We performed a comparison between Chef and Red Hat Satellite 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."The mobile application management, MAM, is the most useful aspect of the 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 features I found most valuable in Intune are its user visibility and troubleshooting options."
"It is very easy to use. It has a very easy interface."
"It's normally able to meet 100% expectations of our customers."
"The best feature is that we don't need to worry about downtime. We don't need to worry about the network connections of our office or the virtual private network. Everything is being done through the internet. Using Intune Autopilot, we can configure and deploy everything to the devices."
"It's easy to deploy a configuration or policy to a system, especially when you don't have Azure AD. Now we are talking to all these small and medium-sized customers who don't necessarily have an on-premise Windows Active Directory. If they have invested in Office 365 Premium, this functionality becomes available to them."
"The most valuable features in Microsoft Intune for me are application deployment, Defender deployment, and asset management."
"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"Automation is everything. Having so many servers in production, many of our processes won't work nor scale. So, we look for tools to help us automate the process, and Chef is one of them."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."
"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."
"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."
"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 of this solution is vulnerability management."
"The product is convenient to use."
"Technical support has been good."
"The most valuable feature is the fact that you don't have to expose your mission-critical environment to the Internet. With the Satellite system in place, it acts as a barrier between your Red Hat infrastructure and the public Internet."
"The 'remote execution' feature further helps manage systems on a consistent basis."
"The product allows us to handle patching for multiple servers at a time manually."
"Patch management is, for sure, most valuable. For license management and patch management, I would rate it a 10 out of 10."
"It plays a significant role in managing the lifecycle of our systems and ensures that we can effectively control and update the software versions to align with our organization's needs."
"Microsoft Intune is not user-friendly to manage and has room for improvement."
"A new Intune feature allows application packaging, but it incurs additional licensing costs for a significant number of applications."
"The most important thing is reporting. They should improve their reporting. They should give a free hand to users. In SCCM, I can create my own reports. For example, in SCCM, I can create an inventory report for my PC or for all PCs, but in Intune, we don't have an option to create any report. Microsoft claims that Intune is a successor of SCCM, but SCCM is more powerful than Intune. So, they should develop Intune more and make it equivalent to SCCM. Then, their product will be great in the market."
"Microsoft Intune could improve by being more user-friendly and having it geared toward device management. The graphic interface is not very good."
"I think there should be a better tracking of the cell phones used on the Intune."
"I'd like some more reporting so that I don't have to delve into PowerShell and I can pull more of the local device information such as memory, apps installed, etc. It would be nice to be able to see the apps that are present there but might not be managed. For example, if they installed 7Zip, it could report that back via an installed program or feature to see what was currently installed."
"An area for improvement is the absence of seamless integration, particularly with external dashboards."
"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."
"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."
"The time that it takes in terms of integration. Cloud integration is comparatively easy, but when it comes to two-link based integrations - like trying to integrate it with any monitoring tools, or maybe some other ticketing tools - it takes longer. That is because most of the out-of-the-box integration of the APIs needs some revisiting."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."
"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."
"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."
"Improving integration could lead to a more unified management experience for multiple operating systems within our data center."
"It should basically include a complete slew of system management and monitoring tools such as Nagios. It should be a single pane of glass that gives us a complete solution. It is a good solution, but it is missing a few important things. We're using Capsule for DMVs on other secured zones. Capsule is a part of Satellite to be a proxy of sorts."
"There could be a feature to simplify the process without the requirement of any patch manager subscription."
"The product's automation capabilities need enhancement."
"I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. The licensing is a bit expensive."
"The solution's initial setup is a little bit tricky."
"Automation can always be improved and refined to continue to make it better."
"Satellite should be bundled with Ansible Tower and the Ansible Automation platform. We face challenges from a security perspective because we have micro-segmentation in our network. For each server we provision, we have to set permissions to different ports so that the servers can communicate with Satellite. If I have a single server with Satellite and the Ansible Automation Platform, it would be easier to manage security issues instead of having two or three products on various servers."
Chef is ranked 16th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews while Red Hat Satellite is ranked 4th in Configuration Management with 22 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while Red Hat Satellite is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Chef writes "Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Red Hat Satellite writes "A good product for managing patches and updates that could be more robust and up-to-date". Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps and BigFix, whereas Red Hat Satellite is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, SUSE Manager, Microsoft Configuration Manager and AWS Systems Manager. See our Chef vs. Red Hat Satellite report.
See our list of best Configuration Management vendors.
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