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BigFix vs VMware Carbon Black Endpoint comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 9, 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

BigFix
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
14th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
96
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)
21st
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
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 February 2025, 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 1.9%, down from 2.5% 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

"It covers multiple operating systems and helps with patch management."
"Desktop patching is the most valuable feature, because with servers, we have complete control over them, and we can simply push patches to the servers."
"It enables us to patch our systems quickly and within expectations and to increase our volume as needed. It has also helped us compress our patch sites. We used to do it monthly but now we do it weekly."
"The most valuable feature of BigFix is the reporting tool and patching Windows."
"It has improved my organization because we can automate a lot of tasks. We went from manually patching machines or doing our best and having very little visibility into it to us being able to set it and forget it and getting really good results on first-pass patching."
"Ability to run custom reports and custom relevance."
"It's very straightforward."
"BigFix is easy to use."
"Carbon Black CB Defense has helped improve my organization by allowing us to have better data so that we can do correlation and get visibility into the alerts."
"The biggest feature out of CarbonBlack is its ability to dive in with more depth. You can look at the entire kill chain and understand, not only if an alarm or identified incident is truly a true security issue versus a false positive, and it allows us to backtrack and figure out why it actually happened and how it got into the environment."
"The product allows us to focus on endpoint and antivirus protection."
"It is stable and easy to set up."
"It has the best live response feature."
"Carbon Black Cb Defense has a nice component called Alert Triage. It contains full details of the process execution "kill chain" and "go live" for immediate remediation."
"It has intelligent learning behind it and we have been very successful in preventing attacks."
"It uses machine learning and behavioral analytics for advanced threat detection and response."
 

Cons

"Maybe the online help could be improved. It'd be nice if you would have a lot more phrases and keywords that you could search for and find answers with the help."
"I'd definitely like to see additional feature parody in the web UI versus the console. There are certain things that you can only do in the console and they're very cumbersome to do, like secure parameters, for example. That's definitely something that has a wide degree of utility but it needs to be easier to surface. At this particular juncture between the transition, between the legacy console and the web UI, it's hard to justify dealing with the cumbersome aspects of the legacy console when theoretically everything's been through the web UI."
"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."
"Around the scalability concern, I would like to see the ability to run teamed, clustered, or hierarchical root servers, in order to provide a more robust, high availability system. The single monolithic root server model does somewhat bother me."
"I'm looking for them to make big web UI improvements."
"The console interface is not friendly, and requires training before using it in production."
"To make it a ten they should improve the licensing. Second, if they could have one environment for everything it would be nice. For you to install compliance you need to install the server, and then you add the modules. For you to install inventory you install the server and then you add the modules. It's not easy to do. When I was doing it before I learned it, it was not straight forward."
"I remember doing restarts a few times. So, making sure that it is rock solid from an executable perspective is important."
"The GUI and reporting should be addressed and the product's administration features need fine tuning."
"But here, we hardly can take any kind of a report out of Carbon Black, so I think that should be something that should be more user-friendly."
"In my company, we face issues sometimes when there is a need to write custom rules or we want to write for some rules that are different from the standard rules provided by the solution."
"The UI interface needs improvement. The management needs further work in future versions."
"The local technical support is very poor, but the support from headquarters is very nice."
"Carbon Black CB Defense has helped improve my organization by allowing us to have better data so that we can do correlation and get visibility into the alerts."
"The product's stability could be improved."
"The feature set for the firewall needs improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of BigFix is better than the solutions. You are able to pay monthly or annually. There are not any hidden costs with BigFix. There is an additional cost for the SQL database."
"The price of BigFix could be lower. However, I am always seeking a lower price."
"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."
"Compliance, inventory, and licensing are really pricey. They should lower the price. It discourages users from getting onboard."
"I can estimate the reduced cost of servers maintenance to approximatively $500,000."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is expensive and ten is cheap, I rate the solution's pricing one out of ten."
"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."
"Its price is very reasonable."
"The license is annual. It's a standard license."
"VMware Carbon Black Endpoint is an expensive product."
"In terms of licensing costs, Carbon Black CB Defense was all associated with CROW and the services my company is using with them, so it came all-inclusive."
"The pricing is very high."
"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."
"The pricing [is] more or less the same as other similar solutions."
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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
52%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

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: January 2025.
832,340 professionals have used our research since 2012.