We performed a comparison between Chef and Quest KACE Systems Management 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."I would say the biggest benefit is the single-pane view. There's no jumping around multiple UI's to do your overall management."
"We can securely manage both company-owned devices and personal devices enrolled in our BYOD program."
"The solution is easy to use and it has good performance."
"The standout features of Intune are its excellent mobile device management and highly effective application management capabilities."
"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."
"Users can make screenshots, and devices only need the minimal version of iOS."
"With on-premises Active Directory, the main challenge was that we had no control when a user was working from home. We didn't know what exactly a user was doing and whether the AV was up to date or not. Intune provides better control of their machines."
"It is a comprehensive security solution that not only controls access to enterprise resources but also tracks and prevents unauthorized access, ensuring the protection of sensitive data and preventing potential data loss scenarios."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"The product is useful for automating processes."
"It has been very easy to tie it into our build and deploy automation for production release work, etc. All the Chef pieces more or less run themselves."
"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."
"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the imaging of computers through the SDA... Being able to do that so quickly with the SDA, and to then use the SMA for reinstalling software, has been huge for our productivity."
"I am impressed by the service desk ticketing and asset management."
"This solution makes it easy to control assets and upgrade all types of software."
"The big pros of Quest KACE Systems Management are its simple interface, and simple, direct management. It's very easy to maintain and manage the device, and it's easy to get it up and running. You can have it up and running in an hour..."
"KACE has made our life much easier since we got off the Microsoft solution. The Microsoft solution was a lot harder to image over different ports and stuff. They would only have this one place where we could do all the imaging. Now, we have a whole building where we can image from. This means that we can image from our storage area, where we have a place to do our imaging. We can also image right at our desks, which is a lot easier."
"I can reach people now that I couldn't have reached previously. We are saving about 25 percent in time."
"The information available via KACE is up to date, critical to our normal operations, and has become the go-to tool of our IT teams for extended support."
"The scripting is a very valuable feature, as it saves us time on pushing certain things out to the users, such as software and patches."
"Could benefit from user having more control over devices."
"One big problem with Microsoft is that they're changing the names of the products quite often, or they're quite consistently doing so. Intune is now Endpoint administration. Constantly switching the user interface or the administrative interface makes it quite hard to keep pace. If you are on a two-week holiday and you come back and look at the same screen you have looked at for the last couple of months, it looks different, which is annoying. Changing things around all the time doesn't make it easy."
"I'm still playing around with it and haven't had any issues with the product yet, but support can definitely be improved."
"I would like to see micro VPN. I like the way that some of the other providers have done something similar where, as you open that app on an end-point device, it creates a micro VPN straight into your device, which is quite a nice little feature. Also, Microsoft Intune relies heavily on its fellow products in the suite. It would be nice if Microsoft Intune could stand on its own two feet."
"The reporting needs to be a bit more interactive."
"The main disadvantage seen today is regarding Linux clients. We have a lot of development resources that have Linux on their clients, and we can't manage them on the same platform, as we do with other clients such as macOS and Windows. So, it should have support for Linux clients. It should also have better support for macOS."
"Cost is the biggest factor for us right now. Microsoft Intune and AD P1 together in a bundle is a good thing to have, but it is very costly compared to other products in the market. Otherwise, Microsoft Intune is the best."
"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."
"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"I would like them to add database specific items, configuration items, and migration tools. Not necessarily on the builder side or the actual setup of the system, but more of a migration package for your different database sets, such as MongoDB, your extenders, etc. I want to see how that would function with a transition out to AWS for Aurora services and any of the RDBMS packages."
"They could provide more features, so the recipes could be developed in a simpler and faster way. There is still a lot of room for improvement, providing better functionalities when creating recipes."
"I would also like to see more analytics and reporting features. Currently, the analytics and reporting features are limited. I'll have to start building my own custom solution with Power BI or Tableau or something like that. If it came with built-in analytics and reporting features that would be great."
"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."
"The KACE Go Mobile App crashes a lot, and it always has. I would love to see that get fixed because it's very convenient when it does work properly, but most of the time it does not."
"The initial setup was complex. It is a Linux-based virtual server, where the customer cannot get into the back-end, so you can only follow their prompts. Then, there are specific things that have to be done in their implementation and upgrade phases that have to be done in a certain order or steps. If you don't get those steps right, the system doesn't work. I think that either simplifying that process or providing really good step-by-step documentation would be helpful."
"Easier integration would be beneficial."
"The K1000 doesn't communicate well with some clients without SMB. There are some issues with getting things to image correctly because they rely on SMB, and SMB is a protocol that is being removed due to security reasons. Organizations are trying to rely less and less on SMB. I know Quest is aware of it. They've talked about having a new version that wouldn't rely on SMB for connection to the clients, but they haven't gotten there yet."
"The only pain point I have is with their salespeople. They call too often. They're too aggressive in trying to upsell. We know what we need, and we know if we want to expand. I don't mind quarterly calls from them, but sometimes, it is weekly. They need to get their sales team under control. The main goal of their support people and professional services is to make sure they deliver the service, and they deliver it well, whereas their salespeople are so interested in making a sale that they're wasting my time."
"One of the complications is that they don't have 24/7 support, and they're also not in our time zone... Sometimes, no matter how critical my application is, if my production server is down I won't be able to connect with anybody till 11:00 AM Eastern Standard Time."
"Its dashboard needs improvement. Currently, there is no way to modify the dashboard. There should be more flexibility so that we can create views according to our use case."
"The problem is that it's harder to directly emulate a lot of the stuff that the group policies do, using the KACE solution. With regular group policies, you just specify the various settings you want to change on the workstations, and then you specify the workstations and—while it's kind of an ugly mess—it does it. Whereas on KACE, you really have to know what you're doing with scripting to effectively script those exact same changes."
More Quest KACE Systems Management Pricing and Cost Advice →
Chef is ranked 15th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews while Quest KACE Systems Management is ranked 8th in Configuration Management with 38 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while Quest KACE Systems Management is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Chef writes "Useful for large infrastructure, reliable, but steep learning cureve". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Quest KACE Systems Management writes "Easy to use, saves us time, and increases IT productivity". Chef is most compared with Jenkins, Microsoft Azure DevOps, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Configuration Manager and BigFix, whereas Quest KACE Systems Management is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, BigFix, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Ivanti Neurons Patch for Intune. See our Chef vs. Quest KACE Systems Management report.
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