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BigFix vs VMware Carbon Black Endpoint comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 9, 2024

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

BigFix
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
23rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
97
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (6th), Patch Management (2nd), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (4th)
VMware Carbon Black Endpoint
Ranking in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
27th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
Security Incident Response (2nd), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (20th), Ransomware Protection (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) category, the mindshare of BigFix is 1.1%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Carbon Black Endpoint is 1.6%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
 

Q&A Highlights

Miriam Tover - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 15, 2019
 

Featured Reviews

Bella Yakoby - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers third-party patching feature, good scalability, and enhance endpoint management capabilities
From the perspective of the team that's handling the environment, it's not so user-friendly compared to other solutions, the competitors. We hire new teams from time to time, and they are complaining, look, although BigFix is very robust and cross-platform, it's not so fun to work with. The user interface for the technical teams is not so advanced. It's not so intuitive compared to SCCM, compared to ManageEngine. And this is the fact that they have, with the teams, because they have the rejection. The look and feel of the system are old-fashioned. For new employees, it's less easy to find someone I don't need to educate on how to work with BigFix. Although it's easy, it's not as intuitive as the other solutions, and the functionality of the other solutions is less advanced. Let's summarize: The user interface has to be changed from the perspective of the teams that are managing the product. It's old school.
Nikunj Kamboj - PeerSpot reviewer
Integrates well with our existing SIEM tool and helps in identifying suspicious activities
The solution's integration with our existing security infrastructure is good. Whenever we have any alert in VMware Carbon Black Endpoint, we can easily that alert in our SIEM tool and check logs from the SIEM tool itself. VMware Carbon Black Endpoint is just a secondary security tool for us, and we are just monitoring the alerts from it. The solution's behavioral analytics feature helps in identifying suspicious activities pretty well. Whenever we have even a small thing, we get an alert. The solution is deployed on the cloud in our organization. Performance-wise, the solution is doing great in terms of connecting to the host directly. Performing a malware scan usually takes a lot of time, more than 24 hours. A malware scan is something that we do only on Carbon Black for the old endpoint devices and servers. It used to take sometimes three days to perform. I would recommend the solution to other users. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"BigFix technical support is good."
"It's enabled us to have a highly successful endpoint patching program for the past decade. It's been enormously successful there. It's also become a core part of many of our business processes, from compliance monitoring of endpoints, encryption management, key escrow, and local administrator password escrow. It's built into our inventory. It's very much everywhere."
"From a security standpoint, it allows us to make sure that we're not leaving ourselves vulnerable to exploits and things like that. That's the biggest advantage that we see to the product from a security standpoint."
"The solution is unbelievably scalable."
"It is a one-stop tool that allows you to do everything. It supports reporting, vulnerability management, patch management, and configuration. All things can be done in one tool."
"I recommend BigFix to others."
"Pre-packaged support for many third-party applications such as Adobe, Google, Mozilla, Sun (Java), WinZip, and others."
"The solution has many useful features. Its main advantage is simplicity - you can do everything from one console, regardless of the task. It supports many operating systems and is scalable to up to 250,000 clients."
"The visibility provided has been great."
"We can access computers remotely if we need to."
"The new feature that we're deploying, the new offering from Carbon Black, is MDR, which stands for manage, detect, and response. It's the most valuable feature because Carbon Black will be continuously checking the logs, and they will be advising us on how to improve some of the policies as well as review the logs. If there are any nefarious agents or things happening on the end points, they will know."
"It has intelligent learning behind it and we have been very successful in preventing attacks."
"It actually does some heuristics, and some behavioral analysis."
"I found it very valuable as a whole. It is good at detecting anything and has kept us very safe. It is also very easy to use."
"I feel that the initial setup was straightforward and not complex."
"The tool is pretty stable."
 

