Perforce Puppet vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform comparison

Perforce Puppet vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

March 2026

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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

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Configuration Management category, the mindshare of Microsoft Intune is 6.9%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Perforce Puppet is 3.8%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is 11.9%, down from 18.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Configuration Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform	11.9%
Microsoft Intune	6.9%
Perforce Puppet	3.8%
Other	77.4%

Configuration Management

Featured Reviews

AkashKamble

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.

Automated configuration management ensures consistent server setups

reviewer2284542

Business Development Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

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.

Automation has transformed server patching and has reduced months of work to minutes

Manas Kashyap

DevOps Engineer at Elevenxcapital

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.

More Microsoft Intune pros

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Microsoft Intune is brilliant for scalability and is excellent for scaling purposes."

"The ability to switch between Affinity and non-Affinity enrollment is great."

"Microsoft Intune's autopilot has been nice to have."

"The best features in Microsoft Intune include secure authentication, which I find very favorable, and the fact that we can remotely push applications."

"While I don't think you can ever have full visibility and control, Intune certainly allows us to see the applications being used and tells us if things like Windows patches aren't applied to machines. It does a good job. That visibility makes life a little easier."

"Intune's unified endpoint management platform is invaluable."

"The standout features of Intune are its excellent mobile device management and highly effective application management capabilities."

"The feature of remotely wiping devices in Microsoft Intune is what I prefer the most."

"The versatility is great."

"The main purpose for this automation tool would be: deploying, controlling, ordering change for the system and IT Infrastructure."

"Puppet3 and 4 series provides optimum deployment solutions for infrastructure and applications."

"The agent-based feature helps me by being stable."

"Puppet Enterprise has good functionalities."

"The most valuable features are the agent, high load balancing, and overall robustness and features."

"Anything that we manage through Puppet always runs perfectly."

"Puppet Enterprise has reduced the time of production changes or environment changes."

More Perforce Puppet pros

"The solution is very simple to use."

"The most valuable feature is that Ansible is agentless."

"The API for exposing all our infrastructure services is the most valuable feature."

"When you have an enterprise-level number of network devices, the ability to quickly push out security updates to thousands of devices is the biggest thing"

"The user interface is well-built and very easy to navigate around."

"It is very extensible. There are many plugins and modules out there that everybody helps create to interact with different cloud providers as well."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"The most valuable feature of Ansible is repeatability because when you're working at the DoD, you want things to be cookie-cutter and replicable."

More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform pros

Cons

"There were several bugs with stability."

"The mobile management is good for iPhone and iPad, but the Apple Mac management needs improvement. That is probably because Microsoft does not have low-level access to Apple Mac hardware. If you are doing basic things, it is okay, but if you want to image Apple Macs and do things like that, then Jamf is much better."

"We've faced significant pushback with Copilot as our clients aren't seeing a favorable cost-benefit analysis."

"One drawback of Intune is that we cannot find devices based on a user's region or location."

"It needs incorporation of Knox, ZeroTouch, etc."

"It's only good for a Microsoft environment."

"Enhancements for managing MacOS more comprehensively would be beneficial."

"There could be some kind of feature that supports a workgroup environment or a separate environment without the Entra ID."

More Microsoft Intune cons

"We would like Puppet to add more integration for applications."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 user interface on the Ansible Tower product could be better, but it is functional."

"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."

"The technical support is not adequate. The Ansible sales and technical support services need significant improvement."

"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."

"There should be better Windows support. We have had to develop a lot of our own roles because of the Windows platform. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux ones existed but not the Windows versions, so I have had to develop a bunch of Windows ones."

"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."

More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is competitive, but it is not cheap."

"The tool is cheaper than our company's other MDM tools."

"It is not a cheap solution. The price for a device when you start using it at a large scale can be improved. It is covered under our enterprise agreement. We pay once a year. I am not aware of any additional costs."

"We work in the charity sector, so a lot of our clients get Microsoft Premium licenses or Business Premium for free. They get ten licenses free, and a lot of our clients do not have more than ten staff members. They are getting the tool for free, so its cost is not an issue."

"Intune's pricing is reasonable considering its benefits and the high costs it helps avoid."

"The cost is somewhat on the higher side, particularly when considering certain price points, especially in markets like India."

"Its licensing model is not complex, but it is very expensive compared to other solutions. They can bring more models and reduce the pricing. They should allow customers to select the features they want and price it accordingly."

"It's reasonable. They're not giving it away, but it's reasonable."

More Microsoft Intune pricing and cost advice

"Puppet Enterprise’s pricing is competitive."

"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 can be an expensive solution for smaller businesses."

"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."

"Customers need to pay yearly for the license."

"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is an expensive solution. There may be additional fees to use advanced features."

"The pricing is okay."

"It is a little pricey but it is affordable. It is not that bad."

"Ansible Tower is free. Until they lower the cost, we are holding off on purchasing the product."

"The cost is high, but it still works well."

"Like many Red Hat products, they have a no-cost version of the web application (AWX, formerly Ansible Tower), but you are on your own to install and it is a little more complicated than just installing Ansible."

"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."

More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user185772

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…

How does Microsoft Intune compare with VMware Workspace One?

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Comms Service Provider

12%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Outsourcing Company

University

Financial Services Firm

18%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	124
Midsize Enterprise	50
Large Enterprise	162

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	10
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	4

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	25
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	48

Questions from the Community

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform was very simple. There ...

