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.
"This product offers an alternative solution to other UEM (Unified Endpoint Management) solutions."
"The most valuable feature for us is the security, including risk analysis and patch management."
"The solution appears to be stable and scalable."
"I like the group policy management feature, which performs application monitoring and device enrollment."
"The most valuable features in Microsoft Intune for me are application deployment, Defender deployment, and asset management."
"It is a comprehensive security solution that not only controls access to enterprise resources but also tracks and prevents unauthorized access, ensuring the protection of sensitive data and preventing potential data loss scenarios."
"Stable product that's easy to set up compared to other MDM products."
"The synchronization of Intune with other Microsoft solutions is a valuable feature."
"Having the Dashboard from an admin point of view, and seeing how all the projects and all the jobs lay out, is helpful."
"The most valuable feature is that Ansible is agentless."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its configuration management, drift management, workflow templates with the visual UI, and graphical workflow representation."
"The most useful features are the playbooks. We can develop our playbooks and simplify them doing something like a cross platform."
"It is agentless. I don't have to think about which client system my unit has understanding in or not, because I can execute from my system. It will go and configure it, and any module that it is looking for will be shipped out."
"Some colleagues and other companies use it and comment that it is easy to use, easy to understand, and offers good features."
"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."
"Since it is in YAML, if I have to explain it to somebody else, they can easily understand it."
"Satellite gives administrators the ability to target deployments and only send out the updates or provision updates to certain groups."
"The most valuable feature is the management of the distributed tool we use in the Red Hat Linux Servers."
"Previously, we were using one server to update from a different repository over the HTTP. We had to manually manage the updates on the repository server. Satellite made the process easier."
"The most valuable features of Red Hat Satellite are its support, simplicity, and patch management."
"The product is convenient to use."
"The product helps me to manage a large number of servers from one console."
"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to process patching and updates completely offline without an internet connection."
"Technical support has been good."
"The reporting is subpar. That's the only issue we have with Intune. We use another solution for that purpose."
"What would make this product better is adding more security policies and features in the next upgrade."
"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."
"No option to do end-to-en macOS management. Slow implementation of policies."
"There should be more support for macOS. Even though macOS is supported by Intune and Microsoft is working very hard to get more features into Intune to manage macOS, that's one thing they can give a lot more attention to."
"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."
"There could be more wizard-driven policy development or creation. Some of the policies can get quite complex. If they have a wizard that assists the administrators in creating the policy, that will be a great job."
"Some enrollment features could be improved."
"In Community, there's a lot of effort towards testing, standardizing, and testing for module development to role development, which is why Molecule is now becoming real. Same thing with Zuul, which we are starting to implement. Zulu tests out modules from third-party sources, like ourselves, and verifies that the modules work before they are committed to the code. Currently, Ansible can't do this with all the modules out there."
"Documentation could be improved. Many times, if I'm looking for something, I have to Google it in a lot of places, then figure out what the best approach will be. There are some best practices documents, but they don't give you the information."
"What I would like to see is a refined Dashboard to see, when I log in: Here are all my jobs, here are how many times they've executed; some kind graphical stitching-together of the workflows and jobs, and how they're connected. Also, those "failed hosts," what does that mean? We have a problem, a failed host can be anything. Is SSH the reason it failed? Is the job template why it failed? It doesn't really distinguish that."
"Additional features could be added."
"It is a little slow on the network side because every time you call a module, it's initiating an SSH or an API call to a network device, and it just slows things down."
"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."
"The product could do a better job at building infrastructure."
"The solution requires some Linux knowledge."
"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."
"I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. The licensing is a bit expensive."
"They could make it more easy to use and improve the GUI so that it's more intuitive."
"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."
"Automation can always be improved and refined to continue to make it better."
"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."
"There needs to be some margin for improvement in terms of the way Satellite manages subscriptions. It is still very confusing when we have different contracts or different bundles of subscriptions, and we need to manage those within Satellite in a way that's very user-friendly."
"The product's automation capabilities need enhancement."
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.
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.