Cons

"I'm looking for them to make big web UI improvements."
"I would like the dashboard to be improved to show the problematic machines and good machines."
"We're a partner, so we deliver technical support to customers. When we need to talk to the product support, traditionally, with the product over the last five years, I would not say support has been supportive. I hope that changes."
"I would like to see more integration with external data."
"The sub-capacity licensing was a challenge for some of it. We had trouble getting it to calculate right."
"Needs to improve Network Access Protection (NAP) technologies to prevent computers with vulnerabilities from gaining access to networks."
"We need a much better multi-tenant option."
"I would like to see much better web reporting because as it is now, it's convoluted, basic, it's not modern, and there are limitations to it."
"CB Defense could be more compatible with Linux, and its cloud provision could be improved."
"Performing a malware scan usually takes a lot of time, more than 24 hours."
"It would be a better solution if Carbon Black Cb Defense had an on-promise solution and a virus auto delete or quarantine."
"The solution needs expanded endpoint query tools."
"They will most likely need to create or include a feature that checks the network."
"With the on-prem one, the bug has been reported by the community in early January or February, something like that, at the beginning of the year, and it's still not addressed. They have released two versions since then, and yet neither of them addresses this specific issue."
"Its compatibility can be improved. It did crash a server during deployment, which is not something that I want to happen. Its deployment should also be easier. The whole deployment cycle needs to be simplified. It is an enterprise solution, and to set it up right now, you have to be an expert."
"It could be a bit complicated. You have to be very familiar with Carbon Black to understand what it is doing and why it is doing. I would like to have more explanations and simplification in the user interface. It would be good to get help and see more explanations. It should tell us that a software is blocked and the reason for it. It would be good to be able to build chains in terms of what caused what, what worked, and what caused an issue. We are now moving from Carbon Black to Cortex XDR. While choosing antivirus software, we were also looking at Carbon Black because it also has an antivirus package, and it is next-generation, but we were told that Carbon Black doesn't support firewalls. We have Palo Alto firewalls. We would have chosen this solution if it supported firewalls, in particular next-generation firewalls, but unfortunately, it doesn't. Therefore, we decided on Cortex XDR because it integrates with Palo Alto firewalls."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"So, the pricing is slightly more expensive than the others. I have to keep buying licenses every time I add a new device."
"You get what we call the Platform Edition, which you get for free. The patch service is maybe $0.50 per workstation per month. Then there's the basic server cost, which is about $1.50 per server per month. You also get into Lifecycle which does power management, OSD remote control, and those types of things, and that might be about 10 times the price - which works out to about $13 per server and, maybe $5 per workstation per month."
"The cost is slightly high."
"The price of the solution is high. There are not any additional fees from the standard license."
"The price of BigFix could be lower. However, I am always seeking a lower price."
"The license is subscription-based."
"It might be about $23 a client."
"The tool's price continues to go up. The cost per endpoint can vary, ranging from approximately 30 to 80 dollars per year. Compared to other products, pricing is in the middle. You need to buy an additional database license, but most users already have it."
"The cost is a considerable factor, but the benefit factor is the most important. When you compare it with other products, the price is high. Carbon Black will negotiate the price."
"In terms of licensing costs, Carbon Black CB Defense was all associated with CROW and the services my company is using with them, so it came all-inclusive."
"This is a really expensive product and we pay licensing fees on a yearly basis."
"Carbon Black provides competitive pricing."
"The pricing [is] more or less the same as other similar solutions."
"The licensing cost is on the more expensive side, but I thought it was worth it because they did a good job. It was one of the vendors I truly didn't have to worry about too much until this latest upgrade."
"Price-wise, VMware Carbon Black Endpoint is a highly-priced solution. Regarding the licensing cost of the solution, one needs to opt for an annual subscription."
"The pricing is very high."
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Answers from the Community

Miriam Tover - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 23, 2019
Apr 23, 2019
BigFix and Carbon Black are really two different products from a functionality standpoint and are not really competing products. Carbon Black Defense is essentially an anti-malware (with more smarts and they refer to it as Next-gen AV) BigFix does not provide anti-malware functionality. BigFix has multiple components that you would use to protect your environment BigFix Patch: As the name sug...
2 out of 8 answers
MP
Apr 15, 2019
These are complementary solutions. Cb Defense is a combination of next-gen AV and EDR capabilities. BigFix is used to identify assets, distribute software, Patch OS� and applications, provision systems, keep systems continuously compliant and much more. Many enterprises use BigFix to find which endpoints need Cb, distribute Cb agents, keep them updated and fix what Cb finds either by quarantining the endpoint, patching it, distributing a new application or wiping and reimaging it.
MW
Apr 15, 2019
Hey Nick, We chose MS SCCM not Bigfix at the end. Thanks
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Educational Organization
13%
Government
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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?
The pricing is competitive, but not the most competitive.
What needs improvement with BigFix?
While performing integration, we face many issues with IBM solution. We need detailed information about those issues that can help users to mitigate them. The problem was related to the hardware co...
What to choose: an endpoint antivirus, an EDR solution or both?
I can recommend Carbon Black, an award-winning next-gen anti-virus (NGAV) and endpoint detection and response (EDR) security solution. The CB Predictive Security Cloud platform combines multiple hi...
What's the difference between Carbon Black CB Response and Carbon Black CB Defense?
Carbon Black offers two different levels of Endpoint Detection and Response. One is the VM Carbon Black Cloud Endpoint Standard (CB Defense), and the other is the Carbon Black Endpoint Detection an...
What do you like most about Carbon Black CB Defense?
VMware Carbon Black Endpoint is a highly stable solution.
 

Also Known As

Tivoli Endpoint Manager
Carbon Black CB Defense, Bit9, Confer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
Netflix, Progress Residential, Indeed, Hologic, Gentle Giant, Samsung Research America
Find out what your peers are saying about BigFix vs. VMware Carbon Black Endpoint and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,803 professionals have used our research since 2012.