Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

KACE Systems Management Appliance (SMA) vs OpenText ZENworks Configuration Management vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
KACE Systems Management Appliance (SMA)1.1%
Kaseya VSA18.2%
NinjaOne13.5%
Other67.2%
Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM)
Configuration Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
OpenText ZENworks Configuration Management1.5%
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform16.0%
Microsoft Configuration Manager11.5%
Other71.0%
Configuration Management
Configuration Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform16.0%
Microsoft Configuration Manager11.5%
AWS Systems Manager9.7%
Other62.8%
Configuration Management
 

Featured Reviews

Scott Tweed - PeerSpot reviewer
Low maintenance, reliable, and easy to create packages
I like how when you click on the device, it shows you everything that has changed as well as the software versioning. I am really enjoying the inventory aspect of it. The deployment process for both deploying and creating a package is straightforward. I believe the inventory in KACE is superior to SCCM's. I know with SCCM I could do things like remote console into machines via the agent's remote console, but that is not a feature that is provided in KACE. I know that at least in the Systems Management Appliance, I can't get to it. I'm not sure how distribution works, with distribution points. I'm not sure if KACE has that feature. You could use an SCCM to set up distribution points at remote sites so that they don't have to download patches or software from across the country. If you have a DP or something similar, they could pull it down.
it_user1272306 - PeerSpot reviewer
Helpful impact analysis and the discovery capability is quite good
This tool works hand-in-hand with RPA technology. RPA will allow you to control your servers by deploying the server automation agent. You don't have the discovery, but then you can deploy the policies that maintain the authorized versus current state. On top of that, you can use server automation to deploy patches or remediate configuration issues on the operating system. My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to ensure that the process is set up properly, first. Once the process is set up, the tool will do the rest for you. Overall, this is a comprehensive tool that works well, and I wouldn't touch it other than to enhance the UI and make containerization work without the CDF. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.
Sudhir Kumar Tiwari - PeerSpot reviewer
Have managed thousands of servers with streamlined configuration processes
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is very helpful due to passwordless integration and the ability to interact with multiple servers at once, which is especially advantageous when dealing with thousands of servers. The integration aspect of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has optimized my IT ecosystem significantly by consolidating multiple tools, such as a CI/CD pipeline with Jenkins, where we validate everything, including testing and SonarQube code quality. The agentless architecture of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, using the SSH key, makes it passwordless and allows us to push configurations with one click, creating a major advantage. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform's main benefit is that it allows us to push configurations to multiple servers without manually visiting each one, maintaining efficiency.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 service desk can be configured and customized to better serve our environment."
"We can get the majority of what we need with this product and do not have to spend money on something else."
"We're able to deploy software and push out fixes to endpoints faster than ever."
"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."
"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."
"The single pane of glass for managing devices is helpful because it allows me to perform updates and control things without having to disturb the doctors or nurses."
"The ability to push an image to a machine, wake that image up, and just blast a new image to a computer without even having to touch it, and then push the software to that machine. This just made things so much more convenient for us and so much more efficient."
"The most valuable feature is the impact analysis."
"Helps me perform changes in connected infrastructure thanks to the discovery features."
"Managing our inventory is a big pain point. Right now, we have Satellite, but we can tie it in with Satellite, so we can actually manage things and automate the entire deployment stack, instead of trying to grab things from tickets, then generating Kickstart, and using that to get things in Satellite. That doesn't work well. We can do the whole deployment stack using the inventory share between Tower and Satellite."
"I like the agentless feature. This means we don't install any agent in worker nodes."
"It has improved our organization through provisioning and security hardening. When we do get a new VM, we have been able to bring on a provisioned machine in less than a day. This morning alone, I provisioned two machines within an hour. I am talking about hardening, installing antivirus software on it, and creating user accounts because the Playbooks were predesigned. From the time we got the servers to the actual hand-off, it takes less than an hour. We are talking about having the servers actually authenticate Red Hat Satellites and run the yum updates. All of that can be done within an hour."
"It enabled me to take the old build manifest and automated everything. So when it came time to spin everything up, it was quick and simple. I could spin it up and test it out. And then, when it came time to roll production, it was a done deal. When we expanded to multiple data centers, it was same thing: Change a few IP addresses, change some names, and off we went."
"The solution can scale."
"The most valuable feature of Ansible is repeatability because when you're working at the DoD, you want things to be cookie-cutter and replicable."
"This solution allows us to stitch a lot of different parts of the workflow together."
"When you have an enterprise-level number of network devices, the ability to quickly push out security updates to thousands of devices is the biggest thing"
 

