We performed a comparison between Quest KACE Systems Management and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 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."With on-premises Active Directory, the main challenge was that we had no control when a user was working from home. We didn't know what exactly a user was doing and whether the AV was up to date or not. Intune provides better control of their machines."
"We have a BYOD policy, and this solution helps us manage our devices."
"The mobile application management, MAM, is the most useful aspect of the solution."
"The most valuable feature of Intune is the central dashboard for compliance and policy management."
"We are using the mobile feature, and we are also using MDM to lock the devices, to push restrictions, et cetera"
"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."
"The aspects I find most valuable are the managing the data and applications. I can also restrict the users to install any applications. I can also wipe the data if the phone was missplaced or stolen. These are the basics for me."
"While I don't think you can ever have full visibility and control, Intune certainly allows us to see the applications being used and tells us if things like Windows patches aren't applied to machines. It does a good job. That visibility makes life a little easier."
"It is excellent in terms of updating and configuring everything the way we need. For anything more complex, we do professional service engagements, and they're exceptional. For anything less complex, we just need to ask questions. Their support division is extremely good too."
"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 service desk can be configured and customized to better serve our environment."
"We use the Systems Deployment appliance. It's our bread and butter. It is every machine that gets imaged here in this building and out through the whole state goes through the SDA. We rely on it completely. There is no manual process of getting a laptop out of a box, plugging it up, turning it on, and waiting for Windows to start. If you were to go to Best Buy and buy a brand new laptop, you spend the next two to three hours just setting it up. We don't do that. We get a laptop, plug it into the network, connect it to the SDA, and within about three clicks, we're done."
"The information available via KACE is up to date, critical to our normal operations, and has become the go-to tool of our IT teams for extended support."
"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."
"We have our KACE agent deployed on all of our workstations and servers, and it provides us with reports on the hardware and software inventory for those."
"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."
"I like being able to control multiple systems and push out updates quickly with just a couple of clicks of a button and commands. I like the automation because it is a time saver."
"It was easy to read and learn. It is a YAML-based syntax, which makes it easily understand and pick up."
"Installing it is a PIP command. So, it's pretty easy. It is a one liner."
"It does not require staff for deployment and maintenance. It just works."
"It is very extensible. There are many plugins and modules out there that everybody helps create to interact with different cloud providers as well."
"The API for exposing all our infrastructure services is the most valuable feature."
"It increases our company's efficiency, automating all the simple tasks which used to take hours of somebody's time."
"It is all modular-based. If there is not a module for it today, someone will write it."
"There should be more focus on mobile device security and integration."
"I know that their AI pieces are at the infancy stage, but allowing users to do more tagging for information would be an interesting thing because Intune also directly integrates with Azure. Because a lot of the devices are hosted with that, you also get a lot of tagging of user data and other things like that."
"It would be great if Intune offered better data protection controls for BYOD Windows PCs."
"The current Intune reporting functionality could benefit from some improvements."
"Reporting and troubleshooting for the application deployment could be better. It's very difficult to understand."
"There are a couple of issues with stability."
"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."
"There needs to be more support for Mac operating systems."
"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."
"We'd love to see support for larger dependencies in the scripting feature."
"There is always room for improvement. However, the system does most of what we need at this moment."
"Sometimes the information is not as real time as it's supposed to be."
"Paying for the product should come with full and extended training anytime it is needed."
"The GUI needs some work. I love all that it can do, however, it can be just be so cluttered at times."
"The only hiccups we had were some power issues, where the box was a little under-powered early on."
"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."
"If we have a problem with some file and we need to get Red Hat to analyze the issue and the file is 100GBs, we'll have an issue since we need to provide a log file for them to analyze. If it is around 12GB or 13GB, we can easily upload it to the Red Hat portal. With more than 100GBs, it will fail. I heard it should cover up to 250GB for an upload, however, I find it fails. Therefore, Red Hat needs to provide a way to handle this."
"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."
"The support could be better."
"Accessibility. Ansible uses a CLI by default. Those accustomed to it can find their way and adopt the YAML files easily over time. But, some users are more comfortable using UIs..."
"The area which I feel can be improved is the custom modules. For example, there are something like 106 official modules available in the Ansible library. A year ago, that number was somewhere around 58. While Ansible is improving day by day, this can be improved more. For instance, when you need to configure in the cloud, you need to write up a module for that."
"The scalability of the solution has some shortcomings."
"It should support more integration with different products."
"The documentation for the installation step of deployment, OpenStack, etc., and these things have to be a bit more detailed."
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Quest KACE Systems Management is ranked 10th in Configuration Management with 38 reviews while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 58 reviews. Quest KACE Systems Management is rated 8.8, while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Quest KACE Systems Management writes "Easy to use, saves us time, and increases IT productivity". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Capable of broad integrations with easy-to-operate infrastructure and user controls". Quest KACE Systems Management is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, BigFix, Automox and Ivanti Neurons Patch for Intune, whereas Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, Microsoft Configuration Manager, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps and BMC TrueSight Server Automation. See our Quest KACE Systems Management vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform report.
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