Apple Business Essentials vs. JumpCloud

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

JumpCloud is least suited in situations where you have few devices, but lots of users. JumpCloud heavily focuses on the "One-User-One-Device" type of use, and does lack some of the features things like Active Directory is better suited for when having multiple users accessing one machine. Their Powershell APIs are fantastic and getting only more powerful. Lots of features are hidden behind these APIs, so admins not as familiar with Powershell would have more issues leveraging these tools. BYOD deployments are amazing, especially for macOS devices that are using Apple Business Manager and can leverage Zero Touch deployments. It is especially good at handling mixed systems, whereas other options, such as Jamf, are really suiting only for macOS, or Intune is more suited for Windows; JumpCloud managed to handle both systems well.

• 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

• User Management - The ability to control our users and set password/polices is made easy in the JC console
• Device Management - Using JC each user is assigned to their own device with only the rights to do their job - When elevated rights are required, this is done simply via the JC console for the period of time required
• SSO - Using JC's SAML SSO integrations we are building out our SSO offering and this is making for a much simpler daily user experience

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.

• SSO via OpenID - Opening up their SSO from just SAML to including OpenID (OAuth) would allow us to make more use of the service and to also incorporate it into some internal testing suites
• Time Limited User Elevation - The ability to time limit a users elevation of privileges would be a great addition
• Extending device management to include LPA - Least Privilege Access is becoming a bigger ask from our external auditors - Being able to do this via JC would be amazing

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.

It's simple. I like how JumpCloud keeps things simple. Similar to Apple's ecosystem, they give you what you want with some extra features and bells and whistles but it doesn't take a large instruction manual to use it. They have the support system and KB articles to back up their product and learn about a feature and how to implement it

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.

We have their premium support. Not only is the support great, but our SAM / Account manager directs any questions or updates to the proper channels and gets us the needed info and solution quickly. Due to this, we find JumpCloud to exceed our expectations and puts us at ease that our Foundation Tech Solution is VERY reliable.

Incentivized

Being responsible for choosing the product after a POC and pilot we found the process to be simple and effective

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

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

• Very easily add, or disable employee logins
• Reduce "password fatigue" by being able to reduce password expiration requirements, and having single sign on
• Higher security and visibility of security issues
• Reduced onboarding time from days to minutes
• Enabled easy reassignment of user accounts to another user via groups when employees leave
• Quick securing of terminated users, or otherwise compromised accounts
• Reduced user disablement time from previous manual methods requiring days, to literal minutes