Chef vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Intune
Sponsored
Ranking in Configuration Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
174
Ranking in other categories
Remote Access (1st), Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) (1st), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (2nd)
Chef
Ranking in Configuration Management
17th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (16th), Release Automation (15th)
Red Hat Ansible Automation ...
Ranking in Configuration Management
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
65
Ranking in other categories
Release Automation (3rd), Network Automation (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the Configuration Management category, the mindshare of Microsoft Intune is 12.2%, up from 11.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Chef is 1.4%, down from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is 18.1%, up from 13.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Configuration Management
Unique Categories:
Remote Access
5.5%
Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM)
37.0%
Build Automation
0.9%
Release Automation
0.4%
Network Automation
15.8%
 

Featured Reviews

ManojNair4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 23, 2022
Replaces third-party products and is easy to deploy a configuration or policy to a system
Reporting in Microsoft solutions is pathetic. With Intune, I'm getting a free inventory tool, but I don't get a reporting tool. When I go to Intune, I can see one machine's entire data in terms of the hardware and the software running on it, but I cannot generate a report for all the machines in the organization. The reporting is the only feature holding back the functionality that is already there. All the other third-party tools are doing the same thing, whether Atlassian, ManageEngine, or Ivanti. They all install an agent on your system. Intune also has an agent on your system collecting inventory details and sending them across the central console, but Microsoft doesn't have the reporting capability there. That is the only drawback I see.
TR
Dec 11, 2018
We have had less production issues since using it to automate our provisioning
We use it for provisioning Adobe Experience Manager web application environments It has given us more resiliency in all the stuff we now manage with Chef, which was previously sort of manually maintained. Now, we are able to drive all of that through version control and automation, which is a lot…
NS
Aug 2, 2021
Helpful for creating an environment and easy to use with dynamic inventory capability
Ansible is great, but there are not many modules. You can do about 80% to 90% of things by using commands, but more modules should be added. We cannot do some of the things in Ansible. In Red Hat, we have the YUM package manager, and there are certain options that we can pass through YUM. To install the Docker Community Edition, I'll write the yum install docker-ce command, but because the Docker Community Edition is not compatible with RHEL 8, I will have to use the nobest option, such as yum install docker-ce --nobest. The nobest option installs the most stable version that can be installed on a particular system. In Ansible, the nobest option is not there. So, it needs some improvements in terms of options. There should be more options, keywords, and modules.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of Intune is the central dashboard for compliance and policy management."
"The feature I like the most is that we can perform remote tasks. If we want to retire or wipe out personal data or corporate data from a device, we can use Microsoft Intune remotely, and with the click of a button, data is removed automatically. Nothing needs to be done from the end-user side."
"The most valuable includes managing everything from a single console."
"Conditional access helps me control uncontrolled access."
"Its protection policies are most valuable. It protects mobile devices as well as individual apps. It is pretty scalable, and its documentation is also pretty good. It is also pretty straightforward to deploy."
"The stability is good."
"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."
"I like that it's very good and very simple. I found that we just needed to have a proper subscription for an Intune tenant, and from the subscription, if we have the right role assigned, like the global admin role or the owner role, we can use Microsoft cloud resources. With the help of that, we can do many things like setting up Microsoft Intune in the cloud to create our virtual machines. All these can be done, and the steps are very simple. I really liked it. I like features like Windows Auto-Enrollment. I like it very much because whenever you supply it to the end-user, it will be ready to use immediately. The end-user only needs to provide the user credentials, and then they are good to go. I also really like Cloud PC, which was recently launched on Azure."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"I wanted to monitor a hybrid cloud environment, one using AWS and Azure. If I have to provision/orchestrate between multiple cloud platforms, I can use Chef as a one-stop solution, to broker between those cloud platforms and orchestrate around them, rather than going directly into each of the cloud-vendors' consoles."
"The scalability of the product is quite nice."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"The Organizations feature, where I can give clear silos and hand them over to different teams, that's amazing; everybody says that it's their own Tower. It's like they have their own Tower out there."
"Role-based access control and agentless architecture are the main features which may attract users."
"I like Ansible's ease of use. If you have Linux skills, you can create a reusable template for the dependencies and other configurations. I can store the templates in a repository and share them with my customers or other developers. It's a popular solution, so there is a large user base that can share templates."
"The API for exposing all our infrastructure services is the most valuable feature."
"The ease of being able to use the modules and collections to define what our business processes are is valuable. We are able to give non-technical people the ability to look at a process and say, "We need a step here. Someone do something and put it right here.""
"Some colleagues and other companies use it and comment that it is easy to use, easy to understand, and offers good features."
"There are so many models that I don't have to create one."
"The development tools are decent and being able to consistently manage those servers is really the key, which is why we went with Ansible in the first place."
 

