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
Workspace ONE UEM
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
VMware acquired Airwatch in 2014. Now from Omnissa, Workspace ONE is a Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) solution and is available in Standard, Advanced, Enterprise, and Advanced for VDI editions.
$3.78
per device/per month
Pricing
Apple Business Essentials
Omnissa Workspace ONE UEM
Editions & Modules
Fleetsmith Managed
$8.25
per device, per month
Standard
$3.78
per device/per month
Advanced
$6
per device/per month
Enterprise
$10
per device/per month
Enterprise for VDI
$20
per device/per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Apple Business Essentials
Workspace ONE UEM
Free Trial
Yes
No
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.
AirWatch is a great tool for large organizations that need to manage more than 100 devices. The product is capable of handling multiple platforms and is scalable to any size company. I would not recommend AirWatch to small companies, companies with minimal MDM needs or companies on a tight budget. It's the Rolls Royce of MDMs, it has all the bells and whistles and it's not inexpensive.
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.
Compliance policies are robust. One thing we have done is to keep our operating systems updated using the Airwatch compliance policies. We created a customized email from an Airwatch template and send notifications to users when they are not compliant.
Volume Purchase Program Integration allows you to purchase apps with a corporate credit card and push out licenses to authorized users.
Staging user allows minimal end user interaction. Only 2 inputs when we hand a corporate phone to an end user(device password & email password).
Secure Content Locker allows us to open and manage email attachments in a secure container.
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.
Web Console GUI. The GUI is a little outdated compared to other MDM providers like Meraki, and can be slow at times.
Overlapping Profiles. I wish there was a GUI interface to show similar profiles that are being appiled to the same user groups, or a best practices intervention that can show me if there is a better way to layout my profiles.
AirWatch Mobile Apps. I would rather have my employees utilize Google Chrome or Firefox on their mobile devices, but can't because they need to access internal content via the MAG. It would be nice if AirWatch could integrate these two items together. All of their mobile apps are sluggish too. Users complain that the Content Locker is not friendly to work with, but on the admin side of things it's great.
We've used it for 3 years and our contract is up later this year. We own the licenses, but we would have to either renew cloud services or bring the services in-house and install on servers here. We may want to see what's new in the marketplace that could be just as useful and cost effective.
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.
It works well for our environment and what we're using it for. It actually does more than we're currently utilizing, but I believe our needs will change in the near future and we could utilize more features.
Just in the past few weeks our staff has had several issues with the website. It is either taking a long time to load anything or we are not able to get in at all. This is very frustrating when you are trying to manage and enroll users. It was down 2 days in a row just this past week. Not good!
Went over the availability just a minute ago on the last rating. Don't use the reporting too much but will likely begin that soon. Integration with Active Directory doesn't seem to bog either system down.
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.
There is a separate portal for Workspace One + Chat function. The support is fast but sometime you need a little but luck that the right person is supporting your case. Case escalation is not really working.
AirWatch support was included and helped with every step of the implementation. They have their "university" with helpful documents and phone support 24x7.
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.
At the time (2017) the Microsoft solution wasn't fully cloud-native and you needed several tools to accomplish the same as Workspace ONE Unified Endpoint Management. This would have led to even more issues getting up and running as we had with Workspace ONE. Last year we made switched to Microsoft Endpoint Manager cause it presented an easier interface and was better suited to go with our business direction of Microsoft 365.
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.
We now have over 100,000 users utilizing AirWatch, and the organization is performing exceptionally well in providing services to both VIP users and the broader user base. The solution has greatly enhanced our ability to manage and support users effectively.
In terms of ROI, the organization is fully satisfied with the service AirWatch provides, and there are plans to explore more features from VMware in the near future. Our next goal is to leverage cloud-based services, which will further enhance our capabilities.
Having a solution like AirWatch in place always creates a positive impact within the organization, allowing users to benefit from the full range of services provided. However, based on feedback, some users are dissatisfied with the enforcement of certain policies required for enrollment. Previously, the process was simpler, with users only needing to enter their ID and password to access emails on their devices. The additional steps in the current process have caused some frustration.
