We performed a comparison between Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Ansible comes out on top in this comparison due to its easy setup, high performance, open-source license, and proven ROI.
"The most valuable feature is probably mobile device management. Small businesses are coming under greater scrutiny and requirements for compliance as time goes on. We don't have to worry about a VPN because we can manage these devices, control company data, and lock users out. If needed, we can remotely wipe devices and deadman-switch them."
"The dashboards, the security, and the customization capabilities work very well for us."
"Microsoft Endpoint Manager is not expensive overall, especially for small environments."
"We are a remote company, and the product helps us manage the global endpoints. It helps us natively manage the endpoints in the cloud from anywhere."
"...Intune itself integrates with that entire Microsoft ecosystem. As an individual product itself, it's okay. It holds up. But when you start saying "I've bought this as part of a wider solution, as a company we are going Microsoft throughout," then it makes more sense to have Microsoft Intune... so you have that single dashboard."
"Users can make screenshots, and devices only need the minimal version of iOS."
"The feature I like the most is that we can perform remote tasks. If we want to retire or wipe out personal data or corporate data from a device, we can use Microsoft Intune remotely, and with the click of a button, data is removed automatically. Nothing needs to be done from the end-user side."
"It's normally able to meet 100% expectations of our customers."
"Microsoft Configuration Manager helps with patch management."
"It lets you know what your infrastructure is like and what state you are in."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager is the availability of being able to manage the Microsoft estate. It handles many areas, such as asset management and tracking."
"The solution has a very good set of features."
"The scalability to deploy the package."
"The most valuable features are application deployment and task-sequenced imaging."
"Provides great insight into the functionalities of the data scope."
"SCCM is a stable solution."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its configuration management, drift management, workflow templates with the visual UI, and graphical workflow representation."
"Being a game-changer in configuration management software is what has made Ansible so popular and widespread. Much of IT is based on SSH direct connectivity with a need for running infrastructure in an agentless way, and that has been a big plus. SSH has become a great security standard for managing servers. The whole thing has really become an out-of-the-box solution for managing a Unix estate."
"It has made our infrastructure more testable. We are able to build our infrastructure in CI, then are more confident in what we are deploying will work, not breaking everything."
"The automation is the most valuable feature."
"The biggest thing I liked about Ansible is the check mode so that we can verify, after we've pushed, that the config there is actually what we intended."
"Ansible provides great reliability when coupled with a versioning system (git). It helps providing predictability to the network by knowing exactly what's being pushed after validating it in production."
"It enabled me to take the old build manifest and automated everything. So when it came time to spin everything up, it was quick and simple. I could spin it up and test it out. And then, when it came time to roll production, it was a done deal. When we expanded to multiple data centers, it was same thing: Change a few IP addresses, change some names, and off we went."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don’t need an agent for it to work."
"They should improve its compatibility with other operating systems such as iOS and Linux. It supports Linux but they still need to work on the iOS part."
"Due to the abundance of features, there's a lot to organize, which makes managing and setting up the solution challenging. The setup is immense, and it would be good to see improvement in this area."
"The pricing can be expensive if you are not combining it with other products."
"The solution requires Mac support."
"There is improvement needed in integrating with the installed Office solutions versions, such as Office 2019. The Office 365 integrates without a problem."
"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."
"The backend of Microsoft Intune needs to be improved. We have seen a little bit of delay as compared to other MDM solutions. That needs to be improved. A little bit more granularity should also be added"
"They could also make it easier to use because there are some other products that may be easier to use in terms of the look and feel of the dashboard."
"This solution should be simpler, and more consistent across modules/sections."
"Their compliance reporting is not accurate, and they admitted it on the phone when we had a call with them. We were trying to understand why their numbers didn't match on our compliance reports. It is not accurate and you cannot depend on the compliance reports. The numbers just don't match, and we can't figure out why. We called Microsoft and they said, "Yeah, that's a known issue." But there is no word that they're working on it."
"I'm looking for a single solution for all discovery needs. It fulfills about 40% of the requirements, and I'd like to see the other 60% so that I don't have to keep doing this."
"SCCM does not scale well, which is one of the reasons we are not going to continue to use it."
"On some hardware, we'd like an easier way to get peripherals attached."
"This solution needs to be supported on all Operating systems."
"There should probably be better remote support. They should also continue to improve on patch management, patching, and creating or turning products in software into deployable apps."
"The setup was complex and I faced a lot of problems initially because I was new to the solution."
"There needs to be improvement in the orchestration."
"It could be easier to integrate Ansible with other solutions. No single tool can do everything. For example, we use Terraform for infrastructure and other solutions for configuration management and VMs."
"When you set up Playbooks, I may have one version of the Playbook, but another member of the team may have a different vision, and we will not know which version is correct. We want to have one central repository for managing the different versions of Playbooks, so we can have better collaboration among team members. This is our use case for using Git version control."
"The area which I feel can be improved is the custom modules. For example, there are something like 106 official modules available in the Ansible library. A year ago, that number was somewhere around 58. While Ansible is improving day by day, this can be improved more. For instance, when you need to configure in the cloud, you need to write up a module for that."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is not the best at server provisioning. Terraform is better."
"On the Dashboard, when you view a template run, it shows all the output. There is a search filter, but it would be nice to able to select one server in that run and then see all that output from just that one server, instead of having to do the search on that one server and find the results."
"Because Ansible is establishing SSH sessions to perform tasks, there is a limit on scalability."
"Some of the modules in Ansible could be a bit more mature. There is still a little room for further development. Some performance aspects could be improved, perhaps in the form of parallelism within Ansible."
More Microsoft Configuration Manager Pricing and Cost Advice →
More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
Microsoft Configuration Manager is ranked 2nd in Configuration Management with 78 reviews while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 58 reviews. Microsoft Configuration Manager is rated 8.2, while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Microsoft Configuration Manager writes "Seamless system updates, useful integration, and reliable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Capable of broad integrations with easy-to-operate infrastructure and user controls". Microsoft Configuration Manager is most compared with ManageEngine Endpoint Central, BigFix, Tanium, AWS Systems Manager and Red Hat Satellite, whereas Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps, BMC TrueSight Server Automation and BigFix. See our Microsoft Configuration Manager vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform report.
See our list of best Configuration Management vendors.
We monitor all Configuration Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.