We performed a comparison between BigFix and Chef based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Configuration Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."This product works very well for companies already using the full Microsoft suite."
"As the solution is a software as a service, the scalability is unlimited."
"The conditional access policies that we set up are very useful."
"The solution is easy to use, simple to understand for those new to using it, and combined with the other Microsoft products it makes for an overall good package."
"Intune is effective because of the configuration management and endpoint security it provides. The graphical interface makes it easier to configure and deploy devices."
"Based on my experience, I find Intune very flexible for managing Windows devices. We can use scripting, and we can make use of the self-service portal or the company portal to publish some of the applications for Windows."
"The standout features of Intune are its excellent mobile device management and highly effective application management capabilities."
"I like the tool's integration with Apple. Anyone who creates an ID in Intune will get an Apple ID."
"The most valuable feature is the patching."
"It is for multiple use cases. A lot of people are looking at it just for security, and that's really endpoint security. The endpoint management part of it in terms of being able to constantly do patching for Windows, Unix, macOS, Cloud, Raspberry, VMware, and all Linux flavors is important, and they are very good at that. They have support for virtually every OS on the market."
"One of the biggest benefits BigFix has had for our organization is the ease and efficiency to perform many different tasks, across pillars and platforms, all from one pane of glass."
"The technical support for BigFix is really amazing."
"The most valuable feature is patch management, a must have, even for Linux and iOS."
"We are able to use BigFix through API connections to automate and reduce resources and time. The product's been great for us. It's increased the security posture ten-fold and it's increased our visibility across our endpoints enormously."
"It is pretty secure, and it gives extensive vulnerability features as compared to other applications. It supports multiple languages, and the security checks are pretty high as compared to other tools in the market."
"Having higher visibility on patching level, on patching successful, and non-successful has been a way that BigFix has improved my organization. Also, the ability to customize the content to do what we need it to do is very powerful and very flexible for us. Finally, in the area of custom interfaces like REST API really gives us the ability to provide for our external customers."
"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."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."
"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."
"If you're handy enough with DSL and you can present your own front-facing interface to your developers, then you can actually have a lot more granular control with Chef in operations over what developers can perform and what they can't."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."
"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"In the past, I raised some tickets for the enhancement feature, which was missing in Intune."
"Integration with Mac devices requires some improvement."
"There should be more support for macOS. Even though macOS is supported by Intune and Microsoft is working very hard to get more features into Intune to manage macOS, that's one thing they can give a lot more attention to."
"There is room for improvement in integration and security as well."
"The reporting could be improved, as it's pretty poor compared to other products of this type."
"Microsoft Intune has a latency response time issue. The latency has room for improvement."
"It should be easier to define policies and comply with those policies."
"Intune has some limitations when it comes to application updates for third-party applications. You can schedule an update, but when it's a package setup, you need to supercede and replace it each time."
"I would like the dashboard to be improved to show the problematic machines and good machines."
"The only thing that I don't like about BigFix is that it does not support other devices such as printer firmware, router firmware, and things like that. I will be happy if I can control everything and get everything else in there, even if it is just a line item. They can do some enhancements to the Web UI. I am trying to get customers to be able to manage their environment by using Web UI, and it would be good if we can delete endpoints by using Web UI. We should also be able to generate Excel content or data tables from the Web UI without having to go to the console. It is small stuff, and it drives me crazy that I have to go to another console to do these things."
"I would like to see API connectivity, built-in API connectors to the standard toolsets, whether it's for your ServiceNow or your Qualys. More API connectivity to make it easier to integrate to other tools."
"I would like to see more integration with external data."
"It could use better integration with Hypervisor products like VMware."
"It can be improved speed-wise. They can make it a little bit light. If you do any query for servers in bulk, it can take some time. Similarly, creating a job can take some time."
"The sub-capacity licensing was a challenge for some of it. We had trouble getting it to calculate right."
"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."
"The time that it takes in terms of integration. Cloud integration is comparatively easy, but when it comes to two-link based integrations - like trying to integrate it with any monitoring tools, or maybe some other ticketing tools - it takes longer. That is because most of the out-of-the-box integration of the APIs needs some revisiting."
"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."
"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"I would also like to see more analytics and reporting features. Currently, the analytics and reporting features are limited. I'll have to start building my own custom solution with Power BI or Tableau or something like that. If it came with built-in analytics and reporting features that would be great."
BigFix is ranked 5th in Configuration Management with 91 reviews while Chef is ranked 15th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews. BigFix is rated 8.6, while Chef is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of BigFix writes "Very stable and easy to deploy with excellent patch compliance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Chef writes "Useful for large infrastructure, reliable, but steep learning cureve". BigFix is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, Tanium, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and ManageEngine Patch Manager Plus, whereas Chef is most compared with Jenkins, Microsoft Azure DevOps, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Configuration Manager and SaltStack. See our BigFix vs. Chef report.
See our list of best Configuration Management vendors.
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