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KACE Systems Deployment Appliance (SDA) vs KACE Systems Management Appliance (SMA) comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 2025

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
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
305
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (2nd), Remote Access (2nd), Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) (1st), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (1st)
KACE Systems Deployment App...
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
8.8
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (18th)
KACE Systems Management App...
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Client Desktop Management (3rd), Endpoint Compliance (7th), Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) (12th), Patch Management (9th), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Configuration Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
KACE Systems Deployment Appliance (SDA)0.7%
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform13.5%
Microsoft Configuration Manager10.4%
Other75.4%
Configuration Management
Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
KACE Systems Management Appliance (SMA)1.6%
Kaseya VSA16.4%
NinjaOne11.5%
Other70.5%
Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM)
 

Featured Reviews

AkashKamble - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr MacOS specialist engineer at Cyber24
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.
MH
Server Administrator III at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
User interface and deployment efficiency save time and reduce staff needs
The best features KACE Systems Deployment Appliance (SDA) offers include the ease of operation and the ability to create images for deployment. When I say ease of operation, the user interface is easy to create the images, and the people deploying do not have to have access to the appliance in order to deploy images. KACE Systems Deployment Appliance (SDA) has positively impacted our organization by allowing us to keep labs with over 300 machines all up to the exact same image for every semester. This has saved our team hundreds of man hours and reduced it down to just a few people doing the deployment compared to how things were done before SDA.
MH
Server Administrator III at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
Reliability and adaptability enable efficient application deployment and security management
The best features Quest KACE Systems Management Appliance (SMA) offers include the scripting function, which stands out to me because I can find specific needs and deploy the applications based on those needs. There was a time when scripting really saved me time by allowing me to find specific registry entries and modify them to patch security vulnerabilities. Scripting has saved us hundreds of hours over the years when patching these vulnerabilities compared to how we did it before. I really enjoy the security features that are enabled to deploy Microsoft and other vendor patches, which stand out to me as key functionalities.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Configuration profiles, remediation, scripts, and auto-pilot features are very good."
"It is very easy for me to configure all the things. Once I create policies and applications in Intune, it is very easy for us to enroll users."
"Its price is reasonable. It is a part of our M365 suite."
"It is helpful for managing devices anytime and any place without requiring dependency on the local networks."
"The ability to push applications on devices is valuable. You do not have to manually install applications one by one. If you like to use ten different applications, you do not have to manually go and download them one by one. Intune can compile a package for you, and then you can just push them from the admin center."
"Autopilot is the most valuable feature of Microsoft Intune."
"Microsoft Intune is easy to use, and it is able to enforce policies towards multiple devices. It is able to bring multiple classes of devices into the same security posture. I found that very useful."
"Stable solution at a good price."
"KACE Systems Deployment Appliance (SDA) has positively impacted our organization by allowing us to keep labs with over 300 machines all up to the exact same image for every semester, saving our team hundreds of man hours and reducing it down to just a few people doing the deployment compared to how things were done before SDA."
"Its ticketing is pretty good."
"There is ease of use, and its pricing was a driving factor."
"KACE’s knowledge-based articles are very good."
"This product made the job easy to do without having to go put hands on the machines."
"The scripting part increases IT productivity because of the specialized software in our environments for students' courses. You need to use software which is not programmed by developers. A lot of software for building houses or other things is developed by normal guys, who do not have much skill in programming. When you need to install this type of software, it is very difficult. You have to install registry keys, etc. For that, it is very good to use the scripting part of this solution. So, you can automate this part as well."
"KACE has made our life much easier since we got off the Microsoft solution. The Microsoft solution was a lot harder to image over different ports and stuff. They would only have this one place where we could do all the imaging. Now, we have a whole building where we can image from. This means that we can image from our storage area, where we have a place to do our imaging. We can also image right at our desks, which is a lot easier."
"Using Quest KACE Systems Management Appliance (SMA), we have been able to manage three times the amount of machines as other groups while having half the staff, which has positively impacted our organization."
"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 solution provides us a single pane of glass with everything that we need for endpoint management of all devices. It definitely has made our endpoint management process much easier."
 

