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Microsoft Configuration Manager vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

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

Microsoft Intune
Sponsored
Ranking in Configuration Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
247
Ranking in other categories
Remote Access (1st), Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) (1st), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (1st)
Microsoft Configuration Man...
Ranking in Configuration Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
81
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (6th), Patch Management (1st)
VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Configuration Management
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
170
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (1st), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (17th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Configuration Management category, the mindshare of Microsoft Intune is 10.2%, up from 9.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Configuration Manager is 12.8%, down from 14.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 5.6%, up from 5.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Configuration Management
 

Featured Reviews

Joseph Merusi - PeerSpot reviewer
Everything has worked better since we started using it
Sometimes the syncing is inconsistent. I'm confident that the devices are checking in every eight hours, but sometimes the devices aren't picking up the settings as quickly as I would expect. Some features haven't been updated in a while, and Microsoft doesn't seem interested in developing them. Unless you talk to an engineer, you don't know whether there will be an update. There are communication issues, so you might start working with a feature without knowing if it will be deprecated six months from now. Some reporting areas still need development. For example, I noticed that the reporting for driver updates is still confusing.
MikeNelson2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Deployment recovery works well but requires configuration improvements
While I do not use the product frequently, many issues were due to configuration rather than the product itself. I cannot give an exact recommendation as it is not my area of responsibility. The team that uses it finds it adequate. It is presently good enough for us not to investigate other options. Overall, I rate the product a six out of ten.
Le Quang Long - PeerSpot reviewer
Significantly streamlined operations with good automation that helps with simplifying workflows
It helps me build a big catalog and provide it to my end users. It helps us automate the workflow of creating many VMs and the TensorFlow key method. I do not meet many people to operate it live beforehand. It operates for both of my products, but as a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Our main use is Intune's management of mobile devices, like Android or iPhone devices. The application performs quite well for both types. We successfully managed almost 3,000 endpoints."
"The main advantage is that Intune performs its intended functions effectively."
"Conditional access has helped us tailor and enforce our security policies in the mobile space."
"The most valuable feature of Intune is the user-friendly portal for end users."
"We use a local Active Directory, but we weren't able to manage all our on-site systems without a solution like Intune, and we needed to deploy software like VPNs and other things. It's seamless now to to this through Intune."
"It has a useful device management feature."
"Intune provides a centralized management solution, although its suitability depends on specific needs and comparisons with alternatives like Jamf, Kandji, or ManageEngine."
"The most valuable feature of Intune is the central dashboard for compliance and policy management."
"What's valuable is the basic management of the systems, being able to control who can access the systems."
"Software deployment and WSUS are most valuable."
"With the SCCM inventory, we found a lot of rogue applications. We were able to identify them, find out who was running them, and either put them on our application list or remove them."
"The most valuable feature of SCCM is the application distribution."
"It lets you know what your infrastructure is like and what state you are in."
"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."
"This solution captures all the devices in our infrastructure."
"Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager is very scalable."
"I recommend the product due to its effectiveness in automation and integration."
"The benefits are that it gives you a heads-up display and dashboard of the way everything's running. The ability to automate around those tasks is really where we get the value."
"Even with the virtualization, it would take us at least three or four days to create a VM. With vRA we have brought that down to seven minutes. The solution has helped increase infrastructure, agility, speed of provisioning, time to market, application agility. Everything got super fast."
"vRA provides that single pane of glass for our cloud tenants to deploy, monitor, access, and manage their VMs/guest operating systems."
"usability; Ease of use, the GUI, is probably the best feature, so that really anybody can use it. You don't have to be technical to be able to deploy a VM. I find it to be intuitive and user-friendly. Regarding some of the files that you feed it, you don't have to do a ton of development. You can feed it pretty standard configuration files. You don't have to be a developer, you don't have to know C# or Java or the like to get it going."
"The most valuable feature is the portal where you can assign permissions to specific people to request specific items in the catalog and allow them to provision things for themselves. Or it enables them to request different services that you can create through vRO and vRA."
"It is possible to completely automatize the creation and removal of a virtual machine."
"We have also found it to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's something that, because it has the workflows that are very easily graphed out - you can follow what it's doing, it's very picturesque, you can see what it's doing easily - it's something that you can hand over to a user who is not familiar with it and they can wrap their brain around it pretty quickly."
 

