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BMC Helix Client Management vs BigFix comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

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
6.7
Number of Reviews
118
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)
BigFix
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
100
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (9th), Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (23rd), Patch Management (8th), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (11th), Autonomous Endpoint Management (6th)
BMC Helix Client Management
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Mobile Device Management (MDM) (11th), Endpoint Compliance (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
BigFix1.8%
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint6.5%
CrowdStrike Falcon5.7%
Other86.0%
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)
Mobile Device Management (MDM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
BMC Helix Client Management4.5%
Jamf Pro11.2%
NinjaOne6.6%
Other77.7%
Mobile Device Management (MDM)
 

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.
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.
Sagar Talreja - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. IT Technical Consultant at Fusion Business Solutions (UK) Ltd
A tool that offers great functionalities to manage reboot and patching
Right now, I don't have anything to say about which areas in BMC Client Management need improvement. The solution does not offer the functionality of remote access to users. From an improvement perspective, it would be great if a remote access functionality was added to BMC Client Management. I want something similar to Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) in BMC Client Management.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cortex XDR can integrate the firewalls and determine the tendencies of the attacks. It's a new generation antivirus, with protection endpoints and detection response. It is very easy to use and everybody can operate the solution."
"Palo Alto is one of the tech vendors that always provides top-of-the-line products."
"If any application performs suspicious activities, such as changing registries or modifying other applications, Cortex XDR detects and blocks the entire application."
"It detected stuff that other things wouldn't detect."
"The normal protection was really effective, and we detected situations that if we didn't have Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, it's highly likely that we would have been affected, but it protected the infrastructure."
"From the Palo Alto side, whatever they buy, they integrate that really well into their integration suite, and that makes a massive difference."
"The product's initial setup phase is very easy."
"Based on my experience with Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, I highly recommend it due to its quick response to zero-day attacks and low utilization from end-user devices."
"BigFix has two advantages over other solutions: its price is competitive and we found the implementation partner to be very supportive in terms of explaining and training the in-house resources and deploying the solution."
"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."
"Pre-packaged support for many third-party applications such as Adobe, Google, Mozilla, Sun (Java), WinZip, and others."
"The solution is unbelievably scalable."
"We've had no issues with stability."
"It covers multiple operating systems and helps with patch management."
"I think BigFix is a very good solution, and I rate it ten out of ten."
"Before we had BigFix, we had problems with some malware. BigFix allows us to immediately patch all instances of endpoints that were vulnerable to antivirus and initiate scans. That's key."
"BMC Client Management has helped us be able to patch our OS or any software to the latest version."
"The inventory and patch management tools are very valuable."
"The solution provides multiple features in one place."
"The support from BMC Client Management is very good."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its patching capabilities and the help it offers when it comes to use cases, like prompting for the reboot after a certain period of time."
"One of our customers is a financial institution with more than 15,000 endpoints, and we use BMC Client Management to manage their regulatory compliance needs, manage the endpoints from a security perspective, and integrate it with service management as well."
"One feature I like, that was especially valuable during the pandemic, is remote control. Remote control grants administrators and support personnel access to the laptops and PCs of employees (who might be working from home) in order to fix any issues that come up as and when they come up, even without having to wait for a support request."
"It's a scalable solution. We have deployed it for customers using 3000 nodes to those using 300,000 nodes."
 

