We performed a comparison between Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 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, Red Hat Ansible comes out ahead of BigFix. While both services provide valuable endpoint protection, BigFix’s ability to integrate with certain applications and its dashboard leave room for improvement.
"The dashboards, the security, and the customization capabilities work very well for us."
"The policy and compliance monitoring of devices and the software deployment are most valuable."
"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."
"The main advantage is that Intune performs its intended functions effectively."
"The most valuable feature for us is the security, including risk analysis and patch management."
"Intune's most valuable features are the device, compliance, and configuration policies."
"We can securely manage both company-owned devices and personal devices enrolled in our BYOD program."
"One of the main features of the solution is it allows the management of many devices in different ways."
"BigFix technical support is good."
"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."
"This has very much improved our organization by saving time to deploy thousands of endpoints to our customers."
"Vulnerability scanning and patch automation."
"Pre-packaged support for many third-party applications such as Adobe, Google, Mozilla, Sun (Java), WinZip, and others."
"Having higher visibility on patching level, on patching successful, and non-successful has been a way that BigFix has improved my organization. Also, the ability to customize the content to do what we need it to do is very powerful and very flexible for us. Finally, in the area of custom interfaces like REST API really gives us the ability to provide for our external customers."
"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."
"Being able to intelligently create reports, gather data, export CSVs and give that to the leadership of some of the client groups that my team supports has helped my organization."
"It is all modular-based. If there is not a module for it today, someone will write it."
"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."
"It does not require staff for deployment and maintenance. It just works."
"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."
"It is very extensible. There are many plugins and modules out there that everybody helps create to interact with different cloud providers as well."
"It has made our infrastructure more testable. We are able to build our infrastructure in CI, then are more confident in what we are deploying will work, not breaking everything."
"Installing it is a PIP command. So, it's pretty easy. It is a one liner."
"It has an easy-to-use interface. It is REST API driven, and it integrates with Active Directory. It provides the ability to grant permissions to other users who would not necessarily have those permissions via the GUI so that they could run other people's jobs. For example, you could have the Oracle team grant permissions to the Linux team so that they can use each of those playbooks or each other's code. It is called shift-left."
"I think that there is room for improvement with the reporting. If this is done, it will be a better product."
"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."
"They can improve their MAM policies a little bit more and make them more granular. They should include more granular group policies. They are there, but they need to be more granular. Its stability should also be improved. It is not very stable. Sometimes, it shows some inconsistencies across tenants."
"The pricing can be expensive if you are not combining it with other products."
"We only have major classifications for iOS and Android, but there are different brands that have different cycles of updates. If they can fine-tune it to make it more brand-specific, that would be even better."
"The closest Microsoft Intune can be to GPOs, the better. There needs to be more granularity on application deployments. However, they have done better recently with the application deployments."
"Intune's third-party patch management could be better. It should be easier for the average system admin to keep non-Microsoft applications updated."
"They should make it easier to order it, however, that's generally true for everything from Microsoft."
"I self-taught for this online, so the initial setup was a little difficult to pick up at first. I had to create a couple of testing environments and destroy them in order to learn how to use it. There was a lot of trial and error, a lot of reading of the manuals."
"The main shortcoming of BigFix was integration with vulnerability management. If you had a vulnerability in your software and BigFix on the endpoint, you needed integration with Qualys, Tenable, or another vulnerability management solution to fix that. It was like, "Okay, we can identify issues, and get that information back from the endpoint, but what are we doing about it?""
"I would like to see much better web reporting because as it is now, it's convoluted, basic, it's not modern, and there are limitations to it."
"I would like better support on the backend."
"The new EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) feature, Detect, is new and still needs a few updates."
"Sometimes there is a lag time for our users."
"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."
"IBM has not focused on the Web Reports capabilities."
"The support could be better."
"The governance features could be improved."
"For a couple of the API integrations, there has been a lack of documentation."
"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."
"For Ansible Tower, there are three tiers with ten nodes. I would like them to expand those ten nodes to 20, because ten nodes is not enough to test on."
"I have seen indications that the documentation needs improvement. They are providing a "How to Improve Your Documentation" presentation at this conference."
"The area which I feel can be improved is the custom modules. For example, there are something like 106 official modules available in the Ansible library. A year ago, that number was somewhere around 58. While Ansible is improving day by day, this can be improved more. For instance, when you need to configure in the cloud, you need to write up a module for that."
"From Red Hat Insights point of view, the product is not on top as it is not responding as per the demand...Like on cloud platforms, you can see the main parts of Red Hat Insights, along with the inventory of all your apps. So, that is missing in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform."
More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
BigFix is ranked 5th in Configuration Management with 91 reviews while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 58 reviews. BigFix is rated 8.6, while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of BigFix writes "Very stable and easy to deploy with excellent patch compliance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Capable of broad integrations with easy-to-operate infrastructure and user controls". BigFix is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, Tanium, ManageEngine Patch Manager Plus and Red Hat Satellite, whereas Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, Microsoft Configuration Manager, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps and AutoSys Workload Automation. See our BigFix vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform report.
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