Jamf Pro vs Microsoft Intune

Comparisons

Compared 10% of the time

IBM MaaS360 vs Microsoft Intune

Compared 8% of the time

Workspace ONE UEM vs Microsoft Intune

Compared 8% of the time

ManageEngine Endpoint Central vs Microsoft Intune

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Entra ID vs Microsoft Intune

Compared 4% of the time

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AWS Systems Manager vs Perforce Puppet

Compared 11% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Perforce Puppet

Compared 11% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Perforce Puppet

Compared 8% of the time

BMC TrueSight Server Automation vs Perforce Puppet

Compared 7% of the time

BigFix vs Perforce Puppet

Compared 6% of the time

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VMware Aria Automation vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat Satellite vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Compared 6% of the time

BigFix vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Compared 4% of the time

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Compared 4% of the time

More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Download Microsoft Intune product report

Microsoft Intune

February 2026

Download Perforce Puppet product report

Perforce Puppet

February 2026

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

February 2026

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform report

Download Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform product report

Also Known As

Intune, MS Intune, Microsoft Endpoint Manager

Puppet

Ansible, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Subscription on AWS

Overview

Microsoft Intune is a cloud-based service designed for device management, security, and compliance. It supports automation and facilitates endpoint management for Windows, iOS, and Android devices, ensuring data protection and efficient policy enforcement.

Microsoft Intune offers seamless integration with tools like Windows Autopilot to automate device setup and deployment. Integrated with Azure Active Directory, it enhances policy management while providing robust reporting and analytics tools for compliance tracking. Despite its intuitive interface aimed at simplifying navigation and device security management, there are challenges such as compatibility issues with Linux and Mac, limited policy support for Android, and demands for better third-party integration. It's widely used for both corporate-owned devices and BYOD scenarios in dynamic IT environments.

What are the key features of Microsoft Intune?

Windows Autopilot: Automates device setup for rapid deployment.
Azure Active Directory Integration: Enhances user policy management.
Reporting and Analytics: Improves compliance visibility.
Mobile Application Management: Ensures app security without compromising personal data.
Cloud-Based Management: Allows management from any location.

What benefits and ROI can users expect?

Time Efficiency: Automation reduces time in policy enforcement and configuration updates.
Enhanced Security: Ensures data protection across corporate-owned and BYOD devices.
Improved Compliance: Advanced reporting tools enhance compliance visibility.
Flexible Management: Cloud-based nature supports management from any location.

In industries such as finance and healthcare, Microsoft Intune is implemented to ensure data protection and compliance with regulatory standards. Manufacturing sectors utilize Intune for managing a distributed workforce across global locations, while educational institutions employ it to secure and manage devices in learning environments supporting both students and faculty.

Microsoft

Perforce Puppet offers automated configuration management and diverse platform support through agent-based functionality, enhancing systems with real-time reporting and efficient process automation.

Perforce Puppet provides comprehensive management for both infrastructure and applications, primarily on-prem servers, enabling automation of server updates, security compliance, and IT operations. It supports Linux and is expanding to Windows, facilitating continuous checks and compliance monitoring. With robust Internet-based features, scalability, role-based access control, and exemplary community support, it streamlines processes like remote package installation, file distribution, and user creation. Using Puppet Forge modules enhances its capabilities despite its steep learning curve and reliance on Ruby and DSL. While GUI limitations necessitate command line proficiency, its integration features and high cost can be a deterrent, prompting some to consider alternatives or the community version.

What are the key features of Perforce Puppet?

Agent-Based Functionality: Provides real-time system management and reporting.
Automated Configuration Management: Streamlines server and network processes with a declarative approach.
Scalability: Adapts to changing infrastructure needs efficiently.
Puppet Forge Modules: Extends capabilities for enhanced performance.
Role-Based Access Control: Ensures secure and organized access control.

What benefits do users gain from Perforce Puppet?

Versatility in Platform Management: Supports diverse environments for seamless integration.
Efficiency in Automation: Reduces manual server configuration tasks.
Community Support: Access to a strong network of developers and users.
Enhanced Security Compliance: Facilitates continuous monitoring and compliance checks.

Perforce Puppet is widely adopted in industries requiring rigorous configuration management and provisioning for on-prem servers. Enterprises automate IT operations and security compliance, applying it initially to Linux servers and progressing to Windows. It aids in public configurations for nodes, enabling efficient network, package, and software integrations while automating configuration and patch management processes.

Perforce

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform streamlines IT operations with features like a simplified GUI and extensive module support. Its agentless architecture and YAML ease make it an adaptable choice for managing diverse infrastructures efficiently.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform offers a robust automation framework that supports multiple environments and integrates well with various applications. Its agentless Python-based architecture facilitates efficient server management and rapid update deployment. Users benefit from centralized management through Ansible Tower, role-based access control, and dynamic inventory. However, improvement areas include documentation, API integration, network support, and UI scaling. Enhanced community contributions could address module availability and compatibility gaps.

What are the most important features of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform?

Agentless Architecture: Leverages Python for seamless management without needing local agents.
Extensive Module Support: Provides modules for managing multiple environments effectively.
Ansible Tower GUI: Offers a centralized interface for easy automation management.
Role-Based Access Control: Ensures user-specific permissions for improved security.
Integration Capabilities: Connects with a variety of applications to enhance functionality.
Dynamic Inventory: Automatically updates inventory, simplifying large infrastructure management.

What benefits and ROI should one consider?

Automation Efficiency: Significantly reduces manual intervention, saving time and resources.
Adaptability: Easily integrates with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, and Azure.
Security Compliance: Automates compliance checks, ensuring up-to-date security protocols.
Cost Management: Lower operational costs through streamlined processes.
Scalability: Supports infrastructure growth without requiring major adjustments.

In industries like finance, healthcare, and technology, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is used for network management, security compliance, and configuration tasks. Organizations utilize its capabilities for cloud and on-premises deployment, infrastructure provisioning, and workflow orchestration. Many integrate it with tools such as Puppet or Terraform to enhance CI/CD processes, benefiting from its agentless design in adapting to cloud environments.

Red Hat

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