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.
"We can securely manage both company-owned devices and personal devices enrolled in our BYOD program."
"The solution is easy to use."
"...Intune itself integrates with that entire Microsoft ecosystem. As an individual product itself, it's okay. It holds up. But when you start saying "I've bought this as part of a wider solution, as a company we are going Microsoft throughout," then it makes more sense to have Microsoft Intune... so you have that single dashboard."
"Being able to manage the devices remotely is most valuable. We can push security requirements through Microsoft Intune."
"The Asset Management and Auto Pilot are valuable features."
"It is a very helpful solution."
"The ability to send configurations to our systems is valuable, particularly as we don't have a regular Windows AD server. Our current environment doesn't have a Windows AD, which limits our ability to push GPOs. However, this is where the solution can step in and help us push policies."
"The most valuable includes managing everything from a single console."
"Technical support is very helpful and very responsive."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager is patch management."
"SCCM does everything from A to Z for a Windows operating system."
"It does the job and meets our needs. With everybody working remotely these days, we are using this solution to deploy everything. The deployment of PCs is easy."
"The solution is user-friendly and easy to learn."
"The initial setup is straightforward and not too complicated."
"Technical support was helpful and responsive."
"I like a lot of the reporting capabilities and baseline configurations."
"The automation manager is very good."
"The most valuable feature is that Ansible is agentless."
"Feature-wise, the solution is a good open-source software offering broad support. Also, it's reliable."
"It is very easy to use, and there is less room for error."
"It is quick to production. It has an API in the back which allows for integrations."
"The most valuable features of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform are the agentless platform and writing the code is simple using the Yaml computer language."
"I like the fact that Ansible is agentless."
"We can automate a few host configurations using the product."
"The solution could improve its flexibility."
"There can be delays in the deployment of new policies."
"They could also make it easier to use because there are some other products that may be easier to use in terms of the look and feel of the dashboard."
"I wanted to check if there is any provision at the Intune level to restrict certain things, such as a website, but unfortunately, that feature is available only in Microsoft Defender. Intune has web filtering capabilities, but they are only useful for protection from malicious websites, whereas we would like to be able to restrict a website. For example, YouTube is a clean website. No one would identify it as a malicious website, but if we want to stop the end-users from going to that website, we have to go for another product, such as Microsoft Defender or another third-party proxy solution. It would be great if this capability is included in Intune."
"The Mac integration has room for improvement."
"It's only good for a Microsoft environment."
"I'm still playing around with it and haven't had any issues with the product yet, but support can definitely be improved."
"The configuration and pricing can be improved."
"The solution can be improved with the addition of a mobile device manager."
"The main thing is that SCCM has to become an appliance instead of a server. When I say appliance, it has to come preconfigured so that it is drop-shipped into the enterprise and then you activate the feature sets that you want. It should pull down all the latest binaries. Once that is all there, it should have a discovery tool which goes out and discovers the assets within an enterprise. If the server, workstation, and applications are all coming from the same vendor, why not have the vendor do this work for us and automate it as much as it possibly can?"
"I would like to see some improvements in WSUS and control of other, non-Microsoft, product updates."
"It is a bit of an old and outdated product."
"A lot of experience is needed in terms of troubleshooting, as this is one of the most difficult tasks in MECM. We were seven people in a group and I was the only one that had the patience to do the troubleshooting at times."
"Troubleshooting in general needs improvement. There's just a ton of logs to go through, and so finding the error log that corresponds with that you're doing can sometimes be difficult."
"The configuration of Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager could be improved, it is a bit complicated."
"There should probably be better remote support. They should also continue to improve on patch management, patching, and creating or turning products in software into deployable apps."
"We are not using the Dashboard a lot because we have higher expectations from it. The default Dashboard from Tower doesn't give that much information. We really want to get down into more than if the job succeeded or what was the percentage of success. We want to get down to task-level success. If, in a job, there are ten tasks, we want to see this task was a success, and this was not, and how many were not. That's the kind of granularity we are looking for, that Tower does not give right now."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"If we have a problem with some file and we need to get Red Hat to analyze the issue and the file is 100GBs, we'll have an issue since we need to provide a log file for them to analyze. If it is around 12GB or 13GB, we can easily upload it to the Red Hat portal. With more than 100GBs, it will fail. I heard it should cover up to 250GB for an upload, however, I find it fails. Therefore, Red Hat needs to provide a way to handle this."
"The solution is slightly expensive, and its pricing could be improved."
"The scalability of the solution has some shortcomings."
More Microsoft Configuration Manager Pricing and Cost Advice →
More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
Microsoft Configuration Manager is ranked 2nd in Configuration Management with 76 reviews while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 58 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 "Seamless system updates, useful integration, and reliable". 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". 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, AWS Systems Manager and BMC TrueSight Server Automation. See our Microsoft Configuration Manager vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform report.
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