We performed a comparison between Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Satellite based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Ansible has a slight edge over Satellite in this comparison since it is a free solution and easier to deploy than Satellite.
"I would say the biggest benefit is the single-pane view. There's no jumping around multiple UI's to do your overall management."
"One of the most valuable aspects of Microsoft Intune is its seamless integration with Azure Active Directory, offering capabilities akin to Group Policy Objects."
"The Asset Management and Auto Pilot are valuable features."
"The one feature we find most useful is the Mobile Application Manager. There are two types, we have the complete MDM and the Mobile Application Manager(MAM). We don't give our users phones, it is their own personal phone, and we need to allow them to have access to the company detail on their phone. We need to create a balance between their own personal data and the company data. We deploy the Mobile Application Manager for them so that we won't be able to interfere with their own personal data."
"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."
"It helps implement conditional access policies to restrict mobile users from accessing potentially dangerous emails."
"I like that we can implement conditional access."
"The most important thing for me is the autopilot feature."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don’t need an agent for it to work."
"Ansible is agentless. So, we don't need to set up any agent into the computer we are interacting with. The only prerequisite is that the host with which we are going to interact must have the Python interpreter installed on it. We can connect to a host and do our configuration by using Ansible."
"We can manage all the configuration consistency between all our servers."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its configuration management, drift management, workflow templates with the visual UI, and graphical workflow representation."
"It is all modular-based. If there is not a module for it today, someone will write it."
"The reason I like Ansible is, first, the coding of it is very straightforward, it's very human-readable. I'm also on a contract, and I can clearly iterate and bring people up to speed very quickly on writing a Playbook compared with writing up a Puppet manifest or a Salt script."
"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."
"The solution can scale."
"Fixing is the most valuable. When you deal with a lot of hardware and software and you have a lot of packages, fixing is a bit difficult. You need to track and pull up all such things, but Satellite makes this task easy. We have branches in other locations, and I can manage other branches by using Satellite Capsule, which is a great feature."
"Previously, we were using one server to update from a different repository over the HTTP. We had to manually manage the updates on the repository server. Satellite made the process easier."
"It plays a significant role in managing the lifecycle of our systems and ensures that we can effectively control and update the software versions to align with our organization's needs."
"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to process patching and updates completely offline without an internet connection."
"It has been a stable solution...It is a totally scalable solution."
"Satellite gives administrators the ability to target deployments and only send out the updates or provision updates to certain groups."
"The product helps me to manage a large number of servers from one console."
"Technical support has been good."
"There is no catalog for mobile access management (MAM) security."
"Microsoft Intune lags market leaders, such as Apperian, in its MAM capabilities."
"Additional application deployment options e.g. MSI deployment with more complex parameters or additional side-by-side files, and non-MSI deployment options."
"Lacks the ability to deploy more ways of management, managing devices and processing the policies."
"The UI is not user-friendly and has room for improvement."
"When somebody has a customized application or their own company's application, we cannot deploy that application."
"There needs to be more support for Mac operating systems."
"We faced issues with macOS support. The product should have better inventory and asset management."
"One problem that I'm facing right now is the mismatch between the new version of Python and Ansible. Sometimes it's Python 2, and sometimes it's Python 3. When things get a bit dicey, I wish that Ansible would solve this issue by itself. I don't want to have to specify if it is Python 3 or version 2."
"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."
"There are some options not available in the community edition of the solution."
"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."
"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."
"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..."
"It could be easier to integrate Ansible with other solutions. No single tool can do everything. For example, we use Terraform for infrastructure and other solutions for configuration management and VMs."
"We are not using the Dashboard a lot because we have higher expectations from it. The default Dashboard from Tower doesn't give that much information. We really want to get down into more than if the job succeeded or what was the percentage of success. We want to get down to task-level success. If, in a job, there are ten tasks, we want to see this task was a success, and this was not, and how many were not. That's the kind of granularity we are looking for, that Tower does not give right now."
"It has not been significantly updated in a while."
"Red Hat Satellite has a short life cycle and we constantly need to update."
"I would like to see the scalability, user interface, and reporting features improved and for the solution to be simplified. Instead of having complex engineering, it should be simple for the user."
"The dashboard of Satellite is not encouraging. It does not adequately showcase all the functionality it offers."
"They could make it more easy to use and improve the GUI so that it's more intuitive."
"There needs to be some margin for improvement in terms of the way Satellite manages subscriptions. It is still very confusing when we have different contracts or different bundles of subscriptions, and we need to manage those within Satellite in a way that's very user-friendly."
"The product could have more diversity in what it is able to deploy and might do better if it was not dedicated to Red Hat products only."
"Automation can always be improved and refined to continue to make it better."
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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 62 reviews while Red Hat Satellite is ranked 4th in Configuration Management with 22 reviews. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6, while Red Hat Satellite is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Makes it easy to build playbooks and saves time and resources". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Red Hat Satellite writes "A good product for managing patches and updates that could be more robust and up-to-date". Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps, BMC TrueSight Server Automation and BigFix, whereas Red Hat Satellite is most compared with SUSE Manager, Microsoft Configuration Manager, AWS Systems Manager, BigFix and vCenter Configuration Manager. See our Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs. Red Hat Satellite report.
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