We performed a comparison between Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Ansible comes out on top in this comparison due to its easy setup, high performance, open-source license, and proven ROI.
"I would say the biggest benefit is the single-pane view. There's no jumping around multiple UI's to do your overall management."
"It's easy to manage."
"The Asset Management and Auto Pilot are valuable features."
"It is a very helpful solution."
"It's normally able to meet 100% expectations of our customers."
"The solution is easy to use and it has good performance."
"Technical support, in general, has been quite helpful."
"The product has eased the deployment of Microsoft apps to the devices. We can manage it properly. We can control it and push the updates. Another company helped us with the deployment. However, we can do it internally."
"Microsoft has done a good job with authentication solutions, such as single sign-on, or open authentication."
"It uses detailed descriptions of the workstations, and that is good for me."
"It gives us the ability to set up schedules, according to what our security requirements are, to automate the patching of our servers and desktops."
"It lets you know what your infrastructure is like and what state you are in."
"What's valuable is the basic management of the systems, being able to control who can access the systems."
"SCCM does everything from A to Z for a Windows operating system."
"Microsoft is being very competitive right now, and they are really investing in a lot of new features to be more competitive in the marketplace."
"The most valuable feature is the graphical-based reports of software updates that have been successful, the ones that have failed, and a summary of where the failures are what security breaches may occur."
"One of the most valuable features is automation. We are doing automation infrastructure, which allows us to automate regular tasks. This solution provides us with a service catalog, like building new services and automating daily tasks."
"The most valuable feature is that Ansible is agentless."
"I like the inventory management. It's a very nice, simple, concise way to keep all that data together. And the API allows us to use it even for things that are not Ansible."
"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 playbooks and the code the solution uses are quite useful."
"There are so many models that I don't have to create one."
"Ansible is agentless. So, we don't need to set up any agent into the computer we are interacting with. The only prerequisite is that the host with which we are going to interact must have the Python interpreter installed on it. We can connect to a host and do our configuration by using Ansible."
"It does not require staff for deployment and maintenance. It just works."
"The feature that allows us to import the business application from the configuration manager to Intune is not very good at this time."
"I think there should be a better tracking of the cell phones used on the Intune."
"The mobile and tablet-based versions need improvement because they are not completely user-friendly, compared to the web version. Also, data synchronization with our existing asset manager, the synchronization between multiple assets and multiple devices, takes a lot of time due to the security scanning. It should be reduced."
"The security features should be improved."
"It would be better if I could integrate it with my core group policy. I would like to have a group policy in my current environment, which has strict control, but those things are still missing. Although it has maximum compliance and security, it's not available on-premise."
"The product needs to upgrade itself when the server is overloaded."
"Technical support is not that great."
"I would like to see easier pushdowns. Currently, we have to package our own software and then push it. Intune can make that way easier and integrate applications, such as Zoom and Adobe Acrobat, that are used by a lot of enterprise or corporate organizations."
"The tool's deployment is complex and depends on the architecture you want to implement."
"Devices like smartphones and tablets are managed very well on VMware, however, they are absent in SCCM. I could configure iPad from the VMware site and it was done very easily. It should be just as possible on SCCM."
"Our company would prefer not rebooting computers while people are using them. There seems to be no strategy behind it."
"SCCM should strive to enhance the accuracy of its reporting functions in order to avoid any issues with incorrect or inaccurate data."
"Not everything is readily available, and there are a lot of commands that are only executable via PowerShell."
"Its client interface should be more accessible, and the notifications should be more customizable from the console. It should be more user friendly and have some kind of customized notifications so that we can use it on the client side. These are the reasons why we restricted its use only for the server environment and didn't use it on the client side."
"It should provide the ability to remotely connect to mobile devices. There are some solutions that are doing that, but with Microsoft Intune, the only way to remotely connect to devices outside the organization and mobile devices is by using TeamViewer. It is pretty strange for a big company like Microsoft to not have something for that."
"The main thing is that SCCM has to become an appliance instead of a server. When I say appliance, it has to come preconfigured so that it is drop-shipped into the enterprise and then you activate the feature sets that you want. It should pull down all the latest binaries. Once that is all there, it should have a discovery tool which goes out and discovers the assets within an enterprise. If the server, workstation, and applications are all coming from the same vendor, why not have the vendor do this work for us and automate it as much as it possibly can?"
"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."
"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."
"It could be easier to integrate Ansible with other solutions. No single tool can do everything. For example, we use Terraform for infrastructure and other solutions for configuration management and VMs."
"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."
"For a couple of the API integrations, there has been a lack of documentation."
"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."
"From Red Hat Insights point of view, the product is not on top as it is not responding as per the demand...Like on cloud platforms, you can see the main parts of Red Hat Insights, along with the inventory of all your apps. So, that is missing in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform."
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Microsoft Configuration Manager is ranked 2nd in Configuration Management with 78 reviews while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 58 reviews. Microsoft Configuration Manager is rated 8.2, while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Microsoft Configuration Manager writes "Seamless system updates, useful integration, and reliable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Its agentless, making the deployment fast and easy". Microsoft Configuration Manager is most compared with ManageEngine Endpoint Central, BigFix, Tanium, AWS Systems Manager and Red Hat Satellite, whereas Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps, BMC TrueSight Server Automation and BigFix. See our Microsoft Configuration Manager vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform report.
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