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Atera vs BigFix comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 16, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Atera
Ranking in Patch Management
8th
Average Rating
9.2
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
IT Service Management (ITSM) (14th), Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) (3rd)
BigFix
Ranking in Patch Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
95
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (5th), Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (15th), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Patch Management category, the mindshare of Atera is 4.9%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BigFix is 13.7%, up from 11.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Patch Management
 

Featured Reviews

CB
Mar 18, 2021
Pay just one price for unlimited devices and remote features enable easy access to all end points regardless of their location
When it comes to ease of use and the user interface I would give Atera a nine out of 10. The platform responsiveness to everything is solid. The updates Atera has put out have been second to none. Moreover, I find that if it wasn't for Atera, I wouldn't be gaining the number of clients I have and growing my business as I do. Atera provides ease of access to all devices no matter where they're located. It makes no difference if the client is in a work group or if he is on a certain domain. Atera enables me to access our clients' devices with ease and to provide them with feedback across the board. It benefits both me and my clients. When it comes to pushing out anything, such as antivirus features, it's second to none. As I'm more of a hands-on person, I visit many of my clients. Often, while visiting a client site, another client will call. With Atera, I am able to remotely handle whatever needs to be done to his machine, be it installing a printer or helping with a password. When a client calls and needs something handled quickly, Atera is a big help. On a daily basis, it saves me time and approximately seven to 10 hours per week. Were I not always going around to all my clients, it would save me even more time.
Bella Yakoby - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 12, 2024
Offers third-party patching feature, good scalability, and enhance endpoint management capabilities
From the perspective of the team that's handling the environment, it's not so user-friendly compared to other solutions, the competitors. We hire new teams from time to time, and they are complaining, look, although BigFix is very robust and cross-platform, it's not so fun to work with. The user interface for the technical teams is not so advanced. It's not so intuitive compared to SCCM, compared to ManageEngine. And this is the fact that they have, with the teams, because they have the rejection. The look and feel of the system are old-fashioned. For new employees, it's less easy to find someone I don't need to educate on how to work with BigFix. Although it's easy, it's not as intuitive as the other solutions, and the functionality of the other solutions is less advanced. Let's summarize: The user interface has to be changed from the perspective of the teams that are managing the product. It's old school.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable features of this solution are automatic batch matching and unattended support access."
"There are a lot fewer hardware replacements. Once people migrated from old style hard disks over to SSDs, you have things like hard disks filling up faster. So, I run a script to clear out all the waste, e.g., all the temporary files and downloads. A lot of our business runs through a custom web application that we built. This involves people downloading a lot of PDFs and Excel files, and not just having them sitting in folders. With Atera, I can just go through and clean the temporary files out."
"It is reliable, and when it is working, it works without issues."
"Pricing is definitely my favorite part of it. It is also extremely easy to use."
"Atera has saved our organization money. We look at Atera as an extra employee that we only pay about $300 a month. This is incredible savings over having to hire somebody to do all the tasks that Atera performs for us."
"It's very easy to use, not just for me, but even for people who have claimed, "I'm not very good at IT." Once you have it installed and you have it set up, it pretty much works by itself. It really helps you do what you need to do. It's easy to use for a beginner, compared to some of the other larger RMMs that are a little bit more complicated."
"Atera saves money. A trip to the customer costs between $20 to $30. Then, you need to charge the customer $20 to $30 for the travel. However, if you are doing this work remotely, then you are not driving. This makes the process easier and saves money for you and the customer. For example, if it is just one machine, then the savings comes out to $50 to $60. If we are talking about a huge client, who has hundreds of machines and is changing their infrastructure, that is a lot of money."
"We value the alerts that come with the product which allow me to reach out to my clients. Overall, Atera generates additional revenue streams for work done on their machines."
"Patch management, because it very much improved the patch compliance and has the capability to manage Windows and non-Windows clients."
"The most valuable point is when you deploy an application, you have to make sure that the application has been deployed to all computers and that is working perfectly. This solution works well at deployments."
"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."
"It allows us to quickly deploy capabilities that we need, whether it be security or non-security. We use it to keep systems up to date, deploy new drivers, find the information we need in the case of security incidents. The capability allows us to gather a lot of information very quickly and it also allows us to have a centralized reporting feature and a centralized deployment capability which is nice."
"It is for multiple use cases. A lot of people are looking at it just for security, and that's really endpoint security. The endpoint management part of it in terms of being able to constantly do patching for Windows, Unix, macOS, Cloud, Raspberry, VMware, and all Linux flavors is important, and they are very good at that. They have support for virtually every OS on the market."
"The most valuable features are patch management, software installation, and asset management."
"BigFix helped us to identify the compliance of devices and has also improved the way that we manage our software inventory for reporting to vendors."
"It is a one-stop tool that allows you to do everything. It supports reporting, vulnerability management, patch management, and configuration. All things can be done in one tool."
 

