Apple Business Essentials is a subscription service that brings together device management, 24/7 support, and cloud storage. It enables small business to manage every iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TVs throughout the business.
$8.25
per device, per month
Kandji
Score 5.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Kandji is an Apple device management software solution for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS, from the company of the same name in San Diego.
N/A
Pricing
Apple Business Essentials
Kandji
Editions & Modules
Fleetsmith Managed
$8.25
per device, per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Apple Business Essentials
Kandji
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Free unlimited trial for up to 10 devices
Device Intelligence free for unlimited devices
iOS/tvOS devices free during beta period
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.
Kandji would be excellent for a company that has Mac fleets and is currently using Intune or Jamf as their MDM. Kandji is cheaper than Jamf and way easy to configure than Intune.
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.
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.
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.
Switching from our old MDM to Kandji: "We'll set you right up with an integration specialist" and it'll be "so easy." Greatly incorrect. The change took months and was a disaster at best. So many things I had to figure out that they never mentioned, or I had to keep going back to them to get more information. "Oh, we forgot to mention that!" - said about a dozen times. Also, I had to go to our former MDM to ask them how to do it because "Kandji can only help on the Kandji side of things - not the other MDM side." Well yes, but then don't make it sound like you can and will do that part in the first place!
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.
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.
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.
They promised us we could add devices as needed. I even had that written in an email. However, they rescinded that promise and required us to add devices in buckets of 50. That means, since we had 55 users, we had to pay for 100 licenses.
Password issues were made much worse by using Kandji instead of our old MDM (Hexnode).
Overall, Kandji created major headaches with laptop instead of improving.