Cons

"Intune's areas for improvement revolve around security and certificate management."
"There is no catalog for mobile access management (MAM) security."
"Sometimes, customers compare it with AirWatch, but the concept of Intune is different from other solutions. It's an application management app. It gets a bit difficult to explain it to customers, but it's not a product limitation. It takes a presale document or presentation to explain it to customers."
"From a new user's perspective, it may be a little overwhelming because there are quite a few things to look at in the console, however, once you are sort of acclimated and are familiar with your core functions, it's fairly simple and straightforward."
"There is improvement needed in integrating with the installed Office solutions versions, such as Office 2019. The Office 365 integrates without a problem."
"Onboarding of endpoint devices is not straightforward. The onboarding process was a little heavier than I thought it would be. That's the key improvement area. Obviously, the more control you have over the devices, the better it is."
"The solution could be improved by the opportunity to connect third-party application databases, such as Chocolatey or another setup store, to Intune."
"I would like to see the ability to deploy custom packages as a Windows 64-bit package, as opposed to the Windows 32-bit, which is the only one available now."
"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."
"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."
"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."
"I would rate this solution a nine because our use case and whatever we need is there. Ten out of ten is perfect. We have to go to IOD and stuff so they should consider things like this to make it a ten."
"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."
"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."
"We are not using the Dashboard a lot because we have higher expectations from it. The default Dashboard from Tower doesn't give that much information. We really want to get down into more than if the job succeeded or what was the percentage of success. We want to get down to task-level success. If, in a job, there are ten tasks, we want to see this task was a success, and this was not, and how many were not. That's the kind of granularity we are looking for, that Tower does not give right now."
"At this time, I do not have anything to improve. What we struggle with is the knowledge base, but that is more about us having to go and find it and learn the platform on our own rather than an actual Ansible issue."
"The solution requires some Linux knowledge."
"It should support more integration with different products."
"The job workflow needs to be worked on. It's not really clear to how you actually link things together. What they probably could do is provide an example workflow on how to stitch things together. I think that would be very helpful."
"There have been some differences between the operating systems that we have noticed. It could be down to cryptographic policies, but we have noticed some speed issues. They should work on the speed of deployment on different operating systems."
"There is always room for improvement in features or customer support."
"Some of the Cisco modules could be expanded, which would be great, along with not having to do so much coding in the background to make it work."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The price is very reasonable."
"The solution is cost-efficient."
"The price of Intune is often included as part of a bundle with other Microsoft licenses, which makes it somewhat cheaper."
"Every customer used to purchase licenses based on their needs."
"While I can't provide insights from a business perspective, it's worth noting that the pricing may differ significantly, and the discount we received might not be reflective of standard business rates."
"I am satisfied with the pricing."
"Its price is in the medium range. It is acceptable because you're paying for the features. I am not aware of any additional costs."
"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 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."
"We are using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time."
"Pricing for Chef is high."
"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."
"Purchasing the solution from AWS Marketplace was a good experience. AWS's pricing is pretty in line with the product's regular pricing. Though instance-wise, AWS is not the cheapest in the market."
"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."
"Chef is priced based on the number of nodes."
"Ansible Tower is free. Until they lower the cost, we are holding off on purchasing the product."
"It’s an open-source tool."
"The pricing is okay."
"Ansible is a lot more competitive than any of the others. Its setup was also straightforward. In fact, we just implemented Ansible on OpenShift, so that is how we are running the Ansible Automation Platform now."
"The cost is high, but it still works well."
"Red Hat's open source approach was a factor when choosing Ansible, since the solution is free as of right now."
"The pricing is pretty standard."
"You don't need to buy agents on servers or deploy expense management when using the solution, which affected our decision to go with it."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Configuration Management solutions are best for your needs.
793,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user185772 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 27, 2015
Docker v. CFEngine v. Puppet Data Center Automation v. Chef v. Ansible
Originally posted at http://technologyconversations.com/2015/08/26/configuration-management-in-the-docker-world/ Anyone managing more than a few servers can confirm that doing such a task manually is a waste of time and risky. Configuration management (CM) exists for a long time and there is no…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
24%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
27%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
7%
 

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 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...
What is the difference between Red Hat Satellite and Ansible?
Red Hat Satellite has proven to be a worthwhile investment for me. Both its patch management and license management h...
How does Ansible compare to Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (SCCM)?
Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager takes knowledge and research to properly configure. The length of time that ...
What do you like most about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform?
The most valuable features of the solution are automation and patching.
 

Also Known As

Intune, MS Intune, Microsoft Endpoint Manager
No data available
Ansible
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Mitchells and Buzzers, Callaway
Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap
HootSuite Media, Inc., Cloud Physics, Narrative, BinckBank
Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and other solutions. Updated: July 2024.
793,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.