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Chef vs SolarWinds Server Configuration Monitor 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
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
377
Ranking in other categories
Remote Access (2nd), Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) (1st), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (1st)
Chef
Ranking in Configuration Management
11th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (13th), Release Automation (8th)
SolarWinds Server Configura...
Ranking in Configuration Management
20th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Configuration Management category, the mindshare of Microsoft Intune is 4.3%, down from 9.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Chef is 3.3%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server Configuration Monitor is 1.5%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Configuration Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Intune4.3%
Chef3.3%
SolarWinds Server Configuration Monitor1.5%
Other90.9%
Configuration Management
 

Featured Reviews

HA
Senior Business Development Executive at Digitaltrack
Centralized device management has automated onboarding and improves remote security compliance
One thing I feel Microsoft Intune could improve is troubleshooting visibility. In many cases, when a policy or application deployment fails, the error messages are a bit generic. So, admins still spend time checking logs manually or testing on devices one by one. Compared to the simplicity of deployment, troubleshooting sometimes feels less mature. I also think reporting and real-time monitoring could be stronger. The dashboard gives useful information, but in large environments, many teams still depend on additional tools or scripts for deeper reporting and analytics. If I had to focus on one area first, I would probably choose troubleshooting and reporting. Deployment through Microsoft Intune is generally straightforward, but when something fails, identifying the exact root cause can still take more time than expected. Error messages are sometimes too generic, and admins often have to dig through logs, sync status, or multiple portals to understand what actually happened. I think user experience and policy management could also improve further. Microsoft Intune has become much better over the years, but sometimes the admin portal still feels fragmented because certain configurations open in different sections or redirect to older interfaces. For new admins, especially, it can take time to understand where everything is located. Another thing is policy conflict handling. In larger organizations, multiple device policies, compliance rules, and configuration profiles can overlap. When conflicts happen, the visibility is not always very clear, so admins spend time figuring out which policy actually won or caused the issue.
G Srivastava - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Agent setup and complexity have limited automation benefits but have reduced manual patching work
There are other automation tools, configuration management tools in the market, which offer many good functionalities compared to Chef. For Chef, we need to install those agents, the Chef client, on all those nodes. That is another heinous task to perform on those nodes. Compared with other tools, they do not require any agent; they simply push configurations to all the clients. Chef needs to improve on this agent installation on all those nodes. I would say that the agent configuration is required, and we need to manage the workstation, the Chef server, and then the Chef client. These two or three things are very difficult. It is a time-taking task compared with other configuration management tools. They need to compete with other tools, such as Ansible or Terraform. They should work on their agent part. If they can remove the agent installation on the nodes and combine both the Chef server and workstation into one server, that will provide a significant benefit in cost for the clients. They should aim for an agentless architecture rather than an agent-based architecture, which will help other customers. That is a very difficult thing because I have stopped using Chef. If you have very good developers who are skilled in Ruby language and can write codes in the Chef recipe, then those developers should start using Chef.
AR
Software Developer at NOESIS Portugal
Alerting has helped us detect server issues across our environment
The alert mechanism is the biggest advantage of SolarWinds Server Configuration Monitor. The customizability of the alerting system is particularly valuable. Whatever devices are in the environment, whether EC2 servers or on-premises servers, all of them can be monitored using this service. I can easily find out what exactly is going wrong in the environment. The clear audit trail aids in troubleshooting and optimization. The tool is effective for detecting unauthorized changes across platforms.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"One of the main features of the solution is it allows the management of many devices in different ways."
"Microsoft Intune's autopilot has been nice to have."
"Intune is the best tool going forward because everyone is moving to the cloud."
"On the cloud, you can manage everything; you can push policies, maintain patches, and maintain security because everything interacts on the cloud and a VPN is not required."
"We can implement a MAM policy in this Intune and protect the device through mobile application development without touching it. The interface is easy to use and understand."
"For the price, the features included with Microsoft are appealing."
"The solution is scalable, and we currently have tens of thousands of users within our organization using the solution."
"Agile and easy to deploy MDM solution that covers the maximum number of policies. Stable, scalable, and with knowledgeable technical support."
"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."
"It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."
"Chef has impacted my organization positively by ensuring that consistent deployments across production and test environments help more effective testing and faster deployments mean that more work can be done in one release cycle."
"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."
"It has decreased a lot of man-hours that we were previously spending doing stuff which we now manage with Chef, decreased the time to fix production issues, and reduced the number of production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."
"The scalability of the product is quite nice."
"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."
"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."
"SolarWinds Server Configuration Monitor is a good-to-have solution for all customers who are under audit pressure, especially from regulatory authorities."
"The customizability of the alerting system is particularly valuable; whatever devices are in the environment, whether EC2 servers or on-premises servers, all of them can be monitored using this service."
"The product’s alert feature is good. We receive notifications whenever some failures occur in the configuration."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server Configuration Monitor is version control. For example, if we began on the first of the month and we considered that as the configuration of the server, I could set that configuration as my baseline. On a daily basis, if there was the operations team that did, for example, server patching, the tool will maintain all levels of versions."
 

