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."Remote Wipe and Autopilot is one of the best features."
"As the solution is a software as a service, the scalability is unlimited."
"The stability is good."
"The feature I like the most is that we can perform remote tasks. If we want to retire or wipe out personal data or corporate data from a device, we can use Microsoft Intune remotely, and with the click of a button, data is removed automatically. Nothing needs to be done from the end-user side."
"The ability to block and erase remote devices is valuable to us, especially when those devices are lost."
"I like how Microsoft Intune lets me lock down the email profile and make it accessible only on certain devices."
"Application deployment and keeping the devices secure no matter where they are, by having this cloud solution — that has been great."
"We already use a lot of Microsoft products in our company, and therefore, it made sense to also use this product."
"SaltStack has given us the ability to deal with systems at scale and rectify issues at scale."
"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."
"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."
"It is a highly stable solution."
"We monitor the configurations against CIS standards. We run CIS benchmarks and maintain configurations with higher CIS values for each server."
"The product’s most valuable feature is its ability to provide environmental security."
"The ability to programmatically describe the desired state of a single, or an entire fleet of servers, on-premises, and in a cloud environment."
"We've just shifted to an Agile development so there has absolutely been an improvement in speed to market. We now have consistent release plans because we have these environments as ready as they are."
"Even with the virtualization, it would take us at least three or four days to create a VM. With vRA we have brought that down to seven minutes. The solution has helped increase infrastructure, agility, speed of provisioning, time to market, application agility. Everything got super fast."
"The big benefit is it will spin up VMs quickly so it would take about 13 to 15 minutes to deploy a virtual machine. Whereas, if I were doing it based on an email from users who are requesting VMs, it might take time for me to hear back from them. This could be anywhere from an hour to a day."
"I personally spend a lot of time in vRealize Orchestrator, so being able to directly tie into the back end on the APIs, I find that to be what really is the most advantageous thing for me."
"The self-service capabilities are by far the best that we've seen in terms of features. If the user is being able to log in and make requests himself, from the onboarding process all the way to the end, that's very helpful."
"It is possible to completely automatize the creation and removal of a virtual machine."
"We have faster delivery times through its automation."
"The IT support for developers is nice as well because they are able to manage the environment themselves."
"The solution requires Mac support."
"A new Intune feature allows application packaging, but it incurs additional licensing costs for a significant number of applications."
"It should be easier to define policies and comply with those policies."
"There is room for improvement in integrating additional features such as Purview and SharePoint activities into Intune."
"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."
"Technical support is not that great."
"It would be good if, in addition to the minimal patching and compliance, we could also use Intune for application deployment. For instance, if a device is not patched, Intune should have the ability to push not only a Microsoft patch but also other patches, such as a browser patch."
"The most important thing is reporting. They should improve their reporting. They should give a free hand to users. In SCCM, I can create my own reports. For example, in SCCM, I can create an inventory report for my PC or for all PCs, but in Intune, we don't have an option to create any report. Microsoft claims that Intune is a successor of SCCM, but SCCM is more powerful than Intune. So, they should develop Intune more and make it equivalent to SCCM. Then, their product will be great in the market."
"There is a little bit of pain when it comes to libraries and what is needed to run the product."
"A hardened set of tests would be much appreciated."
"It is difficult to set up."
"This solution could be integrated with more hardware for an improved offering."
"SaltStack's features are minimal."
"Web UI."
"Its configuration process could be better."
"It would be nice if, at the director level, the manager level, there was a pretty graphic. They don't like to see numbers and line items, they want to see graphs and scales and real world pictures. That would support better reporting."
"The stability is 95 percent. There are some situations where it gets a little bit clumsy. When it gets really big, when you're dealing with a very large deployment, it can be a little bit difficult, but it's better than nothing. It does a significant job, given what it's tasked to do."
"It would be nice in the next release if they added in tool tips. Whether you're putting it together, adding a blueprint, or you're making a change in the system, highlighting or selecting something and having it tell you what it does or what it will do would be nice. Because it's such a complex system, it's hard to work with unless you've been using it for years to know what everything is doing."
"It has some limitations for scalability, especially for remote data center management. For some components, everything need to be centralized."
"vRO can get out of sync with vRA. We've run into every once in a while."
"It's not cheap."
"I would like to see more automation, more ways to automate automation tasks."
"Something as simple as formatting the catalog in a different way would be helpful because there is no option for doing so. A lot of the contents for the virtual machine, blueprints that you can request, are hidden from view and there's no way to change the view."
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.
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