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AWS Systems Manager vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 16, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Intune
Sponsored
Ranking in Configuration Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
236
Ranking in other categories
Remote Access (1st), Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) (1st), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (1st)
AWS Systems Manager
Ranking in Configuration Management
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Red Hat Ansible Automation ...
Ranking in Configuration Management
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
68
Ranking in other categories
Release Automation (3rd), Network Automation (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Configuration Management category, the mindshare of Microsoft Intune is 10.1%, up from 9.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Systems Manager is 10.4%, up from 10.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is 18.3%, up from 18.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Configuration Management
 

Featured Reviews

Joseph Merusi - PeerSpot reviewer
Everything has worked better since we started using it
Sometimes the syncing is inconsistent. I'm confident that the devices are checking in every eight hours, but sometimes the devices aren't picking up the settings as quickly as I would expect. Some features haven't been updated in a while, and Microsoft doesn't seem interested in developing them. Unless you talk to an engineer, you don't know whether there will be an update. There are communication issues, so you might start working with a feature without knowing if it will be deprecated six months from now. Some reporting areas still need development. For example, I noticed that the reporting for driver updates is still confusing.
Ambe Frankline - PeerSpot reviewer
Tracks every action on AWS accounts in a centralized way
Setting up AWS Systems Manager to monitor and control other services is easy. You need to link the services you want to observe and track. The time it takes to deploy depends on factors like connectivity, latency, and the complexity of the services. For example, setting up a simple application is faster than setting up a more complicated three-tier or multi-tier system. Using the solution for batch updates varies depending on the number of servers involved and the commands needed. Personally, when I do small projects at home, deploying a few servers doesn't take long. But at work, where we handle larger deployments with hundreds of servers, it's faster due to better connectivity and resources.
Surya Chapagain - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to manage and simple to learn
We use Red Hat a lot. I open tickets for the Red Hat cases, however, with Ansible, I haven't opened any cases. My manager worked with them a bit. If we have a problem with some file and we need to get Red Hat to analyze the issue and the file is 100GBs, we'll have an issue since we need to provide a log file for them to analyze. If it is around 12GB or 13GB, we can easily upload it to the Red Hat portal. With more than 100GBs, it will fail. I heard it should cover up to 250GB for an upload, however, I find it fails. Therefore, Red Hat needs to provide a way to handle this.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The ability to work from all over the planet is valuable. You just need a functioning and working Internet connection."
"The best part of Intune is device control. If we need to block a user from opening something in their organization's system, we can do it from Intune. If we want to restrict the movement of an organization's data to prevent users from copying the data into Outlook, WhatsApp, or their personal Gmail, we can limit that via Intune. It secures all corporate data."
"Intune has significantly benefited our organization by providing comprehensive visibility into our device ecosystem."
"It supports end-users who tend to lock their devices quite frequently. Its conditional access policy helps us keep the users logged into their devices."
"There are no complaints about the stability. It works one hundred percent of the time."
"Our bank's most valuable Intune features are centered around the dedicated device concept."
"The overall user experience is quite nice. I have no complaints from end users regarding their devices enrolled in Intune."
"What I like most about the tool is that it's now very easy to set up a device for someone to use. It also helps us tremendously in managing security. Before, we used on-premise management with a domain controller. It was difficult to manage security comprehensively. For example, it was hard to know which computers were updated. We weren't able to do that easily with our previous solution."
"The solution's ability to scale is good."
"AWS Systems Manager's most valuable feature is its ability to dynamically export and import values in various AWS accounts."
"AWS Systems Manager's most valuable feature is its ability to dynamically export and import values in various AWS accounts"
"AWS provides Auto Scaling groups."
"It is beginner-friendly with extensive features that can be learned gradually based on the user's needs and tasks."
"Has a variety of automation options."
"When we do the automation in the cloud, we use the SSM agent. This helps us to test our automation and documents, and monitor the cloud."
"The store organizes parameters hierarchically, making it easier to configure and control versions. It also ensures scalability and high availability, automatically scaling to handle increasing workloads and providing reliable access to configuration data across multiple AWS availability zones."
"This solution allows us to stitch a lot of different parts of the workflow together."
"The most valuable features of the solution are automation and patching."
"Since it is in YAML, if I have to explain it to somebody else, they can easily understand it."
"It is all modular-based. If there is not a module for it today, someone will write it."
"The ease of being able to use the modules and collections to define what our business processes are is valuable. We are able to give non-technical people the ability to look at a process and say, "We need a step here. Someone do something and put it right here.""
"It was easy to read and learn. It is a YAML-based syntax, which makes it easily understand and pick up."
"It allows control over thousands of servers, whether virtual or physical."
"Managing our inventory is a big pain point. Right now, we have Satellite, but we can tie it in with Satellite, so we can actually manage things and automate the entire deployment stack, instead of trying to grab things from tickets, then generating Kickstart, and using that to get things in Satellite. That doesn't work well. We can do the whole deployment stack using the inventory share between Tower and Satellite."
 

