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Barkly [EOL] vs BigFix comparison

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Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Net...
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
115
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (4th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (5th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (4th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (1st)
Barkly [EOL]
Average Rating
5.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
BigFix
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
100
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (10th), Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (24th), Patch Management (7th), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (10th), Autonomous Endpoint Management (5th)
 

Featured Reviews

ABHISHEK_SINGH - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Process Expert at A.P. Moller - Maersk
Gained full visibility and streamlined threat detection through behavior-based insights and AI integration
Initially, we got to have a lot of false positives when we onboarded, but nowadays it's quite smooth. We have fine-tuned our security policies and allowed different levels of policies to get rid of those false positives. Currently, we are getting a fairly good amount of incidents that are not false positives or benign, but actionable items. The process is streamlined. In the initial days, the operations used to get involved in a lot of benign and other activities, but now the process is streamlined. We are leveraging the auto-detection and remediation plans. The operations teams are now more involved in other business roles as well, not just looking into the logs and fetching out what's happening there. They have fixed a lot of things. Initially, they didn't have IAC code drift detection, cloud posture management, or security posture management, but they have those now. They purchased different vendors and did a merger with that. They have now Prisma Cloud that gets integrated and now they are working with Cortex Cloud. Everything that was negative has now been addressed, and the product altogether looks to be in a very better and mature shape now. Currently, it's more or less detecting the workloads with AI-based best practices. Since most organizations are consuming AI agents and other things, we are looking forward to seeing what other feature enhancements Palo Alto can support in that.
MD
Senior System Administrator at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
Has an easy to use interface but lacks features and customization options
The product could stand to be a bit more advanced. It's very simple. You don't have a lot of ability to customize properly. For example, it does not handle whitelisting properly. So, in general, it could offer more sophisticated control and more refined options to be able to customize it better. I would also like to see better version information in the changelog. The product doesn't tell you what's changed until it's too late. So, it would be nice to know what's changed between versions of the reports so you can see more easily what might cause a problem and what is probably innocuous.
InderjeetSingh4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
End-to-end automation has simplified patching and software deployment across thousands of servers
There is one feature in BigFix called the automation patch policy that requires enhancement. When an action is initiated through the patch policy, it appears on the console but arrives in chunks. When targeting hundreds of servers from the patch policy, the actions come in chunks such as ten out of six, ten out of nine, or ten out of fifteen. This fragmented approach creates a significant challenge for the patching team to monitor the action status. I would recommend that the development team provide a single action or one to two actions instead of multiple actions requiring individual monitoring. A broad status update could be provided to the client indicating the overall progress of the patch policy implementation rather than requiring monitoring of every individual action. This would reduce the bandwidth required by the team to track multiple actions on the console.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I recommend this solution to others because it is easy to manage, reliable, and overall good to use."
"The tool is designed to scale for large enterprises and handle large volumes of data."
"WildFire AI is the best option for this product."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks has changed the way my security team detects, investigates, and responds to threats, as we are able to see the files, unwanted files, unsecured files, and unauthorized files, so we are quarantining them."
"Palo Alto is constantly adding new features."
"Monitoring is most valuable."
"The most valuable feature of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is its machine-learning capabilities. Additionally, there is full integration with other solutions."
"Stability is a primary factor, and then there's the ease of distribution and policy management; Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is very easy to work with, and we're quite happy with them."
"Very easy to install and use."
"For a next-generation antivirus, this solution is pretty inexpensive."
"BigFix tremendously reduced the amount of work that we had to do on each server in a centralized manner, reduced help desk calls by 60-70%, empowered users with a self-service portal to fix their own problems, and helped us avoid compliance fines in the tens of thousands of dollars by enabling accurate software audits and license verification."
"I like the inventory and life cycle management feature."
"Switching to BigFix has alleviated that to a great degree and is now allowing our company to think ahead about how we can incorporate other pieces of BigFix that other solutions don't have integrated natively, so we can get five or six product sets out of BigFix as opposed to just a single product set on a solution that didn't even work to begin with."
"BigFix has always been easier to use when managing servers, especially when you deal with so many servers. We have 7,000. That's a lot of services to manage, and it's convenient to patch them all at once."
"IBM BigFix is one of the easiest client management tools to install."
"Now, the process is centrally controlled, reported, and has an independently formed location (also over Internet)."
"It is a highly effective tool if you're cross-platform."
"Having higher visibility on patching level, on patching successful, and non-successful has been a way that BigFix has improved my organization. Also, the ability to customize the content to do what we need it to do is very powerful and very flexible for us. Finally, in the area of custom interfaces like REST API really gives us the ability to provide for our external customers."
 

