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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
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Intune
Sponsored
Ranking in Configuration Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
233
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 December 2024, in the Configuration Management category, the mindshare of Microsoft Intune is 12.0%, up from 10.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Systems Manager is 10.3%, down from 10.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is 16.3%, up from 16.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Configuration Management
 

Featured Reviews

Gaurav Chandola - PeerSpot reviewer
We can manage all aspects of our devices from a single console, easy to scale, and quick to deploy
Intune has many benefits from the Microsoft perspective. This solution can manage Windows 10 devices, app management, and provide security solutions. We don't need to worry about our network connection, and we'll be more secure with regular security patches and compliance. Since everything will be deployed through the internet and users will log in using the internet only, the risks have been mitigated. Security updates, security patching, and the application will be targeted from Intune. The location tracker will be available to track where the device is and the user's location. The user will be restricted from accessing certain applications using compliance policies. Conditional access policies will be based on the reason why the user needs access to the application. Microsoft Intune is one of the best products in the industry for managing Windows devices. The solution has more feature restrictions. The conditional access policies also eliminate the dependency on the on-prem network for the devices. The solution also manages our security settings and a lot of other beneficial features such as Microsoft Purview which gives us the compliance portion. We can manage all aspects of our device from a single console, including M365 services. This allows us to configure data classification types, such as public, private, internal, confidential, and highly confidential.
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.
Muralitharan KS - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficient server management and detailed reporting with flexible deployment capabilities
We are primarily using Ansible for automation purposes as it is a configuration management tool. It is utilized for various activities such as DNS activity, changes to web servers, virtual host settings, and other day-to-day tasks, all of which are templated in Ansible Ansible allows us to manage…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The biggest benefits of Intune are the ability to push changes and the added security. When we moved forward with Defender, we onboarded all those machines automatically. That helps dramatically. For a while, we were left with machines that weren't protected. We could see where people had done things they shouldn't have done, and Defender saved our skins a few times. It didn't happen a lot, but it happened enough that it made us glad we made that decision."
"Stable product that's easy to set up compared to other MDM products."
"Compliance and the policies that can be set are the most valuable features."
"Microsoft Intune has helped us by improving our security posture, leading to fewer security problems, and helping us understand where we have issues."
"The reporting and analytics features in Microsoft Intune have been a lifesaver."
"The stability of Microsoft Intune is ten out of ten."
"One of the biggest advantages of Microsoft Intune is that it brings the management of Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and even Linux under a single pane of glass."
"We have a BYOD policy, and this solution helps us manage our devices."
"Systems Manager has a feature where it analyzes the logs and gives us a performance overview in the form of a graph. We know when it's taking up more resources and when there are spikes, so we can predict the usability."
"The solution's ability to scale is good."
"AWS provides Auto Scaling groups."
"The solution is user-friendly"
"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 solution's most valuable feature is the change management option. It tracks every action on my AWS accounts in a centralized way, acting like a control tool for me. This is especially useful when working with Kubernetes and AWS ECS services. Additionally, my colleagues and clients often use the application management tools for configuration, parameters, and installations."
"I use AWS Systems Manager primarily for infrastructure management and automation. One of its key benefits is managing patches and updates for our EC2 instances, including both Windows and Linux workloads. It can perform compliance checks on all managed workloads, identifying which systems aren't compliant or haven't been patched."
"The most valuable feature of Ansible is repeatability because when you're working at the DoD, you want things to be cookie-cutter and replicable."
"Feature-wise, the solution is a good open-source software offering broad support. Also, it's reliable."
"The reason I like Ansible is, first, the coding of it is very straightforward, it's very human-readable. I'm also on a contract, and I can clearly iterate and bring people up to speed very quickly on writing a Playbook compared with writing up a Puppet manifest or a Salt script."
"The biggest thing I liked about Ansible is the check mode so that we can verify, after we've pushed, that the config there is actually what we intended."
"There are new modules available, which help to simplify the workflow. That is what we like about it."
"The easy-to-read syntax for YAML files and the interoperability between modules are valuable."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don’t need an agent for it to work."
"The most useful features are the playbooks. We can develop our playbooks and simplify them doing something like a cross platform."
 

