We performed a comparison between Chef and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Configuration Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Being able to manage the devices remotely is most valuable. We can push security requirements through Microsoft Intune."
"The stability of Microsoft Intune is good."
"We already use a lot of Microsoft products in our company, and therefore, it made sense to also use this product."
"Microsoft Endpoint Manager is not expensive overall, especially for small environments."
"We are a remote company, and the product helps us manage the global endpoints. It helps us natively manage the endpoints in the cloud from anywhere."
"For our office workers who are not based in Norway, when we order the PC, we can do some of the settings for them. These are standardized settings. We can set them up exactly as they are in Norway so that they're the same."
"The solution appears to be stable and scalable."
"It's really easy to access."
"The most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."
"One thing that we've been able to do is a tiered permission model, allowing developers and their managers to perform their own operations in lower environments. This means a manager can go in and make changes to a whole environment, whereas a developer with less access may only be able to change individual components or be able to upgrade the version for software that they have control over."
"Chef can be scaled as needed. The Chef server itself can scale but it depends on the available resources. You can upgrade specific resources to meet the demand. Similarly, with clients, you can add as many clients as you need. Again, this depends on the server resources. If the server has enough resources, it can handle the number of servers required to manage the infrastructure. Chef can be scaled to meet the needs of the infrastructure being managed."
"Automation is everything. Having so many servers in production, many of our processes won't work nor scale. So, we look for tools to help us automate the process, and Chef is one of them."
"The product is useful for automating processes."
"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."
"There are no agents by default, so adding a new server is a matter of a couple lines of configuration (on a new server and the configuration master)."
"The solution is capable of integrating with many applications and devices in comparison to BigFix."
"Installing it is a PIP command. So, it's pretty easy. It is a one liner."
"I like the fact that Ansible is agentless."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is quite stable. If you set it up correctly with the right configurations and there are no hiccups during installation and deployment, it will be stable. I'd give stability a rating of eight out of ten."
"The API for exposing all our infrastructure services is the most valuable feature."
"It is very extensible. There are many plugins and modules out there that everybody helps create to interact with different cloud providers as well."
"RBAC is great around Organizations and I can use that backend as our lab. Ingesting stuff into the JSON logs, into any sort of logging collector; it works with Splunk and there are other collectors as well. It supports Sumo and that helps, I can go create reports in Sumo Logic. Workflows are an interesting feature. I can collect a lot of templates and create a workflow out of them."
"There's quite a lot of development that they can do within their Intune dashboard. I think there are too many lines hyperlinked to move you around. Others, in contrast, give you a simple dashboard and an intuitive administrative walkthrough."
"In future releases, I would like to see better integration with Apple products."
"They could also make it easier to use because there are some other products that may be easier to use in terms of the look and feel of the dashboard."
"We need the capabilities of the Cloud Management Gateway (CMG) to be enhanced through Intune instead of Azure."
"The policies we had in SCCM and AD offered features that are missing from Microsoft Intune."
"An issue we have run into with Microsoft Endpoint Manager is that we cannot patch third-party products like Adobe and Chrome with it."
"Microsoft Intune could enhance its patch management for various devices, ensuring regular updates and tracking of device privileges."
"The UI also needs improvements because it is complex for end-users. We have had feedback from a few users in our organization who found the UI is not feasible for tracking and analyzing all the processes and monitoring all the devices."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"It is an old technology."
"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."
"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."
"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."
"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."
"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."
"What I would like to see is a refined Dashboard to see, when I log in: Here are all my jobs, here are how many times they've executed; some kind graphical stitching-together of the workflows and jobs, and how they're connected. Also, those "failed hosts," what does that mean? We have a problem, a failed host can be anything. Is SSH the reason it failed? Is the job template why it failed? It doesn't really distinguish that."
"There needs to be improvement in the orchestration."
"In Community, there's a lot of effort towards testing, standardizing, and testing for module development to role development, which is why Molecule is now becoming real. Same thing with Zuul, which we are starting to implement. Zulu tests out modules from third-party sources, like ourselves, and verifies that the modules work before they are committed to the code. Currently, Ansible can't do this with all the modules out there."
"Networking needs to be improved."
"They should think of this product as an end-to-end solution and begin to develop it that way."
"The documentation for the installation step of deployment, OpenStack, etc., and these things have to be a bit more detailed."
"It is a little slow on the network side because every time you call a module, it's initiating an SSH or an API call to a network device, and it just slows things down."
"When you set up Playbooks, I may have one version of the Playbook, but another member of the team may have a different vision, and we will not know which version is correct. We want to have one central repository for managing the different versions of Playbooks, so we can have better collaboration among team members. This is our use case for using Git version control."
More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
Chef is ranked 16th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 58 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Chef writes "Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Capable of broad integrations with easy-to-operate infrastructure and user controls". Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager and Nolio Release Automation, whereas Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, Microsoft Configuration Manager, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps and BMC TrueSight Server Automation. See our Chef vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform report.
See our list of best Configuration Management vendors and best Release Automation vendors.
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