Apple Business Essentials vs. Jamf Now

Fleetsmith is well suited for companies with a lot of Macs, Mac minis, Apple tvs, etc., that are all over the place (different offices, states, countries, floors, remote employees, etc). It makes the management of these central where it would be almost impossible otherwise.

Incentivized

Anywhere with under 100 Apple devices, I would recommend this service. It was always so simple to add a device you recently purchased to your inventory and be able to check in on it anytime. If they had more than 100, I would recommend Jamf Pro, the enterprise version of this software.

Incentivized

• Fleetsmith does a great job of being unobtrusive on managed devices. After initial deployment, one might never know it’s there except when it prompts to enforce a software update.
• Fleetsmith has sensible defaults and relatively few decisions for the administrator to make; for most applications and configurations, it’s sufficient to enforce a minimum version. For more complex use cases, I suggest falling back on Fleetsmith’s ability to install tools such as Puppet and run arbitrary shell commands.

Incentivized

• Centralized inventory tracking.
• The ability to push apps to devices.
• Enhanced security by way of specific policies.

Incentivized

• We were told that this was in the works and it would be implemented at the beginning of the year 2019. That has still not happened and whenever we ask about this functionality we cannot get a good answer.
• Management of devices that are already in the field—we were told that in order to use Fleetsmith as we would like (pushing apps to devices) we would have to get each device and set them up from a Mac.
• Integration with Windows.

• UI can feel a bit messy to some
• Not great for a mix environment (Windows + Apple)
• Kind of a steep learning curve

Incentivized

It's very simple to use. Sometimes a little too simple, so it can be tempting to fiddle around or tweaks settings that might have annoying downstream impacts. But it's easy to rollback or disable changes anyway. My only wish is that each option set should have its own deeper explanation about the impact of the options on real-world users or security concerns.

Working in an environment with just macOS devices, Jamf Now is a great option. With Jamf Now, you get details with configurations that get down to the fine details of each device. Without Jamf Now, it would be a much bigger headache managing our Apple devices. Overall, this application makes our jobs much easier.

Incentivized

Fantastic support. I have had a few queries on how to go about doing things in the best way and the support at Fleetsmith was always very quick to reply and with excellent advice and detail to solve the problem and lead is into our best use of their product.

No body is perfect and occasionally, but rare, it take a little bit to get a reply on the chat, but overall as compared to other chat sessions it is pretty responsive and fairly quick. They allow you to upload a screen shot if that helps and to reply with solutions via email so I have it as a reference in writing for future problems.

I include Samsung Knox as a competitor in this field because you can have a similar setup with any Samsung devices purchased through a reseller as well. We have gone down this route for a few devices that have needed to be Android and the difference between the two platforms is night-and-day. Apple Business Essentials Manager is much easier to use and manage.

Incentivized

Jamf was easier to get started and set up, unfortunately since I also have a number of Android Tablets, I had to get IBM MaaS360 to manage them. I also prefer not having to pay for the whole year in advance for the tables as I have been working for about 3 months to get the Android tablets set up with MaaS360 but had to pay for all of them in advance and only have about half of them set up. Our Android tablets are in trucks on the road as part of their ELD's so I can only catch one when that truck is in for maintenance, but I still had to pay for the year in advance. Jamf makes it very nice as I just pay as I add a unit to the system.

• Lesser cost for managing device, instead of getting more manpower to do it manually.
• Lesser security threats (which will cause financial damage) as all devices are configured according the the company security policies, such as firewalls, media management, app security updates.

Incentivized

• One IT employee is able to manage 30 devices with ease.
• The price that we pay for Jamf Now is very reasonable, especially for the time it saves.
• IT can now concentrate on other tasks that time could be better spent on.

Incentivized