We performed a comparison between SaltStack and VMware Aria Automation based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat, Microsoft, HCLTech and others in Configuration Management."The many policies available in Microsoft Intune for managing our devices are valuable."
"One of the most valuable aspects of Microsoft Intune is its seamless integration with Azure Active Directory, offering capabilities akin to Group Policy Objects."
"In terms of technical support, you will get an immediate response."
"Autopilot is the most valuable feature."
"We are using the mobile feature, and we are also using MDM to lock the devices, to push restrictions, et cetera"
"The most valuable feature for us is the security, including risk analysis and patch management."
"It's easy to deploy a configuration or policy to a system, especially when you don't have Azure AD. Now we are talking to all these small and medium-sized customers who don't necessarily have an on-premise Windows Active Directory. If they have invested in Office 365 Premium, this functionality becomes available to them."
"Intune provides full endpoint visibility and IT control across device platforms. You can individualize it for your company with the Intune Company Portal app."
"The product’s most valuable feature is its ability to provide environmental security."
"It is a highly stable solution."
"SaltStack has given us the ability to deal with systems at scale and rectify issues at scale."
"We monitor the configurations against CIS standards. We run CIS benchmarks and maintain configurations with higher CIS values for each server."
"I want to build automation that is intelligent, part of the fabric of our environment, and is somewhat self-sustaining. I think SaltStack can help me do this."
"The ability to programmatically describe the desired state of a single, or an entire fleet of servers, on-premises, and in a cloud environment."
"The automation functionality has been most valuable. With a click of a button, we are able to automate provisioning, the build of new hardware and apply patches. These are all extremely important and differentiated tasks that can be automated in SaltStack."
"With the advent of the automation, we've been able to give DevOps the ability to spin up environments, give them lease times, and then have it automatically reclaim the environment."
"It provides velocity both from management and customer perspectives, from ingesting new catalog items, developing new workflows for additional features, and/or allowing customer access to multiple guest OS instances at scale in a shorter time frame."
"It's extremely convenient to be able to spin something up and be able to work on other things, because it's already done it, making my workload lighter."
"We needed vRA to easily integrate with our hypervisor, orchestration, security (tenant segmentation, PCI), workflows, custom code, and internal monitoring/management tools. Since we didn’t have time to develop our own web front-end during the development sprints, vRA saved considerable time and resource cycles. Its ability to easily integrate with all of the VMware cloud products as well as public cloud providers, like AWS and Azure, out-of-the-box, makes it an even more powerful tool."
"compare-to-competition; Citrix was on our short list. But over the last ten years, we have been a big VMware shop. We wanted to continue with VMware because we are confident that VMware can address any kind of problem situation, any challenges. But with Citrix, we didn't find that kind of credibility when we did solution testing, a PoC."
"The most valuable feature of VMware Aria Automation is the versatile automation and deployments."
"Upgrades have been extremely simple with their Lifecycle Manager product."
"It has definitely increased speed of VM deployment. When a normal server-request would come in, it might take anywhere from three to four days to deploy. Now, within 15 minutes, they can click and have something up and running."
"They should improve its compatibility with other operating systems such as iOS and Linux. It supports Linux but they still need to work on the iOS part."
"The solution can have some compliance problems in general and the end-point user can bypass easily the company policies in Intune."
"Having a dedicated configuration server that assists in modifying the configuration service, and creating personalized structures, interfaces, and web services could enhance usability."
"It doesn't economize when you scale up. We have over 14,000 employees, and we have between 7,500 and 8,000 city-owned or personal devices being used to conduct city business. Its price can be improved. It is not a cheap solution."
"Additional application deployment options e.g. MSI deployment with more complex parameters or additional side-by-side files, and non-MSI deployment options."
"It should be easier to define policies and comply with those policies."
"We haven't really gone through all the features of Intune. We are just discovering them. Every day, we see a new feature that we want to apply, but what will be great for Intune is to be able to deploy apps in a simple fashion. We should be able to easily install various apps on the Windows platform, iOS, and Android. Currently, we have to write some scripts. It's not as straightforward as we would like it to be. It should be simplified so that we can do it just with three clicks—next, next, finish—without needing to write a script."
"The add-ons must be integrated into the solution."
"This solution could be integrated with more hardware for an improved offering."
"A hardened set of tests would be much appreciated."
"Its configuration process could be better."
"SaltStack's features are minimal."
"It is difficult to set up."
"There is a little bit of pain when it comes to libraries and what is needed to run the product."
"Web UI."
"vRealize Automation on the back-end is still a little complicated. It has a lot of moving pieces, simplifying that from a pure infrastructure point of view would be a good thing. I would then like to have more out-of-the-box functionality and integrations with VMware components."
"We would like them to improve the automation part. This is an upcoming area that we would like to focus on."
"With the workflow aspect, which has manual intervention, a policy needs to be approved by somebody. There could be better management of that piece with better templates. It is like a workflow engine, but does not have enough example templates to do certain things. A lot of people waste a lot of time trying to figure out the same thing, and everybody is trying to figure out the same thing, e.g., how to make a MySQL cluster in a Windows environment?"
"The stability needs a lot of work. The troubleshooting component of vRealize is a pain. The administration and the upgrades are not up to the mark. If they were able to improve on that, that would be the best thing and would make it much easier to run it in the enterprise."
"They can improve on the dashboard representations and the options for non-technical people. I would like to see the ability to customize that and maybe provide them with helpful guides to what subscriptions they have. Sometimes, I find that I have to do more explanation to people who do approvals. I would really like to customize the display to the terms they use in their particular business unit. So a little bit more of a nod to the customization of the UI for non-technical users would be helpful."
"Normally, on the first call to technical support, you don't get the right person. The log analysis takes a long time. This is something which should be improved."
"I have not found this solution to be user-friendly. It's really complicated. The demo shows that you can automate anything but they only show basic scenarios. If you want to do anything more complicated than that, it becomes very complicated to set up."
"The setup needs coding. It's not easy. It's not straightforward."
SaltStack is ranked 14th in Configuration Management with 33 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 133 reviews. SaltStack is rated 8.2, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of SaltStack writes "Orchestration tool that powers automation of processes with the click of a button". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Automation writes "Allows for a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment to suit our customers". SaltStack is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, HashiCorp Terraform, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Red Hat Satellite and BMC TrueSight Server Automation, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director, Morpheus and OpenShift.
We monitor all Configuration Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
