Apple Business Essentials vs. Hexnode UEM

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

Hexnode was best suited for us to manage android devices and more specifically for Kiosk Lockdown and restrictions. Hexnode being a UEM offers support for platforms as well. It certainly does open doors for us to increase and take up more devices under the management of Hexnode. As said earlier, Hexnode does not support wearables as of now; would be great if they could start supporting them soon.

• 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

• Setting mandatory applications and the silent installation of enterprise apps.
• Hexnode integrates with the Apple Device Enrollment Program and Apple Volume Purchase Program, enabling bulk software purchases and device enrollment.
• Blocklisted applications would be uninstalled from the device and would not be available for download again.

• 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.

• We utilize a small number of Windows devices in addition to Android ones, however, Hexnode UEM has very few Windows-specific restrictions compared to those for other platforms.
• When we turned on the remote control, the Hexnode for Work app would periodically crash.
• We had to get in touch with their tech support to resolve the issue because the Multi app kiosk mode for Windows devices was not correctly pushed.

It works exactly as needed, no need to find another solution.

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.

UX is pretty good, but various screens are a bit redundant. Managing user and managing devices is often one in the same operation, but is broken across multiple screens. Device management policies are strange because if you make a "macOS" policy, why does it have all the Windows, iOS, Android etc options? It's unlikely you'll want all of these options for all possible OSes in one policy, but that's the only way to build a policy. Manage policy changes require remote system restart which is highly disruptive to employees.

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.

Online chat support is the best I have received from my vendors.

Incentivized

Follow the steps, and it will install very easy.

Incentivized

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

We previously utilized Miradore MDM for all of our tablets and management. We have since made the switch to Hexnode UEM and are migrating all of our tablets to it instead. We have saved money with this switch and we have been able to easily remove our tablets from Miradore and set them up within Hexnode UEM instead.

Incentivized

• 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

• We already had someone try to walk away with an ipad after deploying Hexnode, and we were immediately able to force an activation lock telling them to bring it back and they did.
• It has saved us a lot of time setting up ios devices as we have a limited amount of IT staff and Hexnode makes it take probably around ten minutes an ipad.
• Employee experience has improved since we can reset code remotely and they no longer have to send the ipads back to the corporate office to get reset.

Incentivized