We performed a comparison between BigFix and SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager 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."This product works very well for companies already using the full Microsoft suite."
"It is a stable solution."
"For the price, the features included with Microsoft are appealing."
"One of the best features is Windows Autopilot because if you change any of your devices, whatever security policies and compliance policies that applied can be easily migrated to the new devices. Windows Autopilot gives you that flexibility."
"At the moment, Autopilot is the most valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature of Intune is the central dashboard for compliance and policy management."
"It is a very helpful solution."
"The aspects I find most valuable are the managing the data and applications. I can also restrict the users to install any applications. I can also wipe the data if the phone was missplaced or stolen. These are the basics for me."
"BigFix technical support is good."
"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."
"It's very straightforward."
"We are able to go from patching thousands of machines by twenty to thirty people to one person."
"Patch management, because it very much improved the patch compliance and has the capability to manage Windows and non-Windows clients."
"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."
"All the vendor patches are synchronized automatically."
"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."
"The configuration compliance aspect of SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager allows for easy comparison of configuration settings across branches, ensuring adherence to security guidelines and best practices. Automation capabilities have greatly impacted workflows, enabling tasks such as configuration backups, template deployment, and firmware upgrades to be automated, thereby streamlining processes and saving time. Compliance reporting features provide valuable insights into network compliance, offering pre-built security audit reports and customizable options to meet specific requirements."
"It is a stable solution."
"The installation is straightforward."
"SolarWinds NCM provides updates on the status of your network infrastructure. If any issues arise, such as a link failure or a device going offline, you will receive notifications and alerts. Additionally, if someone unplugs a cable, SolarWinds NCM will detect it. It also features a Topology Mapper that displays the connectivity of your network devices, giving you a visual representation of the network's structure. With SolarWinds NCM, you have a clear understanding of what's happening within your network and can generate comprehensive reports."
"We push all our configurations to the servers with ease and the logs capture almost all the transactions needed for an internal audit."
"The solution's view is very nice, and they have a great customized dashboard."
"What's nice with NCM is you can set up policies that you can then check against the configs to ensure that your device configs adhere to a baseline or standard that you've set in place."
"This solution has helped our organization by allowing us to store all the device configurations for the various network devices in NCM and making it easy for us to retrieve and look them over."
"An issue we have run into with Microsoft Endpoint Manager is that we cannot patch third-party products like Adobe and Chrome with it."
"It would be beneficial to have a more straightforward understanding of Intune's capabilities, presented in a simplified manner."
"The documentation about the custom image setup could be better. Although Microsoft provides the steps to configure Intune or set up or deploy Intune, it doesn't have much information related to custom images. If you ask, "how can we deploy the custom image?" There is no information. The steps they mention ask you to connect to your on-premises environment or create your own image on the cloud itself once there is connectivity. But I needed to go to multiple websites to get all this information. I had to figure out how to upload the custom image if you want to use the on-premise custom image for Cloud PC. If you have the proper subscription, you must have the right access, like global admin or owner. Then you can add your custom image to that. There are no steps mentioned over there. Microsoft Intune doesn't have Chrome browser support. I would like to have that support because they will want it if we pitch the product to clients."
"It just doesn't handle software updates well at all by itself. You need to be a scripting wizard to make those happen properly, or you use third-party tools. The Windows feature updates are very difficult to implement. I would like to see a proprietary built-in remote control tool. I know that they have Team Viewer integrated, but it is not seamless. It would be nice if they had a seamless remote desktop capability directly from the Intune console."
"The feature that allows us to import the business application from the configuration manager to Intune is not very good at this time."
"I would like some integration with the Microsoft reporting platform Power BI."
"The difficulty of the the roll out is surprisingly difficult considering this product is supposed to be an integrated part of the 365 suite."
"Intune's areas for improvement revolve around security and certificate management."
"They don't have a proper mobile device management capability. They're working on it, however, that's the one thing that needs improvement so that you can have full unified endpoint management."
"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 to see SDK for Web UI included in the next release."
"The solution could improve by adding support drivers for different systems and equipment. When you have a lot of different computers if they could fix how to install any updates, firmware, or drivers for different systems or servers it would be good."
"I'd definitely like to see additional feature parody in the web UI versus the console. There are certain things that you can only do in the console and they're very cumbersome to do, like secure parameters, for example. That's definitely something that has a wide degree of utility but it needs to be easier to surface. At this particular juncture between the transition, between the legacy console and the web UI, it's hard to justify dealing with the cumbersome aspects of the legacy console when theoretically everything's been through the web UI."
"The relevant language takes a little getting used to since it's not used anywhere else in the industry. It's just in the BigFix environment."
"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."
"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 interface of solar winds could be improved."
"Its look and feel can be improved. They can also put in more effort into building the THWACK community and use the information about various customer issues and requests to build the new releases."
"The solution could improve by being more secure."
"The solution could have better integration."
"Its customer service response could be faster."
"Releasing a product compatible with operating systems other than Windows would be advantageous."
"We want to be able to store it in a data warehouse format and integrate it with Google single sign-on."
"The only thing that requires some experience, and training doesn't fix, is how to set up your custom policy-based reports to check compliance."
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BigFix is ranked 5th in Configuration Management with 91 reviews while SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is ranked 11th in Configuration Management with 22 reviews. BigFix is rated 8.6, while SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of BigFix writes "Very stable and easy to deploy with excellent patch compliance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager writes "Network configuration is done well; great pricing". 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 SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is most compared with Cisco DNA Center, Cisco Prime, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, OpenText Network Node Manager i and VMware NSX. See our BigFix vs. SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager report.
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