We performed a comparison between Automox and BigFix based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, HCLTech, Kaseya and others in Patch Management."The product's initial setup phase is very easy."
"It is a scalable solution...The initial setup of Fortinet FortiEDR was straightforward."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the ability to customize it and to reduce its size. It lets you run in a very small window in terms of memory and resources on legacy cash registers."
"The setup is pretty simple."
"The product detects and blocks threats and is more proactive than firewalls."
"Forensics is a valuable feature of Fortinet FortiEDR."
"Fortinet is very user-friendly for customers."
"Additionally, when it comes to EDR, there are more tools available to assist with client work."
"The biggest improvement to our organization involves the reduction in its man hours... We've probably saved hundreds of hours."
"It's easy to deploy agents to endpoints."
"Coming from prior solutions that were a lot more effort, Automox's patch management abilities are transformational. When I took over patching at my company, they were using on-premise architecture to patch. As the workforce shifted from being in the office into their home offices, I was able to lift and shift with no effort other than deploying the new agent out into the environment."
"Among the most valuable features are its ease of use and the Worklets. Both of them are time-savers. Worklets enable us to customize things for a given environment. It's something like when Apple lets other people create applications. Other peoples' Worklets can be used in our environment and in our customers' environments. That saves a lot of time, and it's really cool."
"They've been adding some new features lately, which I'm not nearly as familiar with, but the ability to just deploy patches and exempt certain machines from certain patches is helpful. For instance, for our servers, we may not want to roll out zero-day patches. We are able to exempt those and make sure that they don't get those policies. We've got certain servers that have to run a particular version of Java, and being able to exempt those servers from receiving Java updates is pretty fantastic."
"Previously, we would run a report, scan it, and compare it. We were spending 15 to 30 minutes a month on each machine on this stuff because you would find stuff that wasn't up to date, then you had to fix it. This solution takes that time down to minutes. Automox saves us easily many hours a month."
"The flexibility in creating tools to make changes on remote machines is most valuable to me. The reporting feature is also fantastic because on any given day I can bring up a list of machines that don't have patches, for example. Or I can bring up a list of machines that are in my environment on a certain day. The solution helps me with not only my own role, and what I look for internally myself, but it also helps during audits. I can go in and look at the number of machines in there, and their owners and timelines. It certainly helps tell a story for anything that IT requires."
"It's super easy to use and we haven't found anything easier."
"It allows for visibility into the OT, the industrial environments, that didn't exist before which is a big piece and has benefited my organization. Second, the speed at which people can patch is night and day versus SCCM scan or another similar solution."
"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 has improved my organization because we can automate a lot of tasks. We went from manually patching machines or doing our best and having very little visibility into it to us being able to set it and forget it and getting really good results on first-pass patching."
"The most valuable and essential features of BigFix are all of them, they are needed when serving the purpose of the desktop operation framework. We cannot run operations without patching or without having an appropriate mechanism for deploying software, et cetera. The features all serve their purpose for our use case."
"All the vendor patches are synchronized automatically."
"Between the user groups, the community, the AVP support, the direct access via technical route and the PMR support, half the time I don't even need to do a formal PMR because the solutions from the community resolve whatever issues we're having. It's the best community and support based system I've ever used."
"BigFix technical support is good."
"We are able to use BigFix through API connections to automate and reduce resources and time. The product's been great for us. It's increased the security posture ten-fold and it's increased our visibility across our endpoints enormously."
"They can include the automation for the realtime updates. We have a network infrastructure with remote sites. Whenever they send updates, they are not automated. We have to go into the console and push those updates. I wish it was more automated. The update file is currently around 31 MB. It could be smaller."
"The dashboard isn't easy to access and manage."
"The amount of usage, the number of details we get, or the number of options that can be tweaked is limited in comparison to that with other EDR solutions"
"Once, we had an event that was locked and blocked, but information about it came to us two or three days later."
"The EDR console should have more extensive reporting. You shouldn't need to purchase FortiAnalyzer. It should be included in the EDR part. The security adviser cloud platform could be improved with more options for exclusive or intensive rules for devices."
"The solution's installation from a central installation server could be improved because the engineers had a little bit of trouble getting it installed from a central location."
"The solution is not stable."
"We've encountered challenges during API deployment, occasionally resulting in unstable environments."
"They need to improve the automation features."
"The stability has come a long way from what it was like when it started and now it's really good."
"It should have integrated workstation access. So, there should be a remote desktop feature."
"We would like to see additional detailed reporting for Service providers like us. We had to build our own reports via their APIs to meet our needs."
"The biggest area they need to fix, without a doubt, is the ability to copy and sync profiles and worklets between all of the organizations you manage, and the ability to have top-level user access control across all of the companies that you manage."
"Asset management would be a great feature to add to Automox. We would run easier scripts or more out of the box scripts that would help us in audits. \"
"The only thing that we've ever truly wanted is an onsite repository. Currently, all updates are provided directly from the internet. So, if you have 1,000 devices, all 1,000 devices go directly out to the internet. We would love the option of being able to put the updates on local storage so that we're not consuming as much bandwidth. That is literally the only thing that we've ever wanted."
"When we bring on a new client, we need to go into that client and manually set up my account, my chief engineer's account, three technicians' accounts, and a billing person's account all over again, which is annoying. We have probably up to 15 or 16 of our clients on Automox now. For every single one of those, we have had to go in and set this up. Then, if anything changes, we have to remember to go to Automox and change it 15 or 16 times. So, we just want inheritable permissions, and that is it. We have talked to them about this, and they are like, "Yeah, we hear a lot of complaints about it." I am thinking, "Guys, I have been complaining about this for a year and a half. When are you going to do it?" It must be some tricky thing or not an easy fix, because I can only assume if it were easy, then they would have done it by now."
"I would eventually like to see a SaaS offering, a cloud-hosted BigFix instance where we only have to put a relay in our environment."
"The solution should have some kind of a local caching methodology, where the patches can be taken locally into a localized relay server, and from there, the patch can be applied, so that there is not much usage of the network required."
"I remember doing restarts a few times. So, making sure that it is rock solid from an executable perspective is important."
"BigFix is actually a little bit on the expensive side in Turkey because of the dollar's exchange rate in our currency."
"In-place and OS upgrades can be improved."
"We would like to see a different license plan, e.g. to include features from lifecycle with Patch Management, as an example."
"The product lacks AI, ML, and IIT."
"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."
Automox is ranked 12th in Patch Management with 10 reviews while BigFix is ranked 2nd in Patch Management with 91 reviews. Automox is rated 8.8, while BigFix is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Automox writes "Monitors our devices irrespective of the location and the environment, allows us to exempt certain machines from certain patches, and has perfect patch management abilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of BigFix writes "Very stable and easy to deploy with excellent patch compliance". Automox is most compared with Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Configuration Manager, Tanium, Qualys VMDR and NinjaOne, whereas BigFix is most compared with Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Configuration Manager, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, Tanium and NinjaOne.
See our list of best Patch Management vendors and best Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) vendors.
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