Cons

"I have a lot of Apple products in my environment. It would be nice to have an improved integration of Apple products with Microsoft Intune without Jam."
"We haven't really gone through all the features of Intune. We are just discovering them. Every day, we see a new feature that we want to apply, but what will be great for Intune is to be able to deploy apps in a simple fashion. We should be able to easily install various apps on the Windows platform, iOS, and Android. Currently, we have to write some scripts. It's not as straightforward as we would like it to be. It should be simplified so that we can do it just with three clicks—next, next, finish—without needing to write a script."
"It's only good for a Microsoft environment."
"The reporting needs to be a bit more interactive."
"Microsoft Intune lags market leaders, such as Apperian, in its MAM capabilities."
"It's the granularity: 'Is your firewall on? Is BitLocker on?' It's not amazing granularity. But I've looked into other products, like Duo, and they're all similar."
"Intune is not the most user-friendly mobile device management platform available."
"There is improvement needed in integrating with the installed Office solutions versions, such as Office 2019. The Office 365 integrates without a problem."
"The tool's deployment is difficult. Microsoft needs to improve documentation with videos."
"The configuration of Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager could be improved, it is a bit complicated."
"This solution needs to be supported on all Operating systems."
"We'd like the solution to make it easier to manage remote users."
"The deployment process is lengthy and should be quicker to complete."
"Built in PowerShell cmdlets would be a nice feature because managing clients remotely can be a pain without knowing the WMI calls to run."
"The App to upgrades to the server needs to be improved."
"Troubleshooting in general needs improvement. There's just a ton of logs to go through, and so finding the error log that corresponds with that you're doing can sometimes be difficult."
"The stability on the 6.2 version is very bad. It crashes. VMware tech support knows the IIS component is a bit buggy."
"When it comes to the orchestration workflow, you're on your own. The documentation and resources are very limited, and you have to learn everything on your own."
"I don't find it to be user-friendly or intuitive because, in my case, when I have to deploy SAP systems, I need to jump between the vRA, the vRO, and the actual vCenter itself. I need to go back and forth to do different things... I wish they could make it just one application, just vRA, that does all that. There might be a way to do it but I haven't figured out how to do it yet."
"vRealize Automation on the back-end is still a little complicated. It has a lot of moving pieces, simplifying that from a pure infrastructure point of view would be a good thing. I would then like to have more out-of-the-box functionality and integrations with VMware components."
"The back-end has a steep learning curve."
"When you start to do a deployment where you need higher availability and more resiliency, then the complexity goes up drastically."
"Upgrades are always a pain."
"The stability is why I rated it a seven and not higher. There were several cases where we had to restart some services because it wasn't working correctly anymore. People cannot extend their machine or replay their machine. There is no alert to say that there is a problem and that we should stop the service. The monitoring system is not very good."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Microsoft's licensing is more flexible and adaptive than its competitors."
"The tool is cheaper than our company's other MDM tools."
"We spend a lot of money on Intune licensing, and some of our users have to be double licensed just because of how our dev and corporate environments are segmented."
"Microsoft Intune is not cost-effective as a standalone product."
"I liked the tool's pricing until P2 came into effect. I am unsure about the current value versus the cost of the new licensing model."
"The product is relatively pricey, but considering its benefits, I'd say it's fair. The benefits outweigh the expensive licensing fees, especially for large organizations, but medium-sized and smaller businesses may be unable to afford it."
"Its pricing seems reasonable."
"Microsoft Intune's pricing is reasonable."
"The licensing is good because they have various options, depending on what you are looking for."
"Overall, I think it's fine. It's pretty much in-line because there are ways to offset it with the Office 365 licensing."
"Pricing and licensing are horrible. You have to not look at dollar value to use SCCM. It's super-duper expensive but it works. The acquisition cost is expensive, it's labor-intensive. But it works."
"There is an annual license needed to use the solution."
"We use the tool's free license. It is expensive."
"Microsoft provides a steep price for their enterprise products, but they offer very competitive pricing for their legacy customers."
"As far as I know, it is an annual operating expense license."
"Its licensing is quite complicated because we are getting the license not only for SCCM but for the full Microsoft package. We don't need to pay for a separate license. We need to have one license that includes everything we need, such as Windows, Microsoft 365, SCCM, encryption, and so on. So, we don't have a specific price for it. Perhaps, it is good that it includes the full suite of licensing of Microsoft. It is expensive, but we are getting a lot of features."
"The solution is pretty expensive but provides good workload management."
"The pricing for this solution is roughly 20% lower than the competitive products in the market."
"It made the provisioning of the virtual machines easier and faster. We can react more quickly to customers' demands."
"They should provide one license for all the sub-products."
"I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive."
"The pricing is very high."
"It is pricey for what you get."
"The solution is free of cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
24%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
9%
 

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?
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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 ...
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 ...
How to choose between ManageEngine Desktop Central and Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (formerly SCCM)?
ManageEngine Desktop Central is very easy to set up, is scalable, stable, and also has very good patch management. Wh...
What do you like most about SCCM?
One of the standout features of SCCM is its application management capabilities. It allows us to create packages effi...
What's the difference between VMware vRA (automation) and vROps (operations)?
vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything y...
Is there any way to try VMware Aria Automation for free?
When it comes to VMware Aria Automation, you have three choices for free runs: Hands-on Lab (HOL) Advanced lab A fre...
Which sectors can benefit the most from VMware Aria Automation?
I was looking at VMware Aria Automation case studies recently and I got the impression that three main kinds of compa...
 

Also Known As

Intune, MS Intune, Microsoft Endpoint Manager
Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager, System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM )
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Mitchells and Buzzers, Callaway
Bank Alfalah Ltd., Wªrth Handelsges.m.b.H, Dimension Data, Japan Business Systems, St. Lucie County Public Schools, MISC Berhad
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Configuration Manager vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.