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BigFix vs VMware Carbon Black Endpoint comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 9, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

BigFix
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
14th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
95
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (5th), Patch Management (2nd), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (4th)
VMware Carbon Black Endpoint
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
18th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
Security Incident Response (1st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (15th), Ransomware Protection (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) category, the mindshare of BigFix is 1.0%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Carbon Black Endpoint is 2.0%, down from 2.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
 

Q&A Highlights

Miriam Tover - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 15, 2019
 

Featured Reviews

Bella Yakoby - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Matthew Weisler - PeerSpot reviewer
Great granularity for policies or applications without needing hash values
The solution is cloud based which makes it easy to use for remote devices or work-at-home situations. The solution supports full trust or signature-based approvals. You can get very granular and band out policies or applications without having to do hash values. You can band through the entire environment by execution of the name or desk IDXE. This can be achieved on the policy side because of the signature, IOC, or naming convention itself. This is very effective for pushing more blockage or removing threats across the board. The solution has a very nice API on the back end for remoting into a system and executing scripts or utilizing self automation. This is useful for monitoring several different companies in a workspace or workbook-type format. For example, I report and send out mass emails from a clickable button in an Excel workbook. The APIs all exist for each client. I push out automatic endpoint monitoring and reports every single day at a particular time, with a simple clickable button that serves as a scheduled task for fifty clients.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"BigFix technical support is good."
"I like the inventory and life cycle management feature."
"The most valuable and essential features of BigFix are all of them, they are needed when serving the purpose of the desktop operation framework. We cannot run operations without patching or without having an appropriate mechanism for deploying software, et cetera. The features all serve their purpose for our use case."
"The technical support for BigFix is really amazing."
"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 of the solution are Windows patching and the hardware and software inventory."
"Having higher visibility on patching level, on patching successful, and non-successful has been a way that BigFix has improved my organization. Also, the ability to customize the content to do what we need it to do is very powerful and very flexible for us. Finally, in the area of custom interfaces like REST API really gives us the ability to provide for our external customers."
"Pre-packaged support for many third-party applications such as Adobe, Google, Mozilla, Sun (Java), WinZip, and others."
"The product is pretty strong in terms of security and their features are very good in that respect."
"The whole purpose of the product, like application control, is very good, and also if you need to update some policies, it works well and instantly."
"The threat analysis functionality is good."
"I feel that the initial setup was straightforward and not complex."
"The product allows us to focus on endpoint and antivirus protection."
"Some of the valuable features I have found are the online documentation of the solution is well organized and thorough. I like the simplicity of bypass and the visualization of the active components."
"I rate Carbon Black CB Defense an eight out of ten for the ease of its initial setup."
"The tool is pretty stable."
 

Cons

"I would eventually like to see a SaaS offering, a cloud-hosted BigFix instance where we only have to put a relay in our environment."
"The reporting structure could be a little more simplistic. Currently, it throws too many vulnerabilities. Some of them are not needed because they are only informational and limitations, and they are not of much help. It doesn't need to show us these things."
"I would like the dashboard to be improved to show the problematic machines and good machines."
"I would like to see the Self Service section made more user-friendly."
"BigFix can improve the way machines report back to the console. In the external relay management environment, it has become more of a hybrid environment with most of the machines not being on-site. The need of having public-facing reporting items interconnected is becoming more and more crucial. In general, the reporting could use some enhancement."
"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."
"The deployment has room for improvement and can be more streamlined."
"The new EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) feature, Detect, is new and still needs a few updates."
"Needs improvement in the area of infrastructure for on-premise installation.​"
"I would like to see improvements made so that we can better see all of the processes."
"The solution needs expanded endpoint query tools."
"It could be a bit complicated. You have to be very familiar with Carbon Black to understand what it is doing and why it is doing. I would like to have more explanations and simplification in the user interface. It would be good to get help and see more explanations. It should tell us that a software is blocked and the reason for it. It would be good to be able to build chains in terms of what caused what, what worked, and what caused an issue. We are now moving from Carbon Black to Cortex XDR. While choosing antivirus software, we were also looking at Carbon Black because it also has an antivirus package, and it is next-generation, but we were told that Carbon Black doesn't support firewalls. We have Palo Alto firewalls. We would have chosen this solution if it supported firewalls, in particular next-generation firewalls, but unfortunately, it doesn't. Therefore, we decided on Cortex XDR because it integrates with Palo Alto firewalls."
"The local technical support is very poor, but the support from headquarters is very nice."
"The product cannot perform an on-demand scan. They could add this particular feature."
"The solution has to mature on container security and a lot of cloud environment security."
"This solution works well but needs lots of tuning and optimization."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is slightly high."
"So, the pricing is slightly more expensive than the others. I have to keep buying licenses every time I add a new device."
"It is too costly. It is one of the best tools, but because of pricing, not all clients support it. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"I can estimate the reduced cost of servers maintenance to approximatively $500,000."
"The price of the solution is high. There are not any additional fees from the standard license."
"There's not much big cost. We only have to pay the agents' cost for the server, and for the systems."
"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."
"The price is very fair."
"The pricing [is] more or less the same as other similar solutions."
"The product’s price is less expensive than other vendors."
"The product is quite reasonable."
"​The cost/benefit factor has great relevance in Cb Defense implementations​."
"Its pricing was very good, which is one of the reasons I went to it as an alternative. It is on a yearly basis. There are no additional fees."
"This is a really expensive product and we pay licensing fees on a yearly basis."
"The platform is expensive."
"The pricing is annually based and operates through another department than mine."
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Answers from the Community

Miriam Tover - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 23, 2019
Apr 23, 2019
BigFix and Carbon Black are really two different products from a functionality standpoint and are not really competing products. Carbon Black Defense is essentially an anti-malware (with more smarts and they refer to it as Next-gen AV) BigFix does not provide anti-malware functionality. BigFix has multiple components that you would use to protect your environment BigFix Patch: As the name sug...
2 out of 8 answers
MP
Apr 15, 2019
These are complementary solutions. Cb Defense is a combination of next-gen AV and EDR capabilities. BigFix is used to identify assets, distribute software, Patch OS� and applications, provision systems, keep systems continuously compliant and much more. Many enterprises use BigFix to find which endpoints need Cb, distribute Cb agents, keep them updated and fix what Cb finds either by quarantining the endpoint, patching it, distributing a new application or wiping and reimaging it.
MW
Apr 15, 2019
Hey Nick, We chose MS SCCM not Bigfix at the end. Thanks
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
50%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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.
What to choose: an endpoint antivirus, an EDR solution or both?
I can recommend Carbon Black, an award-winning next-gen anti-virus (NGAV) and endpoint detection and response (EDR) security solution. The CB Predictive Security Cloud platform combines multiple hi...
What's the difference between Carbon Black CB Response and Carbon Black CB Defense?
Carbon Black offers two different levels of Endpoint Detection and Response. One is the VM Carbon Black Cloud Endpoint Standard (CB Defense), and the other is the Carbon Black Endpoint Detection an...
What do you like most about Carbon Black CB Defense?
VMware Carbon Black Endpoint is a highly stable solution.
 

Also Known As

Tivoli Endpoint Manager
Carbon Black CB Defense, Bit9, Confer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
Netflix, Progress Residential, Indeed, Hologic, Gentle Giant, Samsung Research America
Find out what your peers are saying about BigFix vs. VMware Carbon Black Endpoint and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.