Cons

"Historically, Group Policy has simplified the management of various items, such as printer and drive mappings and while Intune offers workarounds, it lacks native support for these functionalities."
"There are some issues using the solution with macOS and iOS, and it offers limited granular control with them. Intune works better on Windows and Android."
"Could benefit from user having more control over devices."
"The Mac integration has room for improvement."
"We had an APNS certificate set to expire last week. We tried to renew it two days before it expired. We logged in to the APNS portal but could not find that certificate. We didn't know where it went. All the iOS devices stopped working. We contacted the Apple and Microsoft teams, and each blamed the other. This is something that Microsoft should take care of. Last week, we had so many escalations from high-profile users who couldn't access corporate data on their devices."
"The solution could improve by having better integration with Apple."
"Some enrollment features could be improved."
"There are challenges with Intune, specifically in reporting. Many third-party companies offer single-pane-of-glass reporting that shows you what your update environment looks like, how your patch is doing, application status, etc., but Intune's reporting is not intuitive."
"It could be agentless if there's room for improvement in the AWS Systems Manager. Currently, you have to install agents, although, for most of the latest EC2 images, the agents come preinstalled. If it could be at the level of Ansible, which is agentless, that would be fantastic. When you compare the solution to Ansible, one of the most widely accepted tools, the agentless feature stands out. So, if the AWS Systems Manager could become agentless, that would be a significant improvement."
"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."
"Every AWS service comes with some associated costs."
"AWS does not have EKS cluster backup."
"The current challenge is that we can't pull any incidents from other accounts."
"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 AWS UIs are not the most intuitive. Also, the usability needs room for improvement."
"One area that could be enhanced is dynamic configuration management. Additionally, improving integration with other AWS services like Lambda and CloudFormation would be beneficial."
"What I'm trying to figure out, personally, is, when doing mass updates, how I can parallelize that a little bit better. It seems right now - and maybe, it's a shortcoming on my end - that I run through one set of servers, and then another set of servers, ad then another set of servers, but it seems like I could throw a lot of these checks out. Different types of servers, like web servers and DB servers, if I could parallelize that a little bit to make everything run a little bit more efficiently, that would help."
"The documentation for the installation step of deployment, OpenStack, etc., and these things have to be a bit more detailed."
"For a couple of the API integrations, there has been a lack of documentation."
"Ansible has just been upgraded, and the only issue that we are seeing at the moment is that the user interface can be slow. We're currently investigating the refresh period with Red Hat when you click a job and run a job. It seems that the buffer no longer runs in real-time. We haven't discovered whether that's partially an issue with our environment, but Red Hat has come back and said that they're working on a couple of bugs in the background. We've upgraded to that version in the last six months, and that's the only issue that we've seen."
"On the Dashboard, when you view a template run, it shows all the output. There is a search filter, but it would be nice to able to select one server in that run and then see all that output from just that one server, instead of having to do the search on that one server and find the results."
"One problem that I'm facing right now is the mismatch between the new version of Python and Ansible. Sometimes it's Python 2, and sometimes it's Python 3. When things get a bit dicey, I wish that Ansible would solve this issue by itself. I don't want to have to specify if it is Python 3 or version 2."
"Documentation could be improved. Many times, if I'm looking for something, I have to Google it in a lot of places, then figure out what the best approach will be. There are some best practices documents, but they don't give you the information."
"There are challenges in using the graphical interface, particularly in open-source versions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a license needed to use the solution and we are on an annual license."
"Microsoft Intune is a cost effective choice. It is less expensive than other products on the market."
"Microsoft Intune is available for individual purchase at a low per-device cost."
"Its price is fair. It's a normal price. It isn't too expensive or too cheap."
"Existing E5 license holders for M365, Intune, and Azure, receive a free license."
"The price for Intune is fair."
"Our Office 365 Business Premium license, including Office 365 and Intune Management, offers excellent value."
"It is reasonable for the features it has."
"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."
"As we were doing a government project so the government got the project at a very nominal cost."
"The platform provides excellent value for the capabilities it offers when compared to third-party tools for similar tasks."
"Users have to pay a per-node cost of around $ 100 per node."
"The cost is high, but it still works well."
"You don't need to buy agents on servers or deploy expense management when using the solution, which affected our decision to go with it."
"The pricing is okay."
"Like many Red Hat products, they have a no-cost version of the web application (AWX, formerly Ansible Tower), but you are on your own to install and it is a little more complicated than just installing Ansible."
"The pricing is pretty standard."
"Customers need to pay yearly for the license."
"I am using the community edition of the solution which is free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
26%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
31%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
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: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.