Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs. Symantec Client Management Suite

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Ansible
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (acquired by Red Hat in 2015) is a foundation for building and operating automation across an organization. The platform includes tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation, and can automate resource provisioning, and IT environments and configuration of systems and devices. It can be used in a CI/CD process to provision the target environment and to then deploy the application on it.
$5,000
per year
Symantec Client Management Suite
Score 7.6 out of 10
N/A
Symantec Client Management Suite is designed to automate time-consuming and redundant tasks for deploying, managing, patching, and securing desktops and laptops so organizations can reduce the cost and effort of managing Windows, Mac, Linux, and virtual desktop environments.N/A
Pricing
Red Hat Ansible Automation PlatformSymantec Client Management Suite
Editions & Modules
Basic Tower
5,000
per year
Enterprise Tower
10,000
per year
Premium Tower
14,000
per year
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AnsibleSymantec Client Management Suite
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Red Hat Ansible Automation PlatformSymantec Client Management Suite
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Red Hat Ansible Automation PlatformSymantec Client Management Suite
Configuration Management
Comparison of Configuration Management features of Product A and Product B
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
8.4
44 Ratings
7% above category average
Symantec Client Management Suite
-
Ratings
Infrastructure Automation8.844 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated Provisioning8.541 Ratings00 Ratings
Parallel Execution8.940 Ratings00 Ratings
Node Management8.032 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting & Logging7.541 Ratings00 Ratings
Version Control8.738 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Red Hat Ansible Automation PlatformSymantec Client Management Suite
Small Businesses
HashiCorp Terraform
HashiCorp Terraform
Score 8.6 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
HashiCorp Terraform
HashiCorp Terraform
Score 8.6 out of 10
ManageEngine Endpoint Central
ManageEngine Endpoint Central
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
AWS Config
AWS Config
Score 7.1 out of 10
ManageEngine Endpoint Central
ManageEngine Endpoint Central
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Red Hat Ansible Automation PlatformSymantec Client Management Suite
Likelihood to Recommend
9.4
(108 ratings)
8.9
(14 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.1
(3 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Usability
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.7
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.3
(3 ratings)
5.0
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
8.6
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Red Hat Ansible Automation PlatformSymantec Client Management Suite
Likelihood to Recommend
Red Hat
It has helped save us so much time, as it was designed to automate mundane and repetitive tasks that we were using other tools to perform and that required so much manual intervention. It does not work very well within Windows environments, understandably, but I would love to see more integration. I want it to be sexy and attractive to more than just geeky sysadmins.
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Broadcom
Whenever you have computers that aren't easily accessible or you have a big site to cover (or multi location), Symantec Client Management Suite (CMS) is really great to manage all your computers, if it's for installation, software, licenses or even status. Setting up all you need from CMS can take some time, especially when you're in a multi-location site. We had to ask the Symantec engineers to help us a couple of times and set things up because even if we followed the documentation, it wasn't an easy task. But at least, the Symantec engineers are people that know what they do and they're really efficient at it.
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Pros
Red Hat
  • Debugging is easy, as it tells you exactly within your job where the job failed, even when jumping around several playbooks.
  • Ansible seems to integrate with everything, and the community is big enough that if you are unsure how to approach converting a process into a playbook, you can usually find something similar to what you are trying to do.
  • Security in AAP seems to be pretty straightforward. Easy to organize and identify who has what permissions or can only see the content based on the organization they belong to.
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Broadcom
  • Patch Management: We are able to easily deploy patches to all our workstations and accurately report on compliance.
  • Software Delivery: We do a lot of software deployments to our end users and with CMS we can quickly create policies or tasks to perform these deliveries and get quick results on our success or failures.
  • Inventory: Ease of use to get reports of what workstations have what software installed, patch levels, or hardware specifications.
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Cons
Red Hat
  • YAML is hard for many to adopt. Moving to a system that is not as white space sensitive would likely increase uptake.
  • AAP and EDA should be more closely aligned. There are differences that can trip users of the integration up. An example would be the way that variables are used.
  • Event-driven Ansible output is not as informative as AAP.
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Broadcom
  • More transparency with the roadmap would be a welcome change. New and upcoming features are usually a surprise until a major Symantec Event takes place but little is heard about those features before and even after, in some cases, leading up to a release.
  • Documentation for some items is poor. Especially around the Workflow product. It was intended that the documentation for the elements in a workflow would be crowd-sourced, which is a good idea, but in order for that to happen, more people need to be using it and taking the time to draw up the documents.
  • Cost. Its always a big topic, especially in higher-ed, but Symantec could do more to lower its costs for some product lines in order to gain more acceptance and support. If that was done and more institutions could get their student workers to use the product, once they leave college and go into the "real-world" there is a possibility that they would start recommending Symantec products because of their use in College.
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Likelihood to Renew
Red Hat
Even is if it's a great tool, we are looking to renew our licence for our production servers only. The product is very expensive to use, so we might look for a cheaper solution for our non-production servers. One of the solution we are looking, is AWX, free, and similar to AAP. This is be perfect for our non-production servers.
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Broadcom
So far so good - no major issues with that technology.
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Usability
Red Hat
the yaml is easy to write and most people can be taught to write basic playbooks in a few weeks
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Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Performance
Red Hat
Great in almost every way compared to any other configuration management software. The only thing I wish for is python3 support. Other than that, YAML is much improved compared to the Ruby of Chef. The agentless nature is incredibly convenient for managing systems quickly, and if a member of your term has no terminal experience whatsoever they can still use the UI.
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Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Red Hat
There is a lot of good documentation that Ansible and Red Hat provide which should help get someone started with making Ansible useful. But once you get to more complicated scenarios, you will benefit from learning from others. I have not used Red Hat support for work with Ansible, but many of the online resources are helpful.
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Broadcom
Support at Symantec isn't that great. Client Management Suite isn't even listed on the Support Portal when trying to open a ticket. Your best bet for support is actually the user groups that Symantec hosts. The members of the groups are usually very responsive. With Broadcom buying Symantec, I've seen a huge jump in personnel leaving Symantec, so I'm assuming the support is just going to get worse. Recently for a simple question, I reached out to 5 people just to find out 4 of the 5 had left the company.
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Implementation Rating
Red Hat
I spoke on this topic today!
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Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Red Hat
I haven't thought of any right now other than just doing our own home-brewed shell scripts. Command line scripts. And how does this compare? It's light years ahead, especially with the ability to share credentials without giving the person the actual credentials. You can delegate that within, I guess what used to be called Ansible Tower, which is now the Ansible Automation platform. It lets you share, I can give you the keys without you being able to see the keys. It's great
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Broadcom
Although there are other tools that can be utilized I don't believe those tools are as robust as Symantec Management Platform. The Symantec Management Platform was chosen because of the value it returns internally and for our customers. You can pull just about any data element from an endpoint and provide detailed reports or great graphs for the C-Level
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Return on Investment
Red Hat
  • Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform offers automation and ML tools that allow me to automate complex IT tasks.
  • Through automation analytics, it is seamless to gain full visibility into automation performance allowing me to make informed decisions.
  • Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform allows me to move rapidly from insights to action.
  • Creating and sharing automation content in one place unify a team in one place hence enhancing real-time collaboration.
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Broadcom
  • SMP allows us to centrally manage all of our endpoints with little to no end user interaction.
  • With the new P2P downloading our bandwidth constraints have been almost completely removed.
  • Cloud Enabled Management (CEM) allows our remote users to receive the same updates as in-network devices without the need for a VPN connection.
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ScreenShots