We performed a comparison between ManageEngine Endpoint Central 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, BigFix comes out ahead of ManageEngine Endpoint Central. While both solutions offer useful patch management and endpoint protection features, ManageEngine Endpoint’s lack of support for different operating systems, and the fact that not all of its features come in the same box, leave room for improvement.
"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 easy to use, simple to understand for those new to using it, and combined with the other Microsoft products it makes for an overall good package."
"Intune's most valuable features are the device, compliance, and configuration policies."
"It's easy to manage."
"It's very informative when there is an error. It allows us to backtrace where the error is and resolve that ourselves. It's a bit of a Swiss Army penknife. We find that it fixes most issues."
"The stability is good."
"It supports end-users who tend to lock their devices quite frequently. Its conditional access policy helps us keep the users logged into their devices."
"It's really easy to access."
"Prior to BigFix we used Altiris, which was distributed. We had to manage multiple servers, and duplicate the tasks that we did on each server. BigFix tremendously reduced the amount of work that we had to do on each server in a centralized manner. We could minimize the work that we had to do, and we had a lot more control over the tasks and what machines they ran on."
"BigFix is easy to use."
"It is a one-stop tool that allows you to do everything. It supports reporting, vulnerability management, patch management, and configuration. All things can be done in one tool."
"It allows us to quickly deploy capabilities that we need, whether it be security or non-security. We use it to keep systems up to date, deploy new drivers, find the information we need in the case of security incidents. The capability allows us to gather a lot of information very quickly and it also allows us to have a centralized reporting feature and a centralized deployment capability which is nice."
"It's good for reporting hardware and software."
"From a security standpoint, it allows us to make sure that we're not leaving ourselves vulnerable to exploits and things like that. That's the biggest advantage that we see to the product from a security standpoint."
"What I like most is that it is a powerful solution."
"It is user-friendly."
"Its cross-platform capabilities and the ability to do both OS-level patching and third-party patching are valuable. It is difficult to find a software product that will do all that for you out of the box, and you don't have to do any configuration other than your initial setup. Once you do that, there is a very minimalistic approach to getting it operational. You can have it up and running within a 20-minute time span."
"It's a complete product that allows you to remote troubleshoot, has an inventory of systems."
"ManageEngine has improved my organization because right now we can actually monitor and find out which software products are installed on each desktop. We can then figure out which ones have to get patched and so forth."
"Since deploying Desktop Central our endpoints are all updated. We use configuration management to deploy shortcuts to our users' desktops with ease. Also, we use configuration management to map logical hard drives to our users. Our users are very happy with how much ease IT can solve their problems."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the Patch Management."
"The initial setup is easy."
"The most valuable in Desktop Central is the way it is tightly coupled with the rest of the modules and the entire gamut of ManageEngine."
"The ability to patch my servers and endpoints is the most important for me. However, this feature is more pronounced in ManageEngine Desktop Central."
"We haven't really gone through all the features of Intune. We are just discovering them. Every day, we see a new feature that we want to apply, but what will be great for Intune is to be able to deploy apps in a simple fashion. We should be able to easily install various apps on the Windows platform, iOS, and Android. Currently, we have to write some scripts. It's not as straightforward as we would like it to be. It should be simplified so that we can do it just with three clicks—next, next, finish—without needing to write a script."
"Intune's areas for improvement revolve around security and certificate management."
"It would be better if I could integrate it with my core group policy. I would like to have a group policy in my current environment, which has strict control, but those things are still missing. Although it has maximum compliance and security, it's not available on-premise."
"They should make it easier to order it, however, that's generally true for everything from Microsoft."
"The main disadvantage seen today is regarding Linux clients. We have a lot of development resources that have Linux on their clients, and we can't manage them on the same platform, as we do with other clients such as macOS and Windows. So, it should have support for Linux clients. It should also have better support for macOS."
"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."
"I have a lot of Apple products in my environment. It would be nice to have an improved integration of Apple products with Microsoft Intune without Jam."
"Additional application deployment options e.g. MSI deployment with more complex parameters or additional side-by-side files, and non-MSI deployment options."
"License management isn't quite as easy as it should be to deal with the licensing. You need to take the server down to import the new licenses which I find to be annoying."
"Sometimes there is a lag time for our users."
"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."
"I would like to see the integration of user security between the different products to be improved. There's separate security for compliance, separate security for web reports, and the console, and you have to manage those things separately."
"Relay selection and availability needs improvement as an incorrect relay selected can cause network chokes."
"They need better integration."
"The scalability of the web UI product doesn't scale to the size that we need for our implementation so it needs to expand. I would also like to see the capability to develop on the back of the web UI capability. There are lots of web features and integrations that we could do with web UI that it would be nice to be able to put on top of what's already there, rather than waiting for IBM to develop what we need."
"Sometimes the workstations communicate back to the BigFix server two or three days in a week or something similar. Sometimes there can be a delay reporting back to the server for a variety of reasons, such as users turning their computer off when they go home. When the user comes back and turns the computer back on BigFix needs to synchronize and sometimes it can take some time, approximately one week. The communication between the agent and the server should be faster, there is room for improvement in this area."
"Not many things are needed for improvement, everything seems to be great as it is. One thing that would be good to have would be the ability to add MDM to a tablet running Android 5.0 using the EMM Token Enrollment. If we wanted to add MDM to an older tablet, we just have to go the "long route" to get it added."
"I would like to see them include the ability to find out the network usage but I believe that might be a feature of it already."
"The performance sometimes lags a bit because the solution is demanding on system resources."
"Compared to the solution we use to manage our Mac products, this solution lacks the ability to create dynamic groups. We would like the ability, for example, for machines which have been upgraded to form part of a grouping based on this upgrade."
"There are occasional glitches."
"Computer imaging is powerful but breaks frequently. The reason for this breaking is not clear and requires heavy amounts of attention to keep operational. There is a lot of room for this tool to do more but the reliability of this process should be focused on first to ensure core competencies are being fixed before more features are added."
"ManageEngine Desktop Central should keep up with some of the features that other major vendors are providing, such as Microsoft."
"Documentation could improve so we don't need to create the support requests first."
More ManageEngine Endpoint Central Pricing and Cost Advice →
BigFix is ranked 4th in Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) with 91 reviews while ManageEngine Endpoint Central is ranked 3rd in Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) with 60 reviews. BigFix is rated 8.6, while ManageEngine Endpoint Central is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of BigFix writes "Very stable and easy to deploy with excellent patch compliance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of ManageEngine Endpoint Central writes "An in-depth and intuitive product with good cross-platform capabilities, but they should have a more global support channel". BigFix is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services and Tanium, whereas ManageEngine Endpoint Central is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, VMware Workspace ONE, Jamf Pro, ManageEngine Patch Manager Plus and ManageEngine Mobile Device Manager Plus. See our BigFix vs. ManageEngine Endpoint Central report.
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