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BigFix vs VMware Aria Automation 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
6.8
Number of Reviews
294
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 (3rd), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (4th)
VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Configuration Management
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
170
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (3rd), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (17th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Configuration Management category, the mindshare of Microsoft Intune is 9.9%, up from 9.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BigFix is 8.7%, up from 8.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 5.2%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Configuration Management
 

Featured Reviews

AkashKamble - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables management of multiple operating systems with a single license
The best feature is that it's a Microsoft product, so if anything goes wrong, we get quick support for anything required. Remote system functionality allows us to sit anywhere and take control of any device via remote management. We can enhance security for clients' laptops with built-in Microsoft Defender, which is available with the Microsoft Intune license. We use it for reporting purposes through endpoint analytics. When pushing scripting, there are two types available: remediation script and reservation script. Through endpoint analytics, you can push defender policies to clients. It helps with reporting, inventory updates, and monitoring tenant status health.
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.
Le Quang Long - PeerSpot reviewer
Significantly streamlined operations with good automation that helps with simplifying workflows
It helps me build a big catalog and provide it to my end users. It helps us automate the workflow of creating many VMs and the TensorFlow key method. I do not meet many people to operate it live beforehand. It operates for both of my products, but as a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The user experience of Microsoft Intune is quite good because there's not much disturbance in the background; it's just running in the background."
"Its price is reasonable. It is a part of our M365 suite."
"We are transforming our flat network by adopting different cloud solutions, and our own applications are hosted in the cloud. Intune ensures our security throughout our entire cloud-based system, improving our security posture."
"The security features are most definitely valuable. If I have to give an example, the lockdown features that prevent employees from configuring anything or downloading company data are valuable. We get high-quality device protection, malware protection, and information protection at the same time."
"The performance of Microsoft Intune is good."
"There are so many features, but Windows Autopilot is one of the features that are very valuable for most customers."
"Microsoft Intune has been a time saver and reduces the time and effort IT admins have to invest."
"It provides control over all mobile devices that are being connected to the corporate network."
"BigFix is a great product. The flexibility of putting together your own relevance and retrieving custom data from any one of your agents is a valuable feature. It is one of my favorite features because if a boss asks me, "How many of these devices do we have?", I can put together a report in two seconds."
"We rely on BigFix as part of our consulting engagements. It's more efficient from a visibility and discovery standpoint on the initial phase, the consulting engagement. It also increases our efficiencies on the remediation phase of our engagements."
"Ability to run custom reports and custom relevance."
"The most valuable features are patch management, software installation, and asset management."
"It's easy to use, not complicated."
"I think BigFix is a very good solution, and I rate it ten out of ten."
"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 has improved my organization because we can automate a lot of tasks. We went from manually patching machines or doing our best and having very little visibility into it to us being able to set it and forget it and getting really good results on first-pass patching."
"We also use it to pre-install the applications that the people selected when they ordered the machine, so they get a fully functional machine."
"Using the VMware vRealize self-service portal, we can better manage the lifecycle."
"It is mostly for our tech support to test new versions, find bugs, and troubleshoot what is happening at customer sites."
"We have it deployed in a highly-available environment and scalability is nice because we just had another ESX host and then we are able to increase the capacity."
"For repeated installations and provisioning of VMs, we now have a clear definition of what has been installed, and we can monitor all that stuff."
"The preset policies and templates are useful. I would say that vRA is one of the best solutions we have. The CI/CD features also look helpful even though we aren't using them at the moment. We plan to get more involved and train our customers as much as possible."
"It's much more stable than the highest available variant."
"We had a lot of config drift before, and this really helps us keep it on track. Speed to provision is probably our biggest, significant gain."
 