Cons

"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."
"Scalability is my primary concern right now."
"The GUI needs some work. I love all that it can do, however, it can be just be so cluttered 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."
"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."
"I still need better communication about which processes are really due and which processes are currently being processed. According to the initial setup service provider, there is still no real management or overview on KACE where you can really see 100 percent of what is going on as well as what is going to be processed next and whether I can influence the overall process. It could really help me if I knew, e.g. exactly in 10 minutes my colleague will be supplied with this or that software. I haven't found this yet. If they could add this, that would be cool. It is still missing and I haven't yet found something like this."
"The K1000 doesn't communicate well with some clients without SMB. There are some issues with getting things to image correctly because they rely on SMB, and SMB is a protocol that is being removed due to security reasons. Organizations are trying to rely less and less on SMB. I know Quest is aware of it. They've talked about having a new version that wouldn't rely on SMB for connection to the clients, but they haven't gotten there yet."
"The native UI should be simplified because it is outdated and a little bit over-complicated."
"I would like to see improvements in the dashboards. More detailed dashboards would be beneficial because there is a lack of dashboards on Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform."
"What we need is model-driven, declarative software infrastructure management. However, things tend to break with new versions, requiring a lot of work to fix…The focus should be on improving the support for Ansible in the area of AI coding."
"The SSM connection access needs improvement"
"From Red Hat Insights point of view, the product is not on top as it is not responding as per the demand...Like on cloud platforms, you can see the main parts of Red Hat Insights, along with the inventory of all your apps. So, that is missing in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform."
"It would be helpful to have templates for common configurations. It would make it much easier and faster rather than creating a whole script. The templates would decrease the learning curve as well."
"Ansible could use more public relations and marketing."
"There could be more stuff in the workflows. I hope that if I have ten templates with different services on it, workflow could auto-populate all the template-based services."
"For Ansible Tower, there are three tiers with ten nodes. I would like them to expand those ten nodes to 20, because ten nodes is not enough to test on."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of KACE has been relatively low compared to other systems. Even if those systems have the same cost, they do not do as much of the third-party patching that KACE natively does."
"We are also saving on the licensing fee, compared to other endpoint management solutions."
"Licensing is done on a per device basis, so it's dependent on how many agents you've got installed."
"Their pricing is per end-point device. There is an initial cost for the license for the server, which is pretty low, and then there is a per end-point device license, which is also fairly low. So, the pricing is still reasonable."
"We need it, so we have to pay the price. It is what it is. If you need a gallon of milk, then you have to pay the price for it. You don't want to buy the cheap stuff. You want to buy the stuff that is organic and good for your body, which doesn't have all this other junk in it. You want it clean for your body. Quest has done that for our deployment and management systems."
"Licensing is very straightforward. They don't overcomplicate it. This is not a Cisco product where you have to have 30 different licenses just to open the box. It's pretty much set-and-forget. You pay an annual license... The cost is in the mid to upper range, but the ROI exceeds the outside cost, especially once you've had the system for a while."
"The pricing is fair."
"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."
"This is a really good tool for the money."
"We have to be mindful of how we use Ansible because of the licensing model. I am not saying that it is unfair or we do not find value in it. Because we are trying to automate so many different things, we have to be mindful of what we are doing and how we are doing it because we are trying to stay in compliance with it."
"The solution is inexpensive compared to other products."
"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."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is an affordable solution."
"It’s an open-source tool."
"We use the open-source version of the solution."
"Customers need to pay yearly for the license."
"It is a little pricey but it is affordable. It is not that bad."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) solutions are best for your needs.
871,469 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
University
12%
Government
10%
Non Profit
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
17%
Educational Organization
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
University
9%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise15
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise48
 

Questions from the Community

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...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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

Dell KACE Systems Management
Micro Focus ZENworks Configuration Management, HPE CMS, HPE Configuration Management, Micro Focus Configuration Management
Ansible
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Waypoint, Mattos Filho, Meetic, Gems Education, Green Clinic HealthSystem, Service King
Tech Mahindra, NNIT, ASIC
HootSuite Media, Inc., Cloud Physics, Narrative, BinckBank
Find out what your peers are saying about NinjaOne, Kaseya, N-able and others in Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM). Updated: October 2025.
871,469 professionals have used our research since 2012.