Cons

"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is a strong tool, but it is true that digesting information sometimes makes the tool go a little bit slower."
"Limited remote connection."
"It tends to do 99.9% of things. The only thing I'd like is single sign-on authentication into their cloud platform so that my users can be properly authenticated against it."
"Currently, we are monitoring all USB drives and ports but we would like to improve our device control capabilities."
"The configuration could be simplified. I would like to see better protection, specifically to protect email applications."
"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks could improve by adding a sandbox feature to better compete with their competitors which have it."
"Product might have some bugs."
"I feel that it should not be a licensed activity because a feature should allow us to see applications running on end devices."
"The product could stand to be a bit more advanced. It's very simple."
"It lacks more sophisticated features and opportunity for customization."
"Sometimes there is a lag time for our users."
"The solution could improve by adding support drivers for different systems and equipment. When you have a lot of different computers if they could fix how to install any updates, firmware, or drivers for different systems or servers it would be good."
"For improvements, it would be good if BigFix supported more databases. Currently, it only supports DB2 and Microsoft SQL. Adding support for other databases like Oracle would be beneficial."
"The look and feel of the system are old-fashioned."
"The reporting still needs improvement since customers want specific reporting, such as N-1 month patching reports."
"Technical support has sometimes been very good, and sometimes it's been not so good."
"The technical support is usually pretty good. However, I had a ticket that stayed open for a couple of weeks which I didn't get a response to, and when we got the response it wasn't really good."
"Sometimes there can be a delay reporting back to the server for a variety of reasons, such as users turning their computer off when they go home."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing seems fair, and I do like the licensing model. You use wherever they are, and it is elastic."
"The price of the product is not very economical."
"The solution has one subscription for endpoint protection and one subscription for detection and response. The two licenses combined give you the BRO version."
"This is an expensive solution."
"The tool's price is moderate."
"When we first bought it, it was a bit expensive, but it was worth it. The licensing was straightforward."
"It is cost-effective compared to similar solutions. It fits for the small businesses through to the big businesses."
"It's about $55 per license on a yearly basis."
"It is an inexpensive when compared to other next-generation products."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is expensive and ten is cheap, I rate the solution's pricing one out of ten."
"The price of the solution is high. There are not any additional fees from the standard license."
"Compliance, inventory, and licensing are really pricey. They should lower the price. It discourages users from getting onboard."
"It might be about $23 a client."
"I can estimate the reduced cost of servers maintenance to approximatively $500,000."
"The license is subscription-based."
"So, the pricing is slightly more expensive than the others. I have to keep buying licenses every time I add a new device."
"It is too costly. It is one of the best tools, but because of pricing, not all clients support it. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
No data available
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise54
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise68
 

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Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BigFix?
I rate the price for BigFix as medium, neither low nor high.
What needs improvement with BigFix?
There is one feature in BigFix called the automation patch policy that requires enhancement. When an action is initia...
What is your primary use case for BigFix?
My current use case involves being one of the products and one of the clients implementing this tool.
 

Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
No data available
Tivoli Endpoint Manager
 

Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
TalkTalk, Monadnock Regional School District
US Foods, Penn State, St Vincent's Health US Foods, Sabadell Bank, SunTrust, Australia Sydney, Stemac, Capgemini, WNS Global Services, Jebsen & Jessen, CenterBeam, Strauss, Christian Hospital Centre, Brit Insurance, Career Education Corporation
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, SentinelOne, CrowdStrike and others in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP). Updated: July 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.