Chef vs Quest KACE Systems Management comparison

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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)
Chef
Ranking in Configuration Management
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (15th), Release Automation (15th)
Quest KACE Systems Management
Ranking in Configuration Management
9th
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Compliance (5th), Patch Management (6th)
 

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 Chef is 1.2%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Quest KACE Systems Management is 4.6%, up from 3.2% 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%
Build Automation
0.1%
Release Automation
1.0%
Endpoint Compliance
7.4%
Patch Management
9.7%
 

Featured Reviews

JB
May 4, 2022
Performs well, requires little maintenance, and significantly reduces the costs associated with providing support
It's from Microsoft. However, we are a Microsoft Premier partner. As a result, we are quite familiar with the product. Again, there isn't much of a need for it. However, our clients call us if they run into problems, which happens very rarely. You do not have to maintain the Microsoft Endpoint that is built into their cloud, it's a cloud-based service. Locally, there is now maintenance every 16 months if you are deploying the local endpoint or creating a hybrid to Microsoft's cloud. You have to upgrade if you are deploying the local deployment. The current build changes every 16 months, but the upgrade is a very low skill set, you don't need anyone to upgrade it.
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…
WM
Aug 11, 2022
Great Powershell support and managed installations with excellent reliability
We primarily use our KACE system for imaging, deploying software, and deploying fixes to Windows computer labs.  We don't use the active directory in our environment, so pushing out changes to local group policy is something we use our SMA for often.  Additionally, managing over 1000 Windows…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Intune's most valuable features are the device, compliance, and configuration policies."
"I like how Microsoft Intune lets me lock down the email profile and make it accessible only on certain devices."
"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."
"The one feature we find most useful is the Mobile Application Manager. There are two types, we have the complete MDM and the Mobile Application Manager(MAM). We don't give our users phones, it is their own personal phone, and we need to allow them to have access to the company detail on their phone. We need to create a balance between their own personal data and the company data. We deploy the Mobile Application Manager for them so that we won't be able to interfere with their own personal data."
"The ability to push applications on devices is valuable. You do not have to manually install applications one by one. If you like to use ten different applications, you do not have to manually go and download them one by one. Intune can compile a package for you, and then you can just push them from the admin center."
"Conditional access has helped us tailor and enforce our security policies in the mobile space."
"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."
"The policy and compliance monitoring of devices and the software deployment are most valuable."
"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"Stable and scalable configuration management and automation tool. Installing it is easy. Its most valuable feature is its compliance, e.g. it's very good."
"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."
"I wanted to monitor a hybrid cloud environment, one using AWS and Azure. If I have to provision/orchestrate between multiple cloud platforms, I can use Chef as a one-stop solution, to broker between those cloud platforms and orchestrate around them, rather than going directly into each of the cloud-vendors' consoles."
"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."
"The scalability of the product is quite nice."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."
"The single pane of glass for managing devices is helpful because it allows me to perform updates and control things without having to disturb the doctors or nurses."
"Using this solution saves us lots of time, especially when it comes to performing updates."
"It is excellent in terms of updating and configuring everything the way we need. For anything more complex, we do professional service engagements, and they're exceptional. For anything less complex, we just need to ask questions. Their support division is extremely good too."
"The scripting part increases IT productivity because of the specialized software in our environments for students' courses. You need to use software which is not programmed by developers. A lot of software for building houses or other things is developed by normal guys, who do not have much skill in programming. When you need to install this type of software, it is very difficult. You have to install registry keys, etc. For that, it is very good to use the scripting part of this solution. So, you can automate this part as well."
"It also does patch management. At the moment, I'm rolling out a new feature update, 20.8.2, and it's a great challenge because we have to deploy it to 1,200 computers in the home office. We want to do it without interrupting production, but KACE is reliable and it's easy to adapt it to my needs for how and when to deploy the feature update."
"KACE has made our life much easier since we got off the Microsoft solution. The Microsoft solution was a lot harder to image over different ports and stuff. They would only have this one place where we could do all the imaging. Now, we have a whole building where we can image from. This means that we can image from our storage area, where we have a place to do our imaging. We can also image right at our desks, which is a lot easier."
"The ability to build scripts right on the deployment center itself, as well as building groups that take those scripts/task chains has been absolutely invaluable and one of the most important parts of my whole environment."
"We have our KACE agent deployed on all of our workstations and servers, and it provides us with reports on the hardware and software inventory for those."
 

