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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Intune
Sponsored
Ranking in Configuration Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
168
Ranking in other categories
Remote Access (4th), Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) (1st), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd)
BigFix
Ranking in Configuration Management
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (15th), Patch Management (3rd), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (4th)
Chef
Ranking in Configuration Management
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (15th), Release Automation (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2024, in the Configuration Management category, the mindshare of Microsoft Intune is 12.3%, up from 10.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BigFix is 9.6%, up from 7.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Chef is 1.2%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Configuration Management
Unique Categories:
Remote Access
4.5%
Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM)
36.2%
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
0.9%
Patch Management
15.2%
Build Automation
0.1%
Release Automation
1.0%
 

Featured Reviews

Alex Bazay - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 4, 2024
Streamlines operations and reduces administrative overhead and attack surface
Microsoft Intune is helping to streamline operations and minimize administrative overhead. We are using the Enterprise Application Management features of Intune Suite. It is very well designed and very well suited for Microsoft-related applications. Third-party applications can require some workaround. They do not always organically fit into the solution, but, overall, it is a great option to have visibility into what the users are using and be able to set up some policies based on that. We can allow applications or deny applications. We can manage what users can onboard. Overall, it is a great solution. We can definitely simplify and streamline some security operations. Microsoft Intune is great for securing hybrid work and protecting data on company and BYO devices. What is more important is that it is not a static product. It is not that the product is very well established and not moving anywhere. It is constantly evolving. Microsoft seems to be spending lots of resources trying to improve and bring new features. That is great. We are starting with Intune's Endpoint Privilege Management feature. It definitely impacts productivity. It is great and definitely helps a lot. It helps minimize the attack surface because you do not have elevated privileges accounts available all the time. It helps mitigate or shrink the potential impact or potential entry points into the network. Microsoft Intune has helped us to manage the accounts with elevated privileges. We are a managed service provider. We sometimes have big turnarounds on the help desk. By their job definition, many of them are supposed to have access to different clients and different sensitive areas. It helps us to mitigate and manage these accounts, and, as a result, to be more secure. We can make sure that those accounts are not being distributed very freely. We have control over their actions. We have control over what they are doing. We have full visibility and accountability.
Abdul-Jabbar - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 9, 2023
An affordable solution for managing servers with technical support
We use the solution to manage servers in the data center. Then the other client monitors the server, including Windows 10 BigFix is integrated with the development process, making it easy for developers to remediate vulnerabilities directly from the outside. Some clients have adopted it but…
Aaron  P - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 18, 2023
Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation
Chef is like a master chef in a kitchen for computer systems. It's used to create recipes (cookbooks) that specify how servers and apps should be set up. Chef then makes sure these instructions are followed the same way on all computers in a network. The ChefServer is like the recipe book, where…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is scalable. We currently have tens of thousands of users within our organization using the solution."
"A great solution for anyone wanting a modern endpoint device management solution."
"Intune can wipe devices. For example, if a disgruntled employee wants to leak the data on their company phone, Intune can terminate their access and wipe the entire device with a click."
"Compliance and the policies that can be set are the most valuable features."
"Users can make screenshots, and devices only need the minimal version of iOS."
"One of the best features is Windows Autopilot because if you change any of your devices, whatever security policies and compliance policies that applied can be easily migrated to the new devices. Windows Autopilot gives you that flexibility."
"We have one MDM that works with Windows, iOS, and Android."
"Intune enables us to manage our devices from anywhere."
"Vulnerability scanning and patch automation."
"It allows us to quickly deploy capabilities that we need, whether it be security or non-security. We use it to keep systems up to date, deploy new drivers, find the information we need in the case of security incidents. The capability allows us to gather a lot of information very quickly and it also allows us to have a centralized reporting feature and a centralized deployment capability which is nice."
"It allows for visibility into the OT, the industrial environments, that didn't exist before which is a big piece and has benefited my organization. Second, the speed at which people can patch is night and day versus SCCM scan or another similar solution."
"The most valuable feature of BigFix is the reporting tool and patching Windows."
"We are able to go from patching thousands of machines by twenty to thirty people to one person."
"The most valuable point is when you deploy an application, you have to make sure that the application has been deployed to all computers and that is working perfectly. This solution works well at deployments."
"DOWNLOADING-PATCHES; It has also helped to reduce network traffic when it comes to downloading patches. By only having to download the patch once to the central location and then utilizing the relay structure to then download the patch to a specific site and then everything gathering at local, it greatly reduces the bandwidth of multiple endpoints."
"Between the user groups, the community, the AVP support, the direct access via technical route and the PMR support, half the time I don't even need to do a formal PMR because the solutions from the community resolve whatever issues we're having. It's the best community and support based system I've ever used."
"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."
"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."
"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."
"The product is useful for automating processes."
"It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."
"It has been very easy to tie it into our build and deploy automation for production release work, etc. All the Chef pieces more or less run themselves."
"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."
"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."
 

