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Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Vicarius vRx comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

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

Microsoft Configuration Man...
Ranking in Patch Management
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
81
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (6th), Configuration Management (3rd)
Vicarius vRx
Ranking in Patch Management
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (15th), Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Patch Management category, the mindshare of Microsoft Configuration Manager is 15.0%, down from 18.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vicarius vRx is 3.2%. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Patch Management
 

Featured Reviews

MikeNelson2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Deployment recovery works well but requires configuration improvements
While I do not use the product frequently, many issues were due to configuration rather than the product itself. I cannot give an exact recommendation as it is not my area of responsibility. The team that uses it finds it adequate. It is presently good enough for us not to investigate other options. Overall, I rate the product a six out of ten.
OrenBen Shalom - PeerSpot reviewer
Consolidates vulnerability discovery, prioritization, and remediation in a single platform
Vicarius vRx offers several advantages, especially for organizations with diverse operating systems and applications requiring frequent patching. The platform helps prioritize patch installation by identifying high-risk vulnerabilities, allowing IT teams to focus on critical threats first. This prioritization is crucial because it prevents IT teams from being overwhelmed by the constant influx of patches, enabling them to create a manageable plan and allocate resources effectively. By distinguishing between critical, high-risk, and medium-risk vulnerabilities, Vicarius vRx empowers IT teams to address the most urgent threats promptly and schedule less critical patches for later. Both native operating system updates and Vicarius vRx offer vulnerability remediation. Native OS updates allow for the patching of system vulnerabilities on Windows, macOS, and Linux. However, Vicarius vRx provides a single solution for installing both operating system and application updates by also discovering application vulnerabilities. Another valuable feature is virtual patching, which allows us to protect an asset from a specific vulnerability without installing a patch. Sometimes, installing a patch alone is insufficient and requires restarting the asset. However, production servers often cannot be restarted during the day, restricting restarts to specific timeslots. Virtual patching creates a network-based protection layer that prevents exploitation of a vulnerability, offering a temporary safeguard. While not a foolproof solution for long-term use, it's a valuable tool that reduces tension between IT and security teams by providing time to properly install patches.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's helped us solve problems surrounding patching, installing, and reporting different patches, etc., on the virtual machines."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager is patch management."
"It has the ability to perform mass distribution."
"The cloud account management is a valuable feature."
"SCCM is a stable solution."
"I find the product valuable for deployment recovery and it has done much more than that."
"Technical support is very helpful and very responsive."
"Microsoft is being very competitive right now, and they are really investing in a lot of new features to be more competitive in the marketplace."
"We can easily deploy patches for third-party applications. It automatically downloads the patches for you. You do not have to download them, upload them to the solution, and configure your own scripts or anything like that. It is all automatic."
"Since we started using Vicarius vRx, I have not had to worry about patching the software."
"vRx seemed to be user-friendly and very easy to use."
"Vicarius vRx offers several advantages, especially for organizations with diverse operating systems and applications requiring frequent patching."
"The most efficient feature of Vicarius vRx is the ability to group assets, such as by time zone, allowing for targeted patching and streamlined management."
"The most valuable features of vRx would be virtualized patching and severity prioritization."
"The prioritization of the vulnerabilities and patches that we must apply immediately is valuable. The automation of the tasks allows us to spend less time in that area."
"I like that vRx is cloud-based. It protects the health of applications against zero-day threats."
 