Cons

"It would be nice to have a location tracker for the mobile device management tool. I'm not sure if it exists but hasn't been configured or if it's missing, but we've been unable to utilize the location features."
"I would like to see the ability to deploy custom packages as a Windows 64-bit package, as opposed to the Windows 32-bit, which is the only one available now."
"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."
"One area for improvement is app deployment. Another is the Windows update rollout. If you're rolling out an object to a device that's offline, Intune stops trying to reach this device after it sits idle for a bit. We are forced to find a workaround that could help manage that."
"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."
"It would be helpful if there was proactive remediation."
"The product needs to upgrade itself when the server is overloaded."
"They should make it easier to order it, however, that's generally true for everything from Microsoft."
"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."
"It is an old technology."
"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."
"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"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."
"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."
"It could be designed a little bit more intuitively in terms of administration."
"The KACE Go Mobile App crashes a lot, and it always has. I would love to see that get fixed because it's very convenient when it does work properly, but most of the time it does not."
"The only hiccups we had were some power issues, where the box was a little under-powered early on."
"Sometimes the information is not as real time as it's supposed to be."
"It is a little bit difficult to use the license compliances because you need to decide when you are using the software catalog if you are using it with their license compliance or the normal software part. Under the inventory, you can use software as a menu link or software catalog. Most of my specialist software is not in the software catalog. When I try to import them, in my license compliances overview, there are cryptic names for this software that I have to import. That is not very good for the reports that I use. When I take them to my bosses, they see cryptic names of software that they don't understand. It would be much better for me if I could use software and the software catalog as well for the license compliances."
"My biggest complaint is that almost every time they send out a new version, it fixes something and breaks another. Something that wasn't working in the last version now works, but something else stops; or they'll remove some dashboard that I really found to be nice and replace it with something totally different that I could care less about."
"There may be a good reason why some things are not easily able to be done, yet it needs work to compete with some of the other ticketing systems out there now."
"The problem is that it's harder to directly emulate a lot of the stuff that the group policies do, using the KACE solution. With regular group policies, you just specify the various settings you want to change on the workstations, and then you specify the workstations and—while it's kind of an ugly mess—it does it. Whereas on KACE, you really have to know what you're doing with scripting to effectively script those exact same changes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is challenging. Microsoft needs to pay some attention to it. It is good for big enterprises, but I'm not sure that small and medium-sized organizations can adopt it."
"Intune's pricing is competitive. For example, the license of Blackberry's Enterprise Mobility Suite was costly, but Intune is affordable. It is included as an additional feature when you buy security enhancements for your organization. For example, let's say I have fifty users in my organization and all of them are using Microsoft cloud services, like Teams, Office 365, and OneDrive."
"The purchase of the product was handled by someone else."
"Intune is inexpensive. It also comes bundled in some Office 365 licenses, so you can choose to purchase it separately or as a package."
"For organizations that are a Microsoft shop, the pricing is compelling."
"There are licenses required for this solution. We enable licenses on the devices we need to manage."
"Microsoft Intune is moderately priced. There is a monthly license required to use the solution and it is approximately eight dollars per month."
"This cost is approximately $30 USD per user per month."
"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."
"Chef is priced based on the number of nodes."
"We are using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time."
"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."
"Pricing for Chef is high."
"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."
"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."
"When we're rolling out a new server, we're not using the AWS Marketplace AMI, we're using our own AMI, but we are paying them a licensing fee."
"It may be more expensive, but you get what you pay for."
"Some of the other solutions were just astronomical in price compared with KACE and didn't necessarily have the ease of use either. So, we chose Quest KACE for its easy-to-use features and cost."
"Its pricing model is good for what it offers. Nobody here gives me a hard time about renewing the contract every year. It might be a little cost prohibitive for a smaller company who has to stand up a virtual environment as well as have virtual environment licensing and the hardware. If you have a smaller environment, it might be cost prohibitive. If you only have a couple of hundred computers, you might be more willing to do those manually. In our environment, the cost savings of having KACE far outweigh the licensing costs. We are okay with its pricing model."
"It is expensive in Brazil."
"The product is reasonably priced."
"It was a very attractive price. This is a huge feature of this product. If you would "credit score" this product versus others out there on the market, this one has a very attractive price."
"Their pricing is per end-point device. There is an initial cost for the license for the server, which is pretty low, and then there is a per end-point device license, which is also fairly low. So, the pricing is still reasonable."
"The cost of KACE has been relatively low compared to other systems. Even if those systems have the same cost, they do not do as much of the third-party patching that KACE natively does."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
24%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
14%
University
11%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

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 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...
What do you like most about Quest KACE Systems Management?
KACE automatically tracks this information and saves it for me, allowing me to call it up on the dashboard. For examp...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Quest KACE Systems Management?
It is expensive in Brazil. Generally, it's considered expensive, especially compared to solutions like Spiceworks.
 

Also Known As

Intune, MS Intune, Microsoft Endpoint Manager
No data available
Dell KACE Systems Management
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Mitchells and Buzzers, Callaway
Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap
Waypoint, Mattos Filho, Meetic, Gems Education, Green Clinic HealthSystem, Service King
Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. Quest KACE Systems Management and other solutions. Updated: June 2024.
787,779 professionals have used our research since 2012.