Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Perforce Puppet vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 1, 2026

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
6.7
Number of Reviews
317
Ranking in other categories
Remote Access (2nd), Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) (1st), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (1st)
Perforce Puppet
Ranking in Configuration Management
16th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
5.4
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Red Hat Ansible Automation ...
Ranking in Configuration Management
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
72
Ranking in other categories
Release Automation (3rd), Network Automation (1st), AWS Pro Service Providers (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Configuration Management category, the mindshare of Microsoft Intune is 7.4%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Perforce Puppet is 3.7%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is 12.2%, down from 18.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Configuration Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform12.2%
Microsoft Intune7.4%
Perforce Puppet3.7%
Other76.7%
Configuration Management
 

Featured Reviews

AkashKamble - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr MacOS specialist engineer at Cyber24
Enables management of multiple operating systems with a single license
The best feature is that it's a Microsoft product, so if anything goes wrong, we get quick support for anything required. Remote system functionality allows us to sit anywhere and take control of any device via remote management. We can enhance security for clients' laptops with built-in Microsoft Defender, which is available with the Microsoft Intune license. We use it for reporting purposes through endpoint analytics. When pushing scripting, there are two types available: remediation script and reservation script. Through endpoint analytics, you can push defender policies to clients. It helps with reporting, inventory updates, and monitoring tenant status health.
reviewer2284542 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Development Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Automated configuration management ensures consistent server setups
The strength of Puppet is in automated configuration management. We can configure a server once and set rules with Puppet so that future server configurations are automatic and consistent with company requests. Puppet is declarative, meaning it finds the best state for itself and corrects any deviations in the configuration.
Manas Kashyap - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Engineer at Elevenxcapital
Automation has transformed server patching and has reduced months of work to minutes
The best features that Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform offers is that it does not require any additional resources inside the servers. Python is the only requirement, and since Python is already present inside the servers, we can run it from our location and it automatically deploys things and does the work for us. The minimal requirements and easy deployment have definitely impacted my daily work and my team's efficiency. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is one of the best features that we depend on. We have evaluated other options, but Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform was the best choice because it has saved us a tremendous amount of time. We do not need to manually intervene in the servers or install third-party software to maintain these things. It is very easy to write playbooks for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Ansible Galaxy contains many playbooks that are readily available and ready to be used. It is highly configurable with Jinja templating, making it easy to maintain. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has positively impacted my organization. Previously, we needed to go into the servers and maintain them manually, which used to take a lot of time. For 200 to 300 servers, the maintenance took about one to two months. New patches would arrive and we would have to repeat the process. Now, it is a one-night work or a 10 to 15 minutes task. We write a playbook, maintain an inventory, and roll out the updates and it starts working for us. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform uses conditional clauses and has rollback options, functioning like a standard coding language that is simple to use. There is definitely a reduction in errors with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform because we have playbooks written with all the necessary clauses and rollback options. Manual work automatically creates more errors, whereas in automation, we have written sets that we do not forget every time we run it. We have protected written sets that we execute consistently.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The Asset Management and Auto Pilot are valuable features."
"Once it is well integrated with the rest of the environment, it makes everything easy."
"Configuration profiles, remediation, scripts, and auto-pilot features are very good."
"Microsoft Intune is best for Windows devices and security in Office 365 and Microsoft-related enterprise environments. It's a nice platform for endpoint management."
"It is a cloud-based service. It is easy to use and offers privacy."
"The feature that we need occasionally but is really important is the ability to remotely wipe a device, control it, and perform similar functions."
"Intune's unified endpoint management platform is invaluable."
"The Mobile Device Management in Intune is a valuable feature."
"Puppet3 and 4 series provides optimum deployment solutions for infrastructure and applications."
"The versatility is great."
"The most valuable features are the agent, high load balancing, and overall robustness and features."
"Puppet Enterprise has reduced the time of production changes or environment changes."
"The agent-based feature helps me by being stable."
"Puppet Enterprise is a stable solution."
"Puppet Enterprise has good functionalities."
"The main purpose for this automation tool would be: deploying, controlling, ordering change for the system and IT Infrastructure."
"The automation capabilities streamline deployment processes, providing reliability and reducing manual intervention and errors."
"The most valuable feature is that it is easy to build playbooks. The learning curve is not that steep."
"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."
"Some colleagues and other companies use it and comment that it is easy to use, easy to understand, and offers good features."
"The capacity to install products on the operating system is very valuable."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"Role-based access control and agentless architecture are the main features which may attract users."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is easy to integrate; the platform is simple to use."
 

