We performed a comparison between Chef and Quest KACE Systems Management 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."There has been a noticeable increase in productivity for both my organization and clients."
"The solution is stable."
"Stable product that's easy to set up compared to other MDM products."
"We are using the mobile feature, and we are also using MDM to lock the devices, to push restrictions, et cetera"
"It's normally able to meet 100% expectations of our customers."
"The most valuable includes managing everything from a single console."
"The most valuable feature for us is the security, including risk analysis and patch management."
"The initial setup is not complex."
"The most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."
"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."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"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."
"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."
"It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."
"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to monitor updates—the software versions—on machines so that we can keep everything compliant."
"My company had bought some new machines. We used the tool to do some basic settings to ship every machine the same way and undertake the Windows deployment. We did the scripted installation. The tool helped us deploy custom software for specific departments. We also did Windows updates with the product."
"The most valuable feature of KACE is the mass package deployment. There are a lot of endpoint management solutions in the market. The way KACE responds is with the installation management feature, which is done in a very intelligent way, as well as scripting. It's wow. It's really wow. On top of that, there is a mass undeployment feature as well."
"The Systems Deployment Appliance is magical when it comes to automating deployment... Not only can we have multiple images, specific to end-users' uses, but we have a plethora of post-installation tasks to install or configure the system, tasks that can be re-used for each system. You just have one basic base image, and then you use the post-install tasks to customize everything else. It is amazing."
"The scripting is a very valuable feature, as it saves us time on pushing certain things out to the users, such as software and patches."
"It also does patch management. At the moment, I'm rolling out a new feature update, 20.8.2, and it's a great challenge because we have to deploy it to 1,200 computers in the home office. We want to do it without interrupting production, but KACE is reliable and it's easy to adapt it to my needs for how and when to deploy the feature update."
"The software asset management has been a big help, even when it comes to license true-ups. I can use it to find out how many Tivoli we have, and boom, there's the number... And you can actually click on the information about the software and it shows, for example, that these five servers are where it's being reported. If you really want, you can log in to them and validate."
"The ability to build scripts right on the deployment center itself, as well as building groups that take those scripts/task chains has been absolutely invaluable and one of the most important parts of my whole environment."
"There are a couple of issues with stability."
"Lacking ability to leverage more iOS device management internally."
"It doesn't economize when you scale up. We have over 14,000 employees, and we have between 7,500 and 8,000 city-owned or personal devices being used to conduct city business. Its price can be improved. It is not a cheap solution."
"I would like to see easier pushdowns. Currently, we have to package our own software and then push it. Intune can make that way easier and integrate applications, such as Zoom and Adobe Acrobat, that are used by a lot of enterprise or corporate organizations."
"Having a dedicated configuration server that assists in modifying the configuration service, and creating personalized structures, interfaces, and web services could enhance usability."
"The current Intune reporting functionality could benefit from some improvements."
"The UI also needs improvements because it is complex for end-users. We have had feedback from a few users in our organization who found the UI is not feasible for tracking and analyzing all the processes and monitoring all the devices."
"The reporting needs to be a bit more interactive."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"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."
"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."
"It is an old technology."
"The GUI needs some work. I love all that it can do, however, it can be just be so cluttered at times."
"The labeling process should be more streamlined. It should be easier to do. It gets confusing at times."
"I would like for there to be improvement when it comes to Microsoft and Windows updates. It has the ability to do it but the control of it is not there like I have in the Windows Server Update Services. The way KACE does it is still very granular. You don't really see the process like it is in the Windows Server Update Services. I think that would be one of the biggest things that I would like to see KACE really put some work into and really make that a big enhancement."
"The software asset management functionality is an area that needs to be improved. It could be more automated because when connections need to be made, such as when I connected Adobe and my malware removed, the process was pretty much manual."
"We'd love to see support for larger dependencies in the scripting feature."
"Its dashboard needs improvement. Currently, there is no way to modify the dashboard. There should be more flexibility so that we can create views according to our use case."
"One of the complications is that they don't have 24/7 support, and they're also not in our time zone... Sometimes, no matter how critical my application is, if my production server is down I won't be able to connect with anybody till 11:00 AM Eastern Standard Time."
"There should be a mini toolbox, like the competitors of KACE have, with the small features for KACE administrators. That would make their lives easier. If you are troubleshooting a specific endpoint, remote control is available as is Wake-on-LAN. But if you want to execute some commands, you have to use a third-party tool, the PS tool. If they would integrate those small things, it would make KACE more powerful."
More Quest KACE Systems Management Pricing and Cost Advice →
Chef is ranked 15th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews while Quest KACE Systems Management is ranked 8th in Configuration Management with 38 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while Quest KACE Systems Management is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Chef writes "Useful for large infrastructure, reliable, but steep learning cureve". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Quest KACE Systems Management writes "Easy to use, saves us time, and increases IT productivity". Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager and BigFix, whereas Quest KACE Systems Management is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, BigFix, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Ivanti Neurons Patch for Intune. See our Chef vs. Quest KACE Systems Management report.
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