Cons

"Some enrollment features could be improved."
"The synchronization could be improved."
"It doesn't economize when you scale up. We have over 14,000 employees, and we have between 7,500 and 8,000 city-owned or personal devices being used to conduct city business. Its price can be improved. It is not a cheap solution."
"Sometimes, the process is unsuccessful when we attempt to reset a device and wipe the data using Intune."
"I would like some integration with the Microsoft reporting platform Power BI."
"Intune should improve the management of non-Microsoft devices. It would be better to manage Mac, Android, and other non-Microsoft operating system devices within the same Intune interface."
"The reporting causes problems because we're trying to gather data to present to the management, but we can't get the data they request. If a user has removed an application from his device, but it won't report it at exactly the right time. It takes time to sync from the device to the portal. Let's say we are preparing a list or deck for the number of compliant devices that meet all of the organization's requirements. In a real-time scenario, that device could be compliant, but it is showing as non-compliant on the portal. It sometimes hampers the overall decisions that we make on our end."
"There is room for improvement in integrating additional features such as Purview and SharePoint activities into Intune."
"Ensuring broader OS coverage in patch management could be beneficial for the product."
"We formerly used third-party products to analyze the log, give us information, and find bottlenecks. Systems Manager could provide more tools that conduct this analysis, so we don't have to do it ourselves."
"The fact that AWS Systems Manager takes time to complete the patching process, makes it an area where improvements are required."
"I'd like to see more automation for monitoring and managing things like AWS CloudWatch and AWS Config. It would be a significant improvement if it could automatically handle these tasks and address issues as they arise."
"The current challenge is that we can't pull any incidents from other accounts."
"The AWS UIs are not the most intuitive. Also, the usability needs room for improvement."
"AWS does not have EKS cluster backup."
"One area that could be enhanced is dynamic configuration management. Additionally, improving integration with other AWS services like Lambda and CloudFormation would be beneficial."
"There is always room for improvement in features or customer support."
"The SSM connection access needs improvement"
"It can use some more credential types. I've found that when I go looking for a certain credential type, such as private keys, they're not really there."
"We are not using the Dashboard a lot because we have higher expectations from it. The default Dashboard from Tower doesn't give that much information. We really want to get down into more than if the job succeeded or what was the percentage of success. We want to get down to task-level success. If, in a job, there are ten tasks, we want to see this task was a success, and this was not, and how many were not. That's the kind of granularity we are looking for, that Tower does not give right now."
"I have seen indications that the documentation needs improvement. They are providing a "How to Improve Your Documentation" presentation at this conference."
"The governance features could be improved."
"Improvements should be made in terms of execution speed, which is, I believe, the most lacking feature. Aside from that, re-triggering a failed task is another useful feature."
"Networking needs to be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing depends on how you are providing support to your enterprise, whether it's device-based or user-based."
"The cost is handled through our Office 365 license, so I have yet to be able to compare it directly with other tools in its class."
"Intune's pricing is competitive. For example, the license of Blackberry's Enterprise Mobility Suite was costly, but Intune is affordable. It is included as an additional feature when you buy security enhancements for your organization. For example, let's say I have fifty users in my organization and all of them are using Microsoft cloud services, like Teams, Office 365, and OneDrive."
"Microsoft Intune is more expensive than other solutions, but it offers a wider range of features and control."
"While Microsoft charges for actual usage, it lacks discount options."
"Its price is fair. It's a normal price. It isn't too expensive or too cheap."
"There are licenses required for this solution. We enable licenses on the devices we need to manage."
"The licensing costs we leave up to the customer and these vary from one to another."
"Most of the features are free. I'm not entirely certain, but I believe the pricing is generally very low. Some services that are part of Ops Manager might have associated costs."
"An AWS cloud engineer can bring down the costs."
"The platform provides excellent value for the capabilities it offers when compared to third-party tools for similar tasks."
"As we were doing a government project so the government got the project at a very nominal cost."
"Ansible Tower is pretty expensive."
"We went with product because we have a subscription for Red Hat."
"The pricing is pretty standard."
"The cost is determined by the number of endpoints."
"The pricing for us is huge because we use twenty thousand nodes, so that is a huge infrastructure, but if someone is using a small infrastructure, then the pricing is not so much."
"If you only need to use Ansible, it's free for any end-user, but when you require Ansible Tower, you need to pay per Ansible Tower server."
"We have to be mindful of how we use Ansible because of the licensing model. I am not saying that it is unfair or we do not find value in it. Because we are trying to automate so many different things, we have to be mindful of what we are doing and how we are doing it because we are trying to stay in compliance with it."
"Ansible is a lot more competitive than any of the others. Its setup was also straightforward. In fact, we just implemented Ansible on OpenShift, so that is how we are running the Ansible Automation Platform now."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
27%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Educational Organization
32%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Microsoft Intune compare with VMware Workspace One?
Microsoft Intune is a great tool for managing a mobile device fleet while keeping access control. The solution makes ...
What are the pros and cons of Microsoft Intune?
Microsoft Intune is a great configuration management tool and has a lot of good things going for it. Here are some of...
How does Google Cloud Identity compare with Microsoft Intune?
Microsoft Intune offers not only an easy-to-deploy data protection and productivity management solution, but also ...
What do you like most about AWS Systems Manager?
With AWS Systems Manager, our company can patch our systems directly from it, so we don't need to patch our systems m...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Systems Manager?
Every AWS service comes with some associated costs. While using AWS Systems Manager, we continually monitor to optimi...
What needs improvement with AWS Systems Manager?
There isn't anything specific I remember at the moment.
What is the difference between Red Hat Satellite and Ansible?
Red Hat Satellite has proven to be a worthwhile investment for me. Both its patch management and license management h...
How does Ansible compare to Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (SCCM)?
Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager takes knowledge and research to properly configure. The length of time that ...
What do you like most about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform?
The most valuable features of the solution are automation and patching.
 

Also Known As

Intune, MS Intune, Microsoft Endpoint Manager
Amazon Elastic Container Registry
Ansible
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Mitchells and Buzzers, Callaway
Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
HootSuite Media, Inc., Cloud Physics, Narrative, BinckBank
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Systems Manager vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
832,138 professionals have used our research since 2012.