Cons

"The scalability could be improved, and like most other MDM products, Intune is good but not 100% there yet."
"Microsoft Intune's support for Mac devices is lacking and could be improved."
"The pricing could be improved."
"There are a few security features that are not available in Microsoft Intune, when compared to other products."
"In the next release, I would like a feature to be able to properly lock down the device. For example, if an attacker or somebody steals the phone, you can be sure that the pin cannot be broken."
"Intune should be much more granular in terms of supporting more Android cellular devices."
"Microsoft Intune needs to improve the initial login process."
"I'd like some more reporting so that I don't have to delve into PowerShell and I can pull more of the local device information such as memory, apps installed, etc. It would be nice to be able to see the apps that are present there but might not be managed. For example, if they installed 7Zip, it could report that back via an installed program or feature to see what was currently installed."
"I would like to see for it to be a little easier for new users to be able to learn and create relevant statements. In my opinion, that's the hardest part for bringing on new people that haven't had BigFix experience. Being able to have easier ways to build relevance in ActionScript would be the biggest improvement I'd like to see."
"The reporting structure could be a little more simplistic. Currently, it throws too many vulnerabilities. Some of them are not needed because they are only informational and limitations, and they are not of much help. It doesn't need to show us these things."
"I would like to see different types of reporting and the ability to integrate closer with the cloud."
"I want to see a solution for being able to deploy automated software to a Mac running OS X 10.13, something that's going to deal with kernel exceptions and answering prompts for user permissions for data folders and whatnot. They need to really streamline and automate the Mac software deployment."
"I'd definitely like to see additional feature parody in the web UI versus the console. There are certain things that you can only do in the console and they're very cumbersome to do, like secure parameters, for example. That's definitely something that has a wide degree of utility but it needs to be easier to surface. At this particular juncture between the transition, between the legacy console and the web UI, it's hard to justify dealing with the cumbersome aspects of the legacy console when theoretically everything's been through the web UI."
"I would eventually like to see a SaaS offering, a cloud-hosted BigFix instance where we only have to put a relay in our environment."
"I'd like to see better API integration with BigFix. We have some tremendous API capability inside of CyFIR and the ability to take textual search results, for example, and bring that back into the BigFix dashboard. This would be of extreme interest to us and our customers."
"Maybe the online help could be improved. It'd be nice if you would have a lot more phrases and keywords that you could search for and find answers with the help."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"There appears to be no effort to fix the command line utility functionality, which is definitely broken, provides a false positive for a result when you perform the operation, and doesn't work."
"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"I would rate this solution a nine because our use case and whatever we need is there. Ten out of ten is perfect. We have to go to IOD and stuff so they should consider things like this to make it a ten."
"It is an old technology."
"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."
"I would like them to add database specific items, configuration items, and migration tools. Not necessarily on the builder side or the actual setup of the system, but more of a migration package for your different database sets, such as MongoDB, your extenders, etc. I want to see how that would function with a transition out to AWS for Aurora services and any of the RDBMS packages."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is reasonable, but they should lower it a bit to make it more competitive. It's cheaper than AirWatch and other products, but I still feel like Microsoft can make a base version or with Exchange online or a la carte only Intune version which will be useful. A customer who doesn't want to go full-fledged E3 or E5 can take out or consume an Intune solution only for their purpose, and we want to target that customer."
"The cost is handled through our Office 365 license, so I have yet to be able to compare it directly with other tools in its class."
"The licensing is on a yearly basis."
"The pricing of Endpoint Manager is fine. The licensing is not that complex, but small and midsized organizations might have challenges with the pricing plans. There are a lot of categories—E2, E3, E5—to choose from."
"Microsoft Intune is moderately priced. There is a monthly license required to use the solution and it is approximately eight dollars per month."
"Generally, we get favorable discounts, so it's not too bad. Obviously, we're looking at decreasing those wherever we can to bring value back to the public purse because it's all charity based. It's all publicly funded."
"The pricing is competitive, but it is not cheap."
"The pricing needs improvement."
"The price is very fair."
"The product is less costly when compared to other solutions, and this is a good solid solution for what we have paid."
"There's not much big cost. We only have to pay the agents' cost for the server, and for the systems."
"So, the pricing is slightly more expensive than the others. I have to keep buying licenses every time I add a new device."
"I can estimate the reduced cost of servers maintenance to approximatively $500,000."
"When purchasing, buying with other IBM tools provided us with a very good discount in pricing."
"I would stay with the Managed Virtual Server license model, which is a 1-to-1 license per OS whether it is virtual or physical."
"Its price is very reasonable."
"The price per node is a little weird. It doesn't scale along with your organization. If you're truly utilizing Chef to its fullest, then the number of nodes which are being utilized in any particular day might scale or change based on your Auto Scaling groups. How do you keep track of that or audit it? Then, how do you appropriately license it? It's difficult."
"The price is always a problem. It is high. There is room for improvement. I do like purchasing on the AWS Marketplace, but I would like the ability to negotiate and have some flexibility in the pricing on it."
"We are using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time."
"Pricing for Chef is high."
"We are able to save in development time, deployment time, and it makes it easier to manage the environments."
"Chef is priced based on the number of nodes."
"I wasn't involved in the purchasing, but I am pretty sure that we are happy with the current pricing and licensing since it never comes up."
"Purchasing the solution from AWS Marketplace was a good experience. AWS's pricing is pretty in line with the product's regular pricing. Though instance-wise, AWS is not the cheapest in the market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
24%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Educational Organization
46%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

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?
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 do you like most about BigFix?
The most valuable features of the solution are Windows patching and the hardware and software inventory.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BigFix?
On a scale from one to ten, where one is expensive and ten is cheap, I rate the solution's pricing one out of ten.
What needs improvement with BigFix?
The solution’s pricing could be improved.
What do you like most about Chef?
Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code.
What needs improvement with Chef?
Chef does not support the containerized things of Chef products. In the future, Chef could develop a docker container...
 

Also Known As

Intune, MS Intune, Microsoft Endpoint Manager
Tivoli Endpoint Manager
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Mitchells and Buzzers, Callaway
US Foods, Penn State, St Vincent's Health US Foods, Sabadell Bank, SunTrust, Australia Sydney, Stemac, Capgemini, WNS Global Services, Jebsen & Jessen, CenterBeam, Strauss, Christian Hospital Centre, Brit Insurance, Career Education Corporation
Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap
Find out what your peers are saying about BigFix vs. Chef and other solutions. Updated: June 2024.
787,817 professionals have used our research since 2012.