We performed a comparison between BigFix and Chef based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Configuration Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."While Microsoft Intune boasts a wide range of features, its user-friendliness and bundled licensing cost are key considerations for me."
"It works well if you have a Microsoft environment."
"We are a remote company, and the product helps us manage the global endpoints. It helps us natively manage the endpoints in the cloud from anywhere."
"Remote Wipe and Autopilot is one of the best features."
"The solution is easy to use, simple to understand for those new to using it, and combined with the other Microsoft products it makes for an overall good package."
"Stable solution at a good price."
"We can securely manage both company-owned devices and personal devices enrolled in our BYOD program."
"Intune provides full visibility into all active mobile device users. If their devices are noncompliant with our security policies, I have the flexibility to update them remotely."
"It's enabled us to have a highly successful endpoint patching program for the past decade. It's been enormously successful there. It's also become a core part of many of our business processes, from compliance monitoring of endpoints, encryption management, key escrow, and local administrator password escrow. It's built into our inventory. It's very much everywhere."
"BigFix can manage lost devices, so you can wipe them remotely to ensure the IP doesn't get out in public. Unified endpoint security is a new perspective. I know that HCL is also collaborating with IBM, but I'm not sure if there is any cooperation between them and MaaS360 or other endpoint components."
"We are able to go from patching thousands of machines by twenty to thirty people to one person."
"I would advise someone considering this product to go for it. It's easy to use, cheaper than the value, and there is tons and tons of support from the BigFix community. With almost every challenge we have someone who has encountered it, and you will have a solution right away."
"In terms of vulnerability management, it gives tough competition by providing a single management console with multiple benefits."
"BigFix is a great product. The flexibility of putting together your own relevance and retrieving custom data from any one of your agents is a valuable feature. It is one of my favorite features because if a boss asks me, "How many of these devices do we have?", I can put together a report in two seconds."
"This has very much improved our organization by saving time to deploy thousands of endpoints to our customers."
"The solution is unbelievably scalable."
"Chef can be scaled as needed. The Chef server itself can scale but it depends on the available resources. You can upgrade specific resources to meet the demand. Similarly, with clients, you can add as many clients as you need. Again, this depends on the server resources. If the server has enough resources, it can handle the number of servers required to manage the infrastructure. Chef can be scaled to meet the needs of the infrastructure being managed."
"One thing that we've been able to do is a tiered permission model, allowing developers and their managers to perform their own operations in lower environments. This means a manager can go in and make changes to a whole environment, whereas a developer with less access may only be able to change individual components or be able to upgrade the version for software that they have control over."
"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."
"It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."
"Manual deployments came to a halt completely. Server provisioning became lightning fast. Chef-docker enabled us to have fewer sets of source code for different purposes. Configuration management was a breeze and all the servers were as good as immutable servers."
"Stable and scalable configuration management and automation tool. Installing it is easy. Its most valuable feature is its compliance, e.g. it's very good."
"The reports that are generated aren't so great. They don't give a lot of meaning so far, but that could be down to user knowledge than the actual reporting side of things. I'm not a big user of it, but I was a bigger user of MaaS360, and we used to be able to run weekly and monthly reports. In the case of any deviations. we'd get a warning immediately. That's not so easy to do or to get in place for Intune. This could be just a user issue, but when I compare both, that's the only thing that's lacking for me."
"The configuration could be better by consolidating options and making it simpler."
"I would like to see the ability to deploy custom packages as a Windows 64-bit package, as opposed to the Windows 32-bit, which is the only one available now."
"Intune lags all of its competitors in terms of report generation."
"Microsoft Intune could enhance its patch management for various devices, ensuring regular updates and tracking of device privileges."
"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."
"They should make it easier to order it, however, that's generally true for everything from Microsoft."
"One area for improvement is app deployment. Another is the Windows update rollout. If you're rolling out an object to a device that's offline, Intune stops trying to reach this device after it sits idle for a bit. We are forced to find a workaround that could help manage that."
"I would like to see API connectivity, built-in API connectors to the standard toolsets, whether it's for your ServiceNow or your Qualys. More API connectivity to make it easier to integrate to other tools."
"I would like to see a web UI SDK so we could take what is provided currently and be able to build our own customized web UI for particular customers that want to sell service."
"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 want to see a solution for being able to deploy automated software to a Mac running OS X 10.13, something that's going to deal with kernel exceptions and answering prompts for user permissions for data folders and whatnot. They need to really streamline and automate the Mac software deployment."
"We would like to see a different license plan, e.g. to include features from lifecycle with Patch Management, as an example."
"I would like to see more emphasis on using the web console, to have the same power as the full fat client console that they do they now. It's a lighter way to log in and it would be faster for our operators to do their work. The console tends to take a long time for a large number of clients."
"The self-service application seems to need some work to replace the client UI. There are a lot of pop-ups if you use a baseline as the object that you're setting to a workstation. Unless you're using web UI, the message is not customizable in the user notification."
"The stability is generally pretty good. The one thing that we came across is the battle between load on endpoints and load on our servers and relays versus how quickly, effectively and reliably actions can be taken. I'd like to not have to take an action on a system while I'm working with someone and then have to say whether something will happen between five seconds or thirty minutes from that point."
"There appears to be no effort to fix the command line utility functionality, which is definitely broken, provides a false positive for a result when you perform the operation, and doesn't work."
"I would rate this solution a nine because our use case and whatever we need is there. Ten out of ten is perfect. We have to go to IOD and stuff so they should consider things like this to make it a ten."
"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."
"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."
"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."
BigFix is ranked 5th in Configuration Management with 91 reviews while Chef is ranked 15th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews. BigFix is rated 8.6, while Chef is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of BigFix writes "Very stable and easy to deploy with excellent patch compliance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Chef writes "Useful for large infrastructure, reliable, but steep learning cureve". BigFix is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, Tanium, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and ManageEngine Patch Manager Plus, whereas Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager and SaltStack. See our BigFix vs. Chef 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.