Cons

"Data leak prevention can be integrated into it. Currently, it does not have data leak prevention."
"There's quite a lot of development that they can do within their Intune dashboard. I think there are too many lines hyperlinked to move you around. Others, in contrast, give you a simple dashboard and an intuitive administrative walkthrough."
"There is no catalog for mobile access management (MAM) security."
"The difficulty of the the roll out is surprisingly difficult considering this product is supposed to be an integrated part of the 365 suite."
"Not all technicians are knowledgeable of the Microsoft solution, so they have to work on that as well."
"An area for improvement is the absence of seamless integration, particularly with external dashboards."
"There is improvement needed in integrating with the installed Office solutions versions, such as Office 2019. The Office 365 integrates without a problem."
"Intune is not the most user-friendly mobile device management platform available."
"The new EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) feature, Detect, is new and still needs a few updates."
"The product is quite buggy and complicated to use."
"It could use better integration with Hypervisor products like VMware."
"The BigFix Inventory could have an increased scope regarding the tools that can be detected. It does not cover all the possible software installed in Asset."
"The product should become cloud-based. Also, the peer nesting ability of the product is a little backward."
"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."
"I'd like to see better integration, with the different applications within BigFix. Instead of sometimes feeling like four or five different applications, they need to be integrated a little better within themselves."
"The look and feel of the system are old-fashioned."
"The back-end has a steep learning curve."
"I would like to see better integration capabilities. Maybe if they could develop libraries within Aria Automation for simpler integration with other third-party solutions, instead of just basic integration."
"vRO can get out of sync with vRA. We've run into every once in a while."
"In terms of usability, It has had its challenges. It requires a lot of custom code to integrate into our environment. It can take a little while to get it to do what we want, takes some code instead of having built-in functionality. Part it is how we use it. It would be a lot easier to use in a greenfield scenario versus brownfield, which is the way we using it."
"They should concentrate on navigation and service improvements."
"VMware needs to make it to where it is not as custom. Right now, you spend a lot of time making the services work. In order to get it up and running initially, that takes time."
"It does go down from time to time. We have some issues with the appliances sometimes and we have to do reboots in the middle of the day. That affects the ability for them to deploy."
"We have seen some issues with upgrades or installations. This means we have to raise a call every time with VMware."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The purchase of the product was handled by someone else."
"Microsoft Intune is pretty reasonable. We have difficulty with Azure, which is probably why we have not put many assets in Azure. Everything we put there is very expensive."
"I rate Intune an eight out of ten for affordability. It's bundled with the 365 licensing, which is competitive overall."
"Microsoft Intune has been incorporated into our Microsoft E5 licenses."
"This cost is approximately $30 USD per user per month."
"If you ask the accountant or the finance department, they'll tell you that it is way too expensive, but when I look at the cost and compare it with the value you actually get, it's more than fair."
"Pricing can be improved."
"They have categorized the licenses according to the size of the business. So, if it's a smaller organization, we can choose the license accordingly. If it's a big organization, then we can choose accordingly. Everything is clearly mentioned, and we can decide. It's suitable for all kinds of infrastructure, and that's very goo"
"The license is subscription-based."
"I can estimate the reduced cost of servers maintenance to approximatively $500,000."
"The price of the solution is high. There are not any additional fees from the standard license."
"It is too costly. It is one of the best tools, but because of pricing, not all clients support it. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"The price of BigFix could be lower. However, I am always seeking a lower price."
"It might be about $23 a client."
"You are charged per server and per workstation when using BigFix. ManageEngine is a lot cheaper than BigFix. There are some additional costs, such as support."
"The product is less costly when compared to other solutions, and this is a good solid solution for what we have paid."
"I would rate it high because, compared to other solutions, VMware’s pricing is quite expensive. VMware products have become significantly more costly in recent years, leading to higher costs."
"Customers say this solution is costlier compared to its competitors."
"It is an open-source product."
"VMware Aria Automation is expensive."
"As far as value is concerned, it has been essential to our environment. We have been able to deploy VMs quickly and the developers have their own sandbox, so they can spin up and destroy VMs at their own will."
"The cost of the solution is reasonable for us. Although it is relatively high, we prioritize stability and integration over cost."
"It made the provisioning of the virtual machines easier and faster. We can react more quickly to customers' demands."
"I'm very interested in the integration with Puppet. However, my organization doesn't have the funding for something like Puppet right now. If VMware would integrate that feature set (Puppet) into vRA. That would be very awesome."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
 

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's the difference between VMware vRA (automation) and vROps (operations)?
vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything y...
Is there any way to try VMware Aria Automation for free?
When it comes to VMware Aria Automation, you have three choices for free runs: Hands-on Lab (HOL) Advanced lab A fre...
Which sectors can benefit the most from VMware Aria Automation?
I was looking at VMware Aria Automation case studies recently and I got the impression that three main kinds of compa...
 

Also Known As

Intune, MS Intune, Microsoft Endpoint Manager
Tivoli Endpoint Manager
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
 

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
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about BigFix vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.