We performed a comparison between BigFix and Chef 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."The most valuable feature is the UEM capabilities."
"I can see that the patch management process is much improved with the bundled patch management option available in Microsoft Intune compared to the KPI deployment required by the other deployment solutions."
"It is a very helpful solution."
"Remote Wipe and Autopilot is one of the best features."
"One of the biggest advantages of Microsoft Intune is that it brings the management of Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and even Linux under a single pane of glass."
"The standout features of Intune are its excellent mobile device management and highly effective application management capabilities."
"The most valuable feature is the policy CSPs."
"The conditional access policies that we set up are very useful."
"Servers are patched more consistently than they have been previously."
"The most valuable feature is patch management, a must have, even for Linux and iOS."
"Ability to run custom reports and custom relevance."
"BigFix is incredibly fast and accurate in patching, reporting, and remediation."
"We are able to go from patching thousands of machines by twenty to thirty people to one person."
"The most valuable and essential features of BigFix are all of them, they are needed when serving the purpose of the desktop operation framework. We cannot run operations without patching or without having an appropriate mechanism for deploying software, et cetera. The features all serve their purpose for our use case."
"My company provides support services to a lot of customers and companies. We have reduced a huge amount of man-effort. Along with the man-effort, we have reduced the timeline to fix the compliance and security gaps. We have an unbroken record. The documentation clearly says that we have done the patching of newly released patches, including Microsoft and third-party patches, in up to 80% of the computers, within 72 hours of the release of the production. That was a very massive benefit that we have seen. When I talk about the 80% endpoints, it is 100 or 200. I am talking about 25,000 endpoints."
"The most valuable feature for us is the ability to manage TWS, the relevance is really what sets it apart. Also, using it as a software deployment tool is the key for us."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."
"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."
"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."
"Automation is everything. Having so many servers in production, many of our processes won't work nor scale. So, we look for tools to help us automate the process, and Chef is one of them."
"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"Stable and scalable configuration management and automation tool. Installing it is easy. Its most valuable feature is its compliance, e.g. it's very good."
"Technical support is not that great."
"I think there should be a better tracking of the cell phones used on the Intune."
"A new Intune feature allows application packaging, but it incurs additional licensing costs for a significant number of applications."
"An area for improvement is the absence of seamless integration, particularly with external dashboards."
"In the next release, I would like a feature to be able to properly lock down the device. For example, if an attacker or somebody steals the phone, you can be sure that the pin cannot be broken."
"The pricing could be improved."
"From a new user's perspective, it may be a little overwhelming because there are quite a few things to look at in the console, however, once you are sort of acclimated and are familiar with your core functions, it's fairly simple and straightforward."
"They could also make it easier to use because there are some other products that may be easier to use in terms of the look and feel of the dashboard."
"I'd like to see better API integration with BigFix. We have some tremendous API capability inside of CyFIR and the ability to take textual search results, for example, and bring that back into the BigFix dashboard. This would be of extreme interest to us and our customers."
"Needs to improve Network Access Protection (NAP) technologies to prevent computers with vulnerabilities from gaining access to networks."
"I would like to see improvements in the Web UI program and also a BigFix console for Mac OS."
"The stability is generally pretty good. The one thing that we came across is the battle between load on endpoints and load on our servers and relays versus how quickly, effectively and reliably actions can be taken. I'd like to not have to take an action on a system while I'm working with someone and then have to say whether something will happen between five seconds or thirty minutes from that point."
"They need better integration."
"I self-taught for this online, so the initial setup was a little difficult to pick up at first. I had to create a couple of testing environments and destroy them in order to learn how to use it. There was a lot of trial and error, a lot of reading of the manuals."
"I would like to see the Self Service section made more user-friendly."
"I remember doing restarts a few times. So, making sure that it is rock solid from an executable perspective is important."
"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."
"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."
"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."
"They could provide more features, so the recipes could be developed in a simpler and faster way. There is still a lot of room for improvement, providing better functionalities when creating recipes."
"It is an old technology."
"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."
"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."
"There appears to be no effort to fix the command line utility functionality, which is definitely broken, provides a false positive for a result when you perform the operation, and doesn't work."
BigFix is ranked 5th in Configuration Management with 91 reviews while Chef is ranked 16th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews. BigFix is rated 8.6, while Chef is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of BigFix writes "Very stable and easy to deploy with excellent patch compliance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Chef writes "Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation". BigFix is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Tanium and ManageEngine Patch Manager Plus, whereas Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager and CFEngine Enterprise. See our BigFix vs. Chef report.
See our list of best Configuration Management vendors.
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