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.
"Intune device restriction policies enable me to enforce limitations on the device, like blocking the mobile camera or restricting the employees from using and inserting USB devices, including thumb drives and flash drives."
"Autopilot is a great feature. Most users are looking for a zero-touch deployment."
"The performance of Microsoft Intune is good."
"The best feature is that we don't need to worry about downtime. We don't need to worry about the network connections of our office or the virtual private network. Everything is being done through the internet. Using Intune Autopilot, we can configure and deploy everything to the devices."
"Microsoft Endpoint Manager is not expensive overall, especially for small environments."
"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."
"The solution is stable."
"The Asset Management and Auto Pilot are valuable features."
"The most valuable feature is that Ansible is agentless."
"The Organizations feature, where I can give clear silos and hand them over to different teams, that's amazing; everybody says that it's their own Tower. It's like they have their own Tower out there."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"Managing our inventory is a big pain point. Right now, we have Satellite, but we can tie it in with Satellite, so we can actually manage things and automate the entire deployment stack, instead of trying to grab things from tickets, then generating Kickstart, and using that to get things in Satellite. That doesn't work well. We can do the whole deployment stack using the inventory share between Tower and Satellite."
"The user interface is well-built and very easy to navigate around."
"One of the most valuable features is that Ansible is agentless. It does not have dependencies, other than Python, which is very generic in terms of dependencies for all systems and for any environment. Being agentless, Ansible is very convenient for everything."
"I like being able to control multiple systems and push out updates quickly with just a couple of clicks of a button and commands. I like the automation because it is a time saver."
"The most useful features are the playbooks. We can develop our playbooks and simplify them doing something like a cross platform."
"The 'remote execution' feature further helps manage systems on a consistent basis."
"We've been getting reasonable support from Red Hat."
"I like the integration with other tools."
"It has been a stable solution...It is a totally scalable solution."
"The compliance auditing helped me a lot."
"You don't need to depend on any third party. It's a complete solution for patch and configuration management when integrated with the existing system."
"It plays a significant role in managing the lifecycle of our systems and ensures that we can effectively control and update the software versions to align with our organization's needs."
"The most valuable features of Red Hat Satellite are its support, simplicity, and patch management."
"It would be good if, in addition to the minimal patching and compliance, we could also use Intune for application deployment. For instance, if a device is not patched, Intune should have the ability to push not only a Microsoft patch but also other patches, such as a browser patch."
"It should be easier to define policies and comply with those policies."
"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 current Intune reporting functionality could benefit from some improvements."
"Intune does not provide real-time visibility."
"It would really be helpful to have the option to manage server operating systems as well, like Windows Server, at least. That way, we could scrap the use of SCCM, which requires a lot of on-premises infrastructure."
"In the next release, I would like a feature to be able to properly lock down the device. For example, if an attacker or somebody steals the phone, you can be sure that the pin cannot be broken."
"Areas for improvement in Intune include expanding support beyond Samsung devices to accommodate other Android manufacturers like Redmi and Motorola."
"One problem that I'm facing right now is the mismatch between the new version of Python and Ansible. Sometimes it's Python 2, and sometimes it's Python 3. When things get a bit dicey, I wish that Ansible would solve this issue by itself. I don't want to have to specify if it is Python 3 or version 2."
"It needs better documentation."
"Accessibility. Ansible uses a CLI by default. Those accustomed to it can find their way and adopt the YAML files easily over time. But, some users are more comfortable using UIs..."
"There could be more stuff in the workflows. I hope that if I have ten templates with different services on it, workflow could auto-populate all the template-based services."
"The documentation for the installation step of deployment, OpenStack, etc., and these things have to be a bit more detailed."
"We would like support for the post-integration of this product before cloud frameworks because right now their approach is to avoid using on-premises activities and move everything to the cloud."
"The governance features could be improved."
"Some of the modules in Ansible could be a bit more mature. There is still a little room for further development. Some performance aspects could be improved, perhaps in the form of parallelism within Ansible."
"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."
"The solution's initial setup is a little bit tricky."
"Satellite should be bundled with Ansible Tower and the Ansible Automation platform. We face challenges from a security perspective because we have micro-segmentation in our network. For each server we provision, we have to set permissions to different ports so that the servers can communicate with Satellite. If I have a single server with Satellite and the Ansible Automation Platform, it would be easier to manage security issues instead of having two or three products on various servers."
"There could be a feature to simplify the process without the requirement of any patch manager subscription."
"Improving integration could lead to a more unified management experience for multiple operating systems within our data center."
"I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. The licensing is a bit expensive."
"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."
"Red Hat Satellite has a short life cycle and we constantly need to update."
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 "Its agentless, making the deployment fast and easy". 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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