We performed a comparison between Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Ansible comes out on top in this comparison due to its easy setup, high performance, open-source license, and proven ROI.
"The solution appears to be stable and scalable."
"Easy to use."
"I like how Microsoft Intune lets me lock down the email profile and make it accessible only on certain devices."
"The most valuable features are the ones that make sure that the deployment is of a standard operating system and the Zero Touch deployment, which is very useful. This allows users to have an out of box experience."
"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."
"At the moment, Autopilot is the most valuable feature."
"Fortunately, now everything is streamlined into a single, unified platform."
"Among the most valuable features are the Company Portal that is built into Intune, and the update rings so that we can manage what types of future updates the devices get."
"This solution captures all the devices in our infrastructure."
"With the right administrator, application deployment can do wonders."
"What's valuable is the basic management of the systems, being able to control who can access the systems."
"Automation of operating system, application, and update deployments massively reduces IT operations effort."
"The most valuable features are Remote Connect, SUP, Cloud functionality, Report, Query, and third-party patching."
"I have found the solution to be scalable. We have around 50,000 users using the solution."
"It's a stable product."
"I like Mircosoft's technical support. Microsoft has a few updates, like some of the critical KBs. They are published within the interval time, and in case of an escalation on the client missions, we will raise a ticket with the Microsoft team. They will create a hotfix or a critical update. They will chat with us, and that is one thing I like about Microsoft. Whenever any issues occur at my organization, they will help you out soon as possible within the SLA."
"The reason I like Ansible is, first, the coding of it is very straightforward, it's very human-readable. I'm also on a contract, and I can clearly iterate and bring people up to speed very quickly on writing a Playbook compared with writing up a Puppet manifest or a Salt script."
"Ansible Tower offers use a UI where we can see all the pushes that have gone into the server."
"The solution can scale."
"The user interface is well-built and very easy to navigate around."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is quite stable. If you set it up correctly with the right configurations and there are no hiccups during installation and deployment, it will be stable. I'd give stability a rating of eight out of ten."
"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."
"Installing it is a PIP command. So, it's pretty easy. It is a one liner."
"The solution is very simple to use."
"Lacking ability to leverage more iOS device management internally."
"There is room for improvement in integrating additional features such as Purview and SharePoint activities into Intune."
"The initial setup is a little bit complex."
"More integration with monitoring tools is needed."
"There are a few security features that are not available in Microsoft Intune, when compared to other products."
"Intune has some limitations when it comes to application updates for third-party applications. You can schedule an update, but when it's a package setup, you need to supercede and replace it each time."
"Intune's areas for improvement revolve around security and certificate management."
"One big problem with Microsoft is that they're changing the names of the products quite often, or they're quite consistently doing so. Intune is now Endpoint administration. Constantly switching the user interface or the administrative interface makes it quite hard to keep pace. If you are on a two-week holiday and you come back and look at the same screen you have looked at for the last couple of months, it looks different, which is annoying. Changing things around all the time doesn't make it easy."
"The solution can be improved with the addition of a mobile device manager."
"This solution needs to be supported on all Operating systems."
"Built in PowerShell cmdlets would be a nice feature because managing clients remotely can be a pain without knowing the WMI calls to run."
"SCCM can improve on third-party application support."
"Marketing: Our management doesn't understand that there is a piece of software which helps them automate and manage the entire network, as far as operating systems on computers."
"Its client interface should be more accessible, and the notifications should be more customizable from the console. It should be more user friendly and have some kind of customized notifications so that we can use it on the client side. These are the reasons why we restricted its use only for the server environment and didn't use it on the client side."
"I'm looking for a single solution for all discovery needs. It fulfills about 40% of the requirements, and I'd like to see the other 60% so that I don't have to keep doing this."
"They should improve their anti-malware policies like the SCEP policies. For instance, you can't have different policies for different servers, there is only one policy in all the servers, and everything is covered under that. For example, say you want to scan one group of servers on Saturday, and then you want to scan another group of servers on Sunday, you can't do that. You have to scan all your servers, a regular scan or a full scan, on the same day and at the same time. That's definitely one thing they need to resolve. In the next release, it would actually be nice if they included Apple products. It will also help if you can use Intune again. Their compliance reporting feature could also be better. They can maybe work a bit on that for patching now. It would be better if SCCM came with the functions of Right Click Tools built-in. If SCCM would have all those functions already built-in, we won't have to go and spend $5,000, just as an add-in from another company to get those functions."
"What I'm trying to figure out, personally, is, when doing mass updates, how I can parallelize that a little bit better. It seems right now - and maybe, it's a shortcoming on my end - that I run through one set of servers, and then another set of servers, ad then another set of servers, but it seems like I could throw a lot of these checks out. Different types of servers, like web servers and DB servers, if I could parallelize that a little bit to make everything run a little bit more efficiently, that would help."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is not the best at server provisioning. Terraform is better."
"Ansible could use more public relations and marketing."
"It can use some more credential types. I've found that when I go looking for a certain credential type, such as private keys, they're not really there."
"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."
"The job workflow needs to be worked on. It's not really clear to how you actually link things together. What they probably could do is provide an example workflow on how to stitch things together. I think that would be very helpful."
"Networking needs to be improved."
"There have been some differences between the operating systems that we have noticed. It could be down to cryptographic policies, but we have noticed some speed issues. They should work on the speed of deployment on different operating systems."
More Microsoft Configuration Manager Pricing and Cost Advice →
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Microsoft Configuration Manager is ranked 2nd in Configuration Management with 78 reviews while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 62 reviews. Microsoft Configuration Manager is rated 8.2, while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Microsoft Configuration Manager writes "Affordable, easy to use, and easy to understand". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Makes it easy to build playbooks and saves time and resources". Microsoft Configuration Manager is most compared with ManageEngine Endpoint Central, BigFix, Tanium, AWS Systems Manager and Red Hat Satellite, whereas Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps, BMC TrueSight Server Automation and BigFix. See our Microsoft Configuration Manager vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform report.
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