Cons

"They need to add more group policies. Intune currently does not have many group policies that you can deploy. Its reporting, which is very limited at the moment, also needs improvement. It will be great if they can add report customization. Its stability needs to be improved. Sometimes, when you register a device in Intune, it doesn't show up instantly on the engine portal on the admin side. They need to provide better support for complicated issues. They also have a long turnaround time."
"There are items that require improvements. One is the controls from iOS."
"Intune needs to incorporate more tools to reduce the number of third-party applications we rely on."
"You can have a bad day where 80% of the enrollments failed. The next day it's running with the same devices without any changes, and you don't know why."
"I would like Intune to natively support easier report generation. This improvement would enable less experienced staff to run reports more efficiently without relying on additional tools or functions."
"Intune's areas for improvement revolve around security and certificate management."
"It would be beneficial to have a more straightforward understanding of Intune's capabilities, presented in a simplified manner."
"Lacking ability to leverage more iOS device management internally."
"Puppet Enterprise should improve the general extensibility for places where they can't install it."
"It's a bit of a pain point to make sure that everything works once we've upgraded it because Puppet has been evolving pretty fast."
"Clients with less technical expertise may find Puppet complex to configure. Our team may struggle if technical team members leave the organization, leaving others uncertain about using the tool."
"We would like Puppet to add more integration for applications."
"There's a lot of scope for enhancement on the DevSecOps side. They should definitely include features for compliance, for both the Linux and Windows side of the devices, as well as for network devices. Compliance is something they need to work on."
"The solution has really complex code, you have to understand the Ruby language. However, once you know the code then you can move ahead without any problems."
"Puppet Enterprise is more complex and difficult to configure."
"At the beginning the initial setup was kind of complex."
"The solution requires some Linux knowledge."
"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."
"At this time, I do not have anything to improve. What we struggle with is the knowledge base, but that is more about us having to go and find it and learn the platform on our own rather than an actual Ansible issue."
"For a couple of the API integrations, there has been a lack of documentation."
"The communication on it is not probably where it could be. We could use some real life examples where we could point customers to them and say, "This is what you are trying to do. If you follow these steps, it would at least get you started a bit quicker.""
"The job workflow needs to be worked on. It's not really clear to how you actually link things together. What they probably could do is provide an example workflow on how to stitch things together. I think that would be very helpful."
"The scalability of the solution has some shortcomings."
"Ansible can face scalability issues, such as limitations when trying to scale up infrastructure. It might struggle with connection dropping or spawning additional VMs under certain conditions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I have no comment on pricing of the solution."
"I recently got to know that the AD P1 license is compulsory to use Intune Autopilot, which was surprising for me. Earlier, this was not the case. It is the wrong thing to do. We now need to purchase AD P1 licenses for us and for our customers. I would rate it a seven out of ten for pricing."
"The pricing is good because customers are not complaining about it."
"The pricing for Intune and the competitor products are all within the same range, there is no true advantage when it comes to cost."
"Consider the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite rather than choosing specific sub-components, e.g. only Microsoft Intune."
"Its price is in the medium range. It is acceptable because you're paying for the features. I am not aware of any additional costs."
"Previously the price was $4 per month per user. Now it's $2.25 per user per month."
"While I don't have access to high-level financial information, I believe we have achieved lower costs with this implementation."
"The main thing that we noticed when we switched from the enterprise version to the community version was the difference in cost — the infrastructure is pretty expensive."
"Puppet Enterprise can be an expensive solution for smaller businesses."
"Depending on the size of the organization there is a point when the price of Puppet Enterprise should be lower. However, they provide really good functionality, features, and capabilities."
"Puppet Enterprise’s pricing is competitive."
"The pricing for us is huge because we use twenty thousand nodes, so that is a huge infrastructure, but if someone is using a small infrastructure, then the pricing is not so much."
"Ansible is a lot more competitive than any of the others. Its setup was also straightforward. In fact, we just implemented Ansible on OpenShift, so that is how we are running the Ansible Automation Platform now."
"The cost is high, but it still works well."
"You don't need to buy agents on servers or deploy expense management when using the solution, which affected our decision to go with it."
"If you only need to use Ansible, it's free for any end-user, but when you require Ansible Tower, you need to pay per Ansible Tower server."
"Ansible Tower is pretty expensive."
"I don't see the pricing or licensing features, but from what I understand, it is fairly reasonable."
"The pricing is pretty standard."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Configuration Management solutions are best for your needs.
882,103 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user185772 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Architect with 5,001-10,000 employees
Oct 27, 2015
Docker v. CFEngine v. Puppet Data Center Automation v. Chef v. Ansible
Originally posted at http://technologyconversations.com/2015/08/26/configuration-management-in-the-docker-world/ Anyone managing more than a few servers can confirm that doing such a task manually is a waste of time and risky. Configuration management (CM) exists for a long time and there is no…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business122
Midsize Enterprise48
Large Enterprise160
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise48
 

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?
Microsoft Intune is a great configuration management tool and has a lot of good things going for it. Here are some of...
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 ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Puppet Enterprise?
Regarding the cost, I find it expensive, always. I don't know how much the license would cost per year or per user ap...
What needs improvement with Puppet Enterprise?
I don't know what could be improved in Perforce Puppet to make this tool better for the next release. I can't think o...
What is your primary use case for Puppet Enterprise?
My main use case for Perforce Puppet is for configuration management.
What is the difference between Red Hat Satellite and Ansible?
Red Hat Satellite has proven to be a worthwhile investment for me. Both its patch management and license management h...
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 ...
What do you like most about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform?
The most valuable features of the solution are automation and patching.
 

Also Known As

Intune, MS Intune, Microsoft Endpoint Manager
Puppet
Ansible, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Subscription on AWS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Mitchells and Buzzers, Callaway
Los Alamos National Laboratory, GitHub, IP Commerce, Cedexis, Spiceworks, Server Density, Swisstopo, Chockstone, Constant Contact, NICS, Citrix
HootSuite Media, Inc., Cloud Physics, Narrative, BinckBank
Find out what your peers are saying about Perforce Puppet vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
882,103 professionals have used our research since 2012.