Cons

"Our company would prefer not rebooting computers while people are using them. There seems to be no strategy behind it."
"On some hardware, we'd like an easier way to get peripherals attached."
"The tool's deployment is difficult. Microsoft needs to improve documentation with videos."
"The reports are too busy. They could be simpler. I'm a technician, so I don't care how pretty the reports look. They should be easy to read. I'm designing this for production folks. They need to read the reports quickly when they're patching in the middle of the night."
"Troubleshooting in general needs improvement. There's just a ton of logs to go through, and so finding the error log that corresponds with that you're doing can sometimes be difficult."
"The App to upgrades to the server needs to be improved."
"In spite of us being a premier customer we find the support unsatisfactory."
"As far as load balancing across, they don't have that support yet, so that you can actually build multiple primaries and have it load balance across. They don't have any of that functionality yet. That would be a nice feature, to scale that way."
"I would like to see more network architecture elements with patches."
"I don't like logging in. The portal could be a better process. You could use some third-party push notification rather than sending an email, waiting for the link to generate, and clicking on it. That would be good. It's somewhat frustrating when I need to log in."
"I would be happy if the patch update could be downloaded to the Vicarius server and then implemented on the client. Currently, they just send a link to the software."
"We had an outage due to a change Vicarius performed in their system."
"The network device vulnerability scans can be improved. It would be helpful to be able to mitigate those vulnerabilities using SSH or SNMP to get those those updates out to those devices. I don't know if that is possible because it doesn't run an agent. But at the very least, having that CPE information relative to network devices would be incredibly helpful."
"I would like to see a way to build a virtual environment where we can test patches in real-time before we deploy."
"It would be beneficial if Vicarius vRx could implement smart tagging or suggest tags to create a group for these development tools, signifying that they should not be regularly updated."
"They do have a search function for device names. They already have a list of all our devices, however, if I'm looking for something, sometimes the name does not come up at the top of the list."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"SCCM comes with its own version of SQL Server. If you use that SQL Server with SCCM and don't use it for another applications than you get an SQL Server for free."
"Pricing and licensing are horrible. You have to not look at dollar value to use SCCM. It's super-duper expensive but it works. The acquisition cost is expensive, it's labor-intensive. But it works."
"As far as I know, it is an annual operating expense license."
"Its licensing is quite complicated because we are getting the license not only for SCCM but for the full Microsoft package. We don't need to pay for a separate license. We need to have one license that includes everything we need, such as Windows, Microsoft 365, SCCM, encryption, and so on. So, we don't have a specific price for it. Perhaps, it is good that it includes the full suite of licensing of Microsoft. It is expensive, but we are getting a lot of features."
"There is not a license needed to use the solution."
"The price of Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager is expensive."
"There is an annual license needed to use the solution."
"Its price is okay because it is part of our licensing."
"The pricing is fair."
"It is in the middle. It is not the cheapest solution, but it is also not terribly expensive. We found it to be a good fit. It is fairly priced."
"The price of vRx seems fair. None of our clients complained about the pricing. They all thought it was reasonable. Once people understood what it does, it didn't take much to get them to sign up."
"I am not sure how much it costs, but it would have saved us some costs."
"Vicarius' pricing was reasonable compared to the other systems we evaluated."
"Vicarius vRx is reasonably priced."
"In the past, Vicarius vRx was cheap, but now they have adjusted their pricing policy, resulting in higher renewal costs. We have had some conversations with them regarding a smaller jump in the renewal cost."
"I know we got it for a very cheap price, and I now see why. It was very cheap. It was maybe 12,000 or 14,000 dollars."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
17%
Media Company
13%
Non Profit
11%
Insurance Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Ansible compare to Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (SCCM)?
Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager takes knowledge and research to properly configure. The length of time that the set up will take depends on the kind of technical architecture that your org...
How to choose between ManageEngine Desktop Central and Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (formerly SCCM)?
ManageEngine Desktop Central is very easy to set up, is scalable, stable, and also has very good patch management. What I like most about ManageEngine is that I can log on to every PC very easily a...
What do you like most about SCCM?
One of the standout features of SCCM is its application management capabilities. It allows us to create packages efficiently and deploy them to specific groups within our network. This streamlined ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Vicarius vRx?
I do not use other solutions, so I cannot compare its pricing to others, but its price seems okay.
What needs improvement with Vicarius vRx?
I would be happy if the patch update could be downloaded to the Vicarius server and then implemented on the client. Currently, they just send a link to the software. For example, if I want to updat...
What is your primary use case for Vicarius vRx?
We use Vicarius vRx to manage all third-party software updates. Previously, we could manage Windows updates, but third-party updates were an issue. It was difficult for us to manage the updates of ...
 

Also Known As

Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager, System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM )
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Bank Alfalah Ltd., Wªrth Handelsges.m.b.H, Dimension Data, Japan Business Systems, St. Lucie County Public Schools, MISC Berhad
Information Not Available
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