Cons

"They've been having some issues with updating their endpoint agents, and it has been quite frustrating."
"Whenever the tool releases a new version when deploying the product across the organization, I feel like there are some disturbances in the CPU usage after upgrading the tool to the latest version."
"The solution should enhance the ADR and reporting."
"Data privacy is a matter of concern. You have to be careful with data privacy, it can be sensitive and Cortex can have most of your access."
"The main issue I could point out is the offline agents and the way that it is missing."
"If you compare it to SentinelOne, which has more functionalities and detection capabilities on an open platform, the pricing on SentinelOne is far more reasonable and cheaper than Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks."
"The solution can never really be an on-premises solution based simply on the way it is set up. It needs metadata to run and improve. Having an on-premises solution would cut it off from making improvements."
"There is a severe gap in functionality between Windows, Linux, and Mac versions. For example all folder restriction settings are Windows only. Traps 5.0+ does not have SAML / LDAP integration."
"To make it a ten they should improve the licensing. Second, if they could have one environment for everything it would be nice. For you to install compliance you need to install the server, and then you add the modules. For you to install inventory you install the server and then you add the modules. It's not easy to do. When I was doing it before I learned it, it was not straight forward."
"The BigFix Inventory could have an increased scope regarding the tools that can be detected. It does not cover all the possible software installed in Asset."
"The only thing that I don't like about BigFix is that it does not support other devices such as printer firmware, router firmware, and things like that."
"Web reports. The interface for web reports is still pretty basic, and really hasn't changed in the seven years that we've had the product, so that would be one thing that would be really nice."
"The relevant language takes a little getting used to since it's not used anywhere else in the industry. It's just in the BigFix environment."
"I'd definitely like to see additional feature parody in the web UI versus the console."
"It's not perfect, but it's close."
"Sometimes the workstations communicate back to the BigFix server two or three days in a week or something similar. 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. When the user comes back and turns the computer back on BigFix needs to synchronize and sometimes it can take some time, approximately one week. The communication between the agent and the server should be faster, there is room for improvement in this area."
"In BMC Client Management, I would like to see more features for executing commands remotely. For example, with SAP, there isn't the capability to execute all the commands available in the console. The latest version includes more endpoints, but they do not cover everything the operations team needs. Additionally, I think improving the hierarchy for managing endpoints is crucial. Extending the endpoint capabilities would be highly beneficial."
"BMC Client Management supports only iOS devices. It would be good if they would support Android as well."
"The solution needs to add whitelisting because many customers request it."
"The on-premises version of BMC Client Management has powerful remote control functionality and decent compliance features, but these features both rely on the discovery tool in order to gain a complete set of insights about the endpoint's environment. Now, BMC's discovery solution depends on having an agent installed in each endpoint and sometimes the agent doesn't work properly, making it difficult to get an accurate understanding of the environment (including special topologies) even with BMC's discovery tool."
"It would be good if BMC Client Management can perform vulnerability assessment scanning at the endpoint on its own and mitigate that. Then, we wouldn't have to rely on a third party VA tool. I would like to see this application move to being a web-based one."
"BMC Client Management could improve in the area of integration."
"The solution does not offer the functionality of remote access to users."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I don't have any issues with the pricing. We are satisfied with the price."
"I am using the Community edition."
"It has a higher cost than other solutions, like CrowdStrike or Microsoft’s EDR tools, but it reduces the cost of our operations because it’s a new generation antivirus tool."
"The solution is expensive. It's pricing is on a yearly-basis."
"The price was fine."
"This is an expensive solution."
"The tool's price is moderate."
"It is "expensive" and flexible."
"Its price is very reasonable."
"The license is subscription-based."
"You get what we call the Platform Edition, which you get for free. The patch service is maybe $0.50 per workstation per month. Then there's the basic server cost, which is about $1.50 per server per month. You also get into Lifecycle which does power management, OSD remote control, and those types of things, and that might be about 10 times the price - which works out to about $13 per server and, maybe $5 per workstation per month."
"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."
"I can estimate the reduced cost of servers maintenance to approximatively $500,000."
"It might be about $23 a client."
"There's not much big cost. We only have to pay the agents' cost for the server, and for the systems."
"The price of BigFix could be lower. However, I am always seeking a lower price."
"To use BMC Client Management they charge annually per node."
"The solution is low cost."
"BMC Client Management is a very affordable solution. There is one main server license which I believe is around $1,000 per year, and then there is the license for the actual solution. With the solution license, you can opt for a suite license where you get access to all the features and benefits, or alternatively you can buy any of the five main components of the suite license individually."
"BMC Client Management is a high-priced solution, but given its performance and capabilities, I think it offers great value. I don't have the exact number for the yearly licensing costs. I believe there is an additional cost of around two hundred dollars."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Retailer
10%
Construction Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business47
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise55
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise68
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
 

Questions from the Community

Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. Sentinel One
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. SentinelOne SentinelOne offers very detailed specifics with regard to risks or attacks. ...
Comparing CrowdStrike Falcon to Cortex XDR (Palo Alto)
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. CrowdStrike Falcon Both Cortex XDR and Crowd Strike Falcon offer cloud-based solutions th...
How is Cortex XDR compared with Microsoft Defender?
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud-delivered endpoint security solution. The tool reduces the attack surface,...
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.
Ask a question
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Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
Tivoli Endpoint Manager
BMC Helix Client Management, Helix Client Management, BMC Fromdistance Mobile Device Management
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
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
Charter Manufacturing
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, SentinelOne, CrowdStrike and others in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP). Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.