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BigFix vs Chef comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 16, 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

Microsoft Intune
Sponsored
Ranking in Configuration Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
271
Ranking in other categories
Remote Access (1st), Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) (1st), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (1st)
BigFix
Ranking in Configuration Management
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
97
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (26th), Patch Management (2nd), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (4th)
Chef
Ranking in Configuration Management
18th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (20th), Release Automation (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Configuration Management category, the mindshare of Microsoft Intune is 10.3%, up from 9.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BigFix is 9.1%, up from 7.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Chef is 1.9%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Configuration Management
 

Featured Reviews

Joseph Merusi - PeerSpot reviewer
Everything has worked better since we started using it
Sometimes the syncing is inconsistent. I'm confident that the devices are checking in every eight hours, but sometimes the devices aren't picking up the settings as quickly as I would expect. Some features haven't been updated in a while, and Microsoft doesn't seem interested in developing them. Unless you talk to an engineer, you don't know whether there will be an update. There are communication issues, so you might start working with a feature without knowing if it will be deprecated six months from now. Some reporting areas still need development. For example, I noticed that the reporting for driver updates is still confusing.
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.
Aaron  P - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation
In terms of improvement, Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation. There is also an issue with shared resources like cookbooks lacking context, which could lead to problems when multiple companies use them. Chef should aim for wider availability, better flexibility, clearer documentation, and improved management of shared resources to prevent conflicts. Many companies are now moving to Ansible, so I would recommend better documentation, easier customer use, and simpler integration. I have concerns about the complexity of migrating to different servers and would prefer a simpler process.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has improve our organization through the remote management of non-domain joined devices."
"The most valuable feature is the UEM capabilities."
"It supports end-users who tend to lock their devices quite frequently. Its conditional access policy helps us keep the users logged into their devices."
"The solution is fully integrated with the Microsoft platform and the Autopilot feature, which is a unique feature."
"While Microsoft Intune boasts a wide range of features, its user-friendliness and bundled licensing cost are key considerations for me."
"Users can make screenshots, and devices only need the minimal version of iOS."
"Autopilot is the most valuable feature."
"By using Microsoft Intune we can control which websites the users can go to and it provides a secure environment for our employees using their laptops that are having access from home. We have installed Intune to control the user's environment minimizing the chances of any hacking."
"The most valuable and essential features of BigFix are all of them, they are needed when serving the purpose of the desktop operation framework. We cannot run operations without patching or without having an appropriate mechanism for deploying software, et cetera. The features all serve their purpose for our use case."
"Patch Management for a variety of operating systems makes it valuable as we can rely on a single tool for obtaining patch compliance of the entire compute infrastructure."
"The product is less costly when compared to other solutions, and this is a good solid solution for what we have paid."
"Being able to intelligently create reports, gather data, export CSVs and give that to the leadership of some of the client groups that my team supports has helped my organization."
"BigFix helped us to identify the compliance of devices and has also improved the way that we manage our software inventory for reporting to vendors."
"The most valuable feature of BigFix is the software deployment."
"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 enables us to patch our systems quickly and within expectations and to increase our volume as needed. It has also helped us compress our patch sites. We used to do it monthly but now we do it weekly."
"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."
"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."
"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."
"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."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"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."
"This solution has improved my organization in the way that deployment has become very quick and orchestration is easy. If we have thousands of servers we can easily deploy in a small amount of time. We can deploy the applications or any kind of announcements in much less time."
"Manual deployments came to a halt completely. Server provisioning became lightning fast. Chef-docker enabled us to have fewer sets of source code for different purposes. Configuration management was a breeze and all the servers were as good as immutable servers."
 

Cons

"Microsoft Intune is not as fast and extensive as traditional solutions such as SCCM and others."
"Sometimes the syncing is inconsistent. I'm confident that the devices are checking in every eight hours, but sometimes the devices aren't picking up the settings as quickly as I would expect. Some features haven't been updated in a while, and Microsoft doesn't seem interested in developing them. Unless you talk to an engineer, you don't know whether there will be an update."
"Integrating certain group policies can be challenging and may necessitate using on-premises systems to integrate them with Microsoft Intune."
"We are facing issues with Apple products. With macOS and iOS, there are some difficulties with the updates because we cannot get full control of Apple products. In the case of Windows, it is fine, but in the case of Apple, we have some difficulties. We cannot control everything through Intune."
"The security features should be improved."
"A new Intune feature allows application packaging, but it incurs additional licensing costs for a significant number of applications."
"Enrollment into the Microsoft Intune service can still get easier, especially for legacy-managed systems, such as how we get it from a GPO or an SCCM configuration into Intune."
"There can be delays in the deployment of new policies."
"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."
"I would like to see more integration with external data."
"BigFix is actually a little bit on the expensive side in Turkey because of the dollar's exchange rate in our currency."
"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 more emphasis on using the web console, to have the same power as the full fat client console that they do they now. It's a lighter way to log in and it would be faster for our operators to do their work. The console tends to take a long time for a large number of clients."
"The solution could improve by adding support drivers for different systems and equipment. When you have a lot of different computers if they could fix how to install any updates, firmware, or drivers for different systems or servers it would be good."
"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."
"We would like to see a different license plan, e.g. to include features from lifecycle with Patch Management, as an example."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."
"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."
"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."
"They could provide more features, so the recipes could be developed in a simpler and faster way. There is still a lot of room for improvement, providing better functionalities when creating recipes."
"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."
"It is an old technology."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's a bit expensive from a licensing perspective, especially as we look to have organizations with tenants across the globe."
"It is reasonable for the features it has."
"The price is very reasonable."
"My team members bundled it together with their Microsoft solutions, including Microsoft 365 and related products."
"It's monthly for us, but it's built into the license cost that we pay our IT each month. It's maybe 129 Kroner per head, which translates to £10. There are some additional costs. Our IT had to set up and configure their own server, so there is an extra cost for that, but I'm not sure what that costs."
"Intune is moderately expensive. You can get the license bundled with Office 365 E3 or E5 licenses. The E5s are a bit expensive, but you get some cheaper solutions with Intune."
"Intune comes with the licensing that is common for large organizations. However, Microsoft has recently released many add-ons that are very expensive, especially for large organizations or corporations."
"It comes with the E5 plan. We bought the E5 plan from Microsoft."
"Compliance, inventory, and licensing are really pricey. They should lower the price. It discourages users from getting onboard."
"We have a subscription-based contract with BigFix."
"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 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 price of BigFix is better than the solutions. You are able to pay monthly or annually. There are not any hidden costs with BigFix. There is an additional cost for the SQL database."
"So, the pricing is slightly more expensive than the others. I have to keep buying licenses every time I add a new device."
"The price is reasonable, but our customers find it expensive."
"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."
"We are using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time."
"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."
"Chef is priced based on the number of nodes."
"Pricing for Chef is high."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"We are able to save in development time, deployment time, and it makes it easier to manage the environments."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
33%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
15%
University
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

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?
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 ...
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 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.