Cons

"Sometimes, updating a client policy is very difficult. This needs to be improved."
"Automations in Microsoft Intune can be more elaborated; KQL (Kusto Query Language) is available, but if multiple automation options were readily available, which would include PowerShell, KQL, JSON, and different interpreters like VS Code or Python readily available from Microsoft Intune, it would help administration and management much better."
"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."
"The MacBook management could be better."
"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."
"I also hope the cost of Remote Help will decrease because it's a much-needed Intune function."
"If you wish to block any App Store application, there is no way to do so."
"Customer service is not really good. I would give it a six out of ten. The main issue is the time it takes to get someone involved who truly understands what the product does."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."
"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."
"It is an old technology."
"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."
"Other things would be the need to use Cinc if you want to use the open-source version because Progress Software's policy on copyright is confusing for new users and it puts a barrier in the way to adoption because many small, medium enterprises, startups, and non-profits who might want to use Chef would find the whole Cinc versus Chef situation confusing and the fact that there is not an easy path to install Chef and then go to a paid version without having to change from Cinc to Chef or Chef to Cinc."
"Some dashboards I observed in Dynatrace are not available in SolarWinds Server Configuration Monitor."
"The price of SolarWinds Server Configuration Monitor is not reasonable, it is slightly on the higher side."
"In a feature release, they could enhance the reporting. However, we have not evaluated this part of the solution extensively."
"The product’s support services and licensing models need improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Existing E5 license holders for M365, Intune, and Azure, receive a free license."
"The clients pay for a license and each can have a different type of license, such as an E3 or E5."
"The pricing is good because customers are not complaining about it."
"Microsoft Intune has a user-based subscription model. You can go for a monthly or a yearly payment."
"We spend a lot of money on Intune licensing, and some of our users have to be double licensed just because of how our dev and corporate environments are segmented."
"There is a license required to use this solution. However, it was part of a bundle package. Microsoft Intune is far less expensive than other solutions, such as Workspace ONE."
"The price of Intune is included with the license for Office 365, so we don't have to pay anything extra for it."
"Intune's pricing is reasonable considering its benefits and the high costs it helps avoid."
"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 using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time."
"We are able to save in development time, deployment time, and it makes it easier to manage the environments."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Pricing for Chef is high."
"SolarWinds Server Configuration Monitor has medium pricing compared to other solutions."
"The price of SolarWinds Server Configuration Monitor is not reasonable, it is slightly on the higher side."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business191
Midsize Enterprise63
Large Enterprise187
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise20
No data available
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Chef?
The licensing cost is zero for Chef if you are using the free version. They have developed other versions, such as Sa...
What needs improvement with Chef?
There are other automation tools, configuration management tools in the market, which offer many good functionalities...
What is your primary use case for Chef?
We used Chef, the automation tool, as an Infrastructure as Code tool for configuration deployment, such as deploying ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Server Configuration Monitor?
In general, I think that licensing for SolarWinds Server Configuration Monitor is acceptable, and the solution is qui...
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server Configuration Monitor?
Some dashboards I observed in Dynatrace are not available in SolarWinds Server Configuration Monitor. The dashboard f...
What is your primary use case for SolarWinds Server Configuration Monitor?
I work only with SolarWinds Server Configuration Monitor. My major use case is the monitoring of environment servers ...
 

Also Known As

Intune, MS Intune, Microsoft Endpoint Manager
No data available
SolarWinds SCM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Mitchells and Buzzers, Callaway
Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. SolarWinds Server Configuration Monitor and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
915,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.