Cons

"To make it a perfect ten, it would be helpful if there was a better way to troubleshoot user issues, as I've had a few users with corrupt files before and had to redeploy it without knowing the root cause."
"I find the price for Microsoft Intune too high, which represents an area for improvement in Microsoft's pricing model."
"Reporting could be improved. It needs to be more expensive and robust."
"The security features should be improved."
"It needs certificate provisioning for S/MIME purposes."
"Certificate management within Microsoft Intune's Suite is still under development. It's not very reliable compared to other certificate tools, though it has made good progress within a couple of years."
"Deploying an app can be a complex process due to dependencies."
"Back in 2020, there were significant problems with report accuracy, particularly regarding web patching."
"I have heard feedback that the imaging is slow. It takes somewhere around an hour to image one PC."
"KACE Systems Deployment Appliance (SDA) works well, but it would be nice if it were org based like the SMA, allowing one SDA to service several different departments."
"My biggest complaint is that almost every time they send out a new version, it fixes something and breaks another. Something that wasn't working in the last version now works, but something else stops; or they'll remove some dashboard that I really found to be nice and replace it with something totally different that I could care less about."
"Scalability is my primary concern right now."
"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."
"It could be designed a little bit more intuitively in terms of administration."
"I think it should have the ability to have the applications automatically update. It would be really helpful if this would override what the user might choose to do."
"What could be improved is the possibility to use replicas in a secure way outside our network in order to maintain the machines that never connect to our corporate network."
"The KACE Go Mobile App crashes a lot, and it always has. I would love to see that get fixed because it's very convenient when it does work properly, but most of the time it does not."
"There is always room for improvement. However, the system does most of what we need at this moment."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I recently got to know that the AD P1 license is compulsory to use Intune Autopilot, which was surprising for me. Earlier, this was not the case. It is the wrong thing to do. We now need to purchase AD P1 licenses for us and for our customers. I would rate it a seven out of ten for pricing."
"Intune is available as an individual product, but it also comes with Office 365 Premium or an Enterprise license, and the price varies for each version."
"The pricing for Microsoft Intune is reasonable. Our clients are satisfied."
"It is not a cheap solution. The price for a device when you start using it at a large scale can be improved. It is covered under our enterprise agreement. We pay once a year. I am not aware of any additional costs."
"The cost is handled through our Office 365 license, so I have yet to be able to compare it directly with other tools in its class."
"Microsoft Intune is not cost-effective as a standalone product."
"The pricing is competitive, but it is not cheap."
"It's affordable for the protection it gives. There are no additional costs."
Information not available
"The pricing is fair."
"It was a very attractive price. This is a huge feature of this product. If you would "credit score" this product versus others out there on the market, this one has a very attractive price."
"Some of the other solutions were just astronomical in price compared with KACE and didn't necessarily have the ease of use either. So, we chose Quest KACE for its easy-to-use features and cost."
"Based on other solutions that we had implemented, its pricing seems to be quite competitive. It is not inexpensive, but it is also not more expensive than any other solution. They have the standard licensing fees and support fees."
"Its pricing model is good for what it offers. Nobody here gives me a hard time about renewing the contract every year. It might be a little cost prohibitive for a smaller company who has to stand up a virtual environment as well as have virtual environment licensing and the hardware. If you have a smaller environment, it might be cost prohibitive. If you only have a couple of hundred computers, you might be more willing to do those manually. In our environment, the cost savings of having KACE far outweigh the licensing costs. We are okay with its pricing model."
"Licensing is done on a per device basis, so it's dependent on how many agents you've got installed."
"n terms of pricing and licensing, my advice is that you need to assess what you need and then look at what they offer. It's easy to get caught up in the things that you want, but don't really need."
"We buy consulting fees from Software Factory, then we pay extra for it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
No data available
University
12%
Government
9%
Non Profit
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business117
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise152
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

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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 Kace Systems Deployment Appliance?
The pricing for KACE Systems Deployment Appliance (SDA) is straightforward, and the setup was easy.
What needs improvement with Kace Systems Deployment Appliance?
KACE Systems Deployment Appliance (SDA) works well, but it would be nice if it were org based like the SMA, allowing ...
What is your primary use case for Kace Systems Deployment Appliance?
Our main use case for KACE Systems Deployment Appliance (SDA) is to deploy workstations as well as lab machines. We u...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Quest KACE Systems Management?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Quest KACE Systems Management Appliance (SMA) is that, hand...
What needs improvement with Quest KACE Systems Management?
I wish Quest KACE Systems Management Appliance (SMA) would have a top-down approach since we use orgs; currently, we ...
What is your primary use case for Quest KACE Systems Management?
My main use case for Quest KACE Systems Management Appliance (SMA) is to deploy applications and maintain security, a...
 

Also Known As

Intune, MS Intune, Microsoft Endpoint Manager
No data available
Dell KACE Systems Management
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Mitchells and Buzzers, Callaway
Information Not Available
Waypoint, Mattos Filho, Meetic, Gems Education, Green Clinic HealthSystem, Service King
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