Cons

"The one thing that could do with improvement is the reporting. This is from someone who worked in an MSP, where I would want to run a report and be able to just present that to a client."
"There is definitely room for improvement with its automation capabilities."
"There should be enhancements in network monitoring capabilities beyond just physical devices like computers and servers. It would be beneficial to include better tools for monitoring networking infrastructure such as routers. Additionally, while Atera excels in ticket management, I believe there's room for improvement in user authentication and security features, especially when accessing and managing remote equipment. These updates would contribute to a more robust and secure user experience overall. Atera should include a monitoring tool integrated with Azure or similar cloud platforms. It would be beneficial to have capabilities for monitoring network growth and automatically generating statistics based on system stability and performance metrics. This feature would help us better manage and optimize our equipment and network resources, especially for strategic customer planning and resource allocation."
"Having more freedom to perform identity access management would be great."
"Customization could be improved."
"Atera could be improved by adding more granular control over technician roles. We need more specific controls on what technicians can access, like limiting their ability to view certain sections or access devices and share files. This feature request has already been made. The IP asset management capabilities need improvement to better manage assets beyond just devices."
"The chat solutions need improvement because we first need to connect to the customer. This needs to improve so that there is a particular feature that can provide support to customers even if they are not connected to a computer."
"The solution is scalable. However, in the past, we did have some issues."
"I'd like to see better integration, with the different applications within BigFix. Instead of sometimes feeling like four or five different applications, they need to be integrated a little better within themselves."
"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."
"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 would like to see different types of reporting and the ability to integrate closer with the cloud."
"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."
"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."
"In-place and OS upgrades can be improved."
"Sometimes the workstations communicate back to the BigFix server two or three days in a week or something similar. Sometimes there can be a delay reporting back to the server for a variety of reasons, such as users turning their computer off when they go home. When the user comes back and turns the computer back on BigFix needs to synchronize and sometimes it can take some time, approximately one week. The communication between the agent and the server should be faster, there is room for improvement in this area."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The value of the product is perfect, neither cheap nor expensive. I think it is the right rate. It would be awesome if it continued to be the same price because it is a great solution that I like. I like it because I'm not paying per device. I have some customers on monthly contracts and some of them are on break'n fix. If I have a client who is on break'n fix, and they need to pay per agent, then I am losing money. If they were ever to change structures, going to pay-per-device model, then I would need to think about changing to something else."
"Our company is a startup. The initial reason I looked into Atera was the fact that you pay by the technician, not per-device. That means you are able to jump right in with a service without having a large overhead."
"As an internal IT, it's gold right there. It is money in the bank."
"It comes with unlimited devices, so the fixed price cost is taken out of my budget. So, I'm all good."
"One of the biggest issues I face is the need to pay per technician. I've dealt with other platforms that you need to have 250-500 devices. Even though the cost declines as the number of devices a person has increases, they still require you to pay for 250 or 500, respectively. With Atera, the number doesn't matter as you always pay the same amount. I approximate that Atera saves me $100 per week."
"We pay per user. I am the only user. It is $150 per user. If I need to add one, it is not as costly as expanding with other providers."
"The solution cost approximately $200 Canadian per month."
"Atera's pricing stays fixed and predictable, enabling us to add more customers and unlimited monitored devices. We still have a number of clients who fit a break/fix IT model. This is something where clients are complaining more about having to pay extra month-by-month for technology services. With Atera's model, we don't have to be going out and asking for more from clients each month. Right now, with where we are at in terms of scale, this is very important to us."
"I can estimate the reduced cost of servers maintenance to approximatively $500,000."
"The price is very fair."
"It might be about $23 a client."
"The price is reasonable, but our customers find it expensive."
"You are charged per server and per workstation when using BigFix. ManageEngine is a lot cheaper than BigFix. There are some additional costs, such as support."
"The price of the solution is high. There are not any additional fees from the standard license."
"You get what we call the Platform Edition, which you get for free. The patch service is maybe $0.50 per workstation per month. Then there's the basic server cost, which is about $1.50 per server per month. You also get into Lifecycle which does power management, OSD remote control, and those types of things, and that might be about 10 times the price - which works out to about $13 per server and, maybe $5 per workstation per month."
"There's not much big cost. We only have to pay the agents' cost for the server, and for the systems."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Retailer
6%
Educational Organization
6%
Educational Organization
49%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Atera?
Pricing is low. It costs around 149 bucks per month.
What needs improvement with Atera?
It should improve its processes.
What is your primary use case for Atera?
Atera is integral to our daily operations. We use it for RMM, PSA, our ticket system, and contact with people. We also integrate it with different products.
What do you like most about BigFix?
The most valuable features of the solution are Windows patching and the hardware and software inventory.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BigFix?
The pricing is competitive, but not the most competitive.
What needs improvement with BigFix?
BigFix could improve its asset management capabilities to discover assets, including hardware. More improvements could be made in asset management.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Tivoli Endpoint Manager
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

MSPs, IT consultants, and IT departments worldwide trust and use Atera. 
US Foods, Penn State, St Vincent's Health US Foods, Sabadell Bank, SunTrust, Australia Sydney, Stemac, Capgemini, WNS Global Services, Jebsen & Jessen, CenterBeam, Strauss, Christian Hospital Centre, Brit Insurance, Career Education Corporation
Find out what your peers are saying about Atera vs. BigFix and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
815,854 professionals have used our research since 2012.