


Chef and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform are products competing in the IT automation category. Ansible appears to have the upper hand due to its ease of use and flexible features that meet enterprise needs effectively.
Features: Chef provides detailed script-driven automation, offering significant flexibility in deployment across complex environments through customizable recipes. It supports a headless system by allowing interaction directly with its database. Ansible stands out for its agentless architecture, utilizing SSH for communication, and leverages a simple YAML syntax for crafting intuitive playbooks. It integrates well with various systems due to its extensive modularity.
Room for Improvement: Chef can benefit from enhancing its enterprise-focused capabilities, including more streamlined deployment options and reducing the complexity of its Ruby-based setup. It could also improve its rollback processes. Ansible might enhance its user experience by providing broader support for headless operations and simplifying complex condition handling in its playbooks. Additionally, expanding deeper integration options with third-party systems would add value.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Ansible is known for its straightforward deployment process, primarily due to its simple YAML syntax, minimizing setup time. The vast community support strongly complements its professional services. Chef, while requiring deeper initial setup, offers personalized support opportunities, albeit with a steeper learning curve owing to its use of Ruby-based recipes.
Pricing and ROI: Chef often incurs higher initial setup costs due to its comprehensive customization and detailed support access, yet yields a solid ROI with long-term strategic planning. In contrast, Ansible provides competitive pricing with lower initial expenditure, appealing to organizations seeking cost-efficient and rapid returns. Its pricing strategy complements enterprises focusing on primary cost efficiency and quicker ROI.
Everything we've gained from it makes my job easier day after day, and I see value in it as an engineer.
Microsoft Intune not only saves costs by reducing the number of personnel needed but also offers a comprehensive solution for managing laptops, applications, security, individual access, and enrollment.
Importantly, when someone leaves the company, it helps protect document access on their devices.
The return has been far more hours saved than spent.
Chef has provided a return on investment, particularly in needing fewer employees, as the tool significantly reduces the amount of human work required for many tasks.
We have seen significant improvement in the time and the way we make changes to the infrastructure.
The work that previously took two months now takes 10 to 15 minutes.
When a support ticket is submitted, it directly reaches someone with Intune support expertise.
When I contacted Microsoft, they had the same expertise, if not more, which is phenomenal because I felt heard and my problem was solved.
Sometimes, the support provided is excellent, and the representative is knowledgeable, while other times, the service needs improvement.
We usually work with the Chef teams and community support, who are always willing to assist.
The Ansible sales and technical support services need significant improvement.
I have not escalated any questions to the Red Hat support team regarding Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, as their modules are professional and complete.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has a large community with many written blogs and resources available, making it easy to maintain.
The scalability of Microsoft Intune is ten out of ten.
Ideally, we want to automatically segregate devices based on user properties like primary use, but currently, dynamic groups seem limited to device properties.
It supports organizations with 200 endpoints and those with more than 15,000 endpoints.
We leverage both to achieve the best option possible for scaling.
Chef's scalability handles a large number of nodes easily, allowing us to manage hundreds of servers consistently using the same set of cookbooks.
Chef's scalability is evident as the public sector organization I work at serves a population of 5 million, and we have had no problems with scaling.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is easily maintainable and highly scalable.
Ansible can face scalability issues, such as limitations when trying to scale up infrastructure.
We have not experienced downtime, bugs, or glitches.
It appears Microsoft Intune undergoes changes without informing customers.
Microsoft Intune has been very stable.
It is a good tool to work with, offering a strong developer experience and community support.
Chef is stable.
In my experience, Chef is quite stable most of the time.
The stability of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is excellent, deserving a 10 out of 10 rating.
Features like unlocking devices sometimes fail, and the support offered for other operating systems is insufficient.
There are communication issues, so you might start working with a feature without knowing if it will be deprecated six months from now.
Many third-party companies offer single-pane-of-glass reporting that shows you what your update environment looks like, how your patch is doing, application status, etc., but Intune's reporting is not intuitive.
On support, I think there should be more focus on how we can achieve AI automations in answering questions for beginners and addressing deep concerns without general manual management.
Self-healing infrastructure continuously verifies that the system matches the desired state and can auto-correct configuration changes during the next run.
To improve Chef, making an interface with another language such as Python or Java that is well understood, as capable as Ruby, and even more widely adopted would demystify it a bit.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is very easy to use with Jinja templating capabilities that make it really straightforward.
The dashboarding capabilities should be improved by bringing CMP (Cloud Management Platform) into Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform could improve by creating modules for upcoming AI and ML tech stacks.
Introductory professional services, like a fast-track service, were included with our E5 membership, and there have been no additional costs.
The Intune suite and add-ons, such as batch management and remote help, are costly.
It costs approximately forty euros per user per month.
Licensing looks reasonable compared to the manual work of managing whole data centers with even 10,000 servers.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that we sidestepped it by using Cinc because none of the functionality that is exclusive to the paid version was actually in use in the organization.
The pricing is high, and since I'm not using all functionalities, it would be better if the price depended on the functionalities used.
The cost of combining Red Hat Developer Hub and Ansible is extremely high, which presents a significant challenge with the Red Hat product.
There is no pricing and no licensing required, as Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is always free to use.
Intune excels in configuration and compliance management for Windows 10, ensuring devices receive timely updates and adhere to organizational standards.
Dynamic groups allow us to set conditions for automatic membership, eliminating the need for user intervention or manual review and ensuring a seamless workflow.
Windows Autopatch is the most valuable because it removes the burden of patch management.
Security is a key aspect that Chef can automate, monitor new features that are available, and even do patches without you getting involved.
Chef can manage hundreds or thousands of servers effortlessly, allowing for easy rollout of a single cookbook change to all machines.
When you have infrastructure as code and you already have everything apart from the environment-specific config, which you can specify in variables, then it is not only more repeatable and reliable, it is faster.
The agentless architecture of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, using the SSH key, makes it passwordless and allows us to push configurations with one click, creating a major advantage.
For 200 to 300 servers, the maintenance took about one to two months. New patches would arrive and we would have to repeat the process. Now, it is a one-night work or a 10 to 15 minutes task.
The automation capabilities streamline deployment processes, providing reliability and reducing manual intervention and errors.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform | 13.5% |
| Microsoft Intune | 8.2% |
| Chef | 2.8% |
| Other | 75.5% |



| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 121 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 47 |
| Large Enterprise | 154 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 3 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 7 |
| Large Enterprise | 19 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 24 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 8 |
| Large Enterprise | 48 |
Microsoft Intune provides centralized management of mobile devices and applications, ensuring security, compliance, and productivity through integration with Microsoft services like Microsoft 365 and Azure Active Directory.
Organizations use Intune for managing mobile devices and applications, enhancing security and compliance across platforms. With features like single sign-on, conditional access, and zero-touch deployment via Autopilot, it facilitates efficient operations. Intune's scalability, easy enrollment, and capabilities such as remote wipe support diverse device management, offering robust data protection and efficient operation. Despite its features, improvement areas include reporting, compatibility with non-Microsoft devices, and better support for macOS and Linux devices.
What are the key features of Microsoft Intune?
What benefits should users look for in reviews?
In industries such as finance, healthcare, and education, Microsoft Intune is implemented to ensure secure and compliant device management. Companies leverage its capabilities to deploy security policies and manage both corporate-owned and BYOD environments, facilitating a unified approach to data protection and compliance.
Chef, is the leader in DevOps, driving collaboration through code to automate infrastructure, security, compliance and applications. Chef provides a single path to production making it faster and safer to add value to applications and meet the demands of the customer. Deployed broadly in production by the Global 5000 and used by more than half of the Fortune 500, Chef develops 100 percent of its software as open source under the Apache 2.0 license with no restrictions on its use. Chef Enterprise Automation Stack™, a commercial distribution, is developed solely from that open source code and unifies security, compliance, infrastructure and application automation with observability. Chef provides an unequaled developer experience for the Coded Enterprise by enabling users to express infrastructure, security policies and the application lifecycle as code, modernizing development, packaging and delivery of any application to any platform. For more information, visit http://chef.io and follow @chef.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform streamlines IT operations with features like a simplified GUI and extensive module support. Its agentless architecture and YAML ease make it an adaptable choice for managing diverse infrastructures efficiently.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform offers a robust automation framework that supports multiple environments and integrates well with various applications. Its agentless Python-based architecture facilitates efficient server management and rapid update deployment. Users benefit from centralized management through Ansible Tower, role-based access control, and dynamic inventory. However, improvement areas include documentation, API integration, network support, and UI scaling. Enhanced community contributions could address module availability and compatibility gaps.
What are the most important features of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform?In industries like finance, healthcare, and technology, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is used for network management, security compliance, and configuration tasks. Organizations utilize its capabilities for cloud and on-premises deployment, infrastructure provisioning, and workflow orchestration. Many integrate it with tools such as Puppet or Terraform to enhance CI/CD processes, benefiting from its agentless design in adapting to cloud environments.
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