, whereas their salespeople are so interested in making a sale that they're wasting my time."
"KACE implemented the possibility of reducing the network speed of the KACE agent. You can set it so that it takes whatever network speed you want or you can set it to 5 Mb, to save network speed. You set it for all the computers, but it would be preferable to separate between VPN connections in our home office and the local area. It would be great to be able to set separate speeds for different VLANs."
"Sometimes the information is not as real time as it's supposed to be."
"There should be a mini toolbox, like the competitors of KACE have, with the small features for KACE administrators. That would make their lives easier. If you are troubleshooting a specific endpoint, remote control is available as is Wake-on-LAN. But if you want to execute some commands, you have to use a third-party tool, the PS tool. If they would integrate those small things, it would make KACE more powerful."
"Scalability is my primary concern right now."
More Quest KACE Systems Management Pricing and Cost Advice →
Chef is ranked 16th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews while Quest KACE Systems Management is ranked 9th in Configuration Management with 38 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while Quest KACE Systems Management is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Chef writes "Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Quest KACE Systems Management writes "Easy to use, saves us time, and increases IT productivity". Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, BigFix and SaltStack, whereas Quest KACE Systems Management is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, BigFix, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Automox. See our Chef vs. Quest KACE Systems Management report.
See our list of best Configuration Management vendors.
We monitor all Configuration Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
