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
Mosyle
Score 9.7 out of 10
N/A
The Mosyle platform manages and secures Apple devices and networks.
$1
per month per iPad & iPhone & Mac
Pricing
Apple Business Essentials
Mosyle
Editions & Modules
Fleetsmith Managed
$8.25
per device, per month
Business Plan
$1
per month per iPad & iPhone & Mac
Fuse Plan
$1.50
per month per iPad & iPhone & Mac
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Apple Business Essentials
Mosyle
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
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.
This is a great solution if you're a Google or Microsoft 365 workspace. SSO is a breeze to set up for users of the portal, employees and it works across the board. Other services have it as an optional addon that requires significant lift to set up. Mosyle has it as a checkbox. Click the box, sign in with an admin account, make a few other toggles and you're done.
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.
Price points. When they first started, they were definitely less expensive than other options. Now they are about in-line once you get to Fuse and compare to other options.
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.
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.
Easier to use and more capable than Meraki SM by far! More capable than Jamf Now. Easier to use than Jamf Pro and provides most if not all of the same features at a very competitive price. I'd recommend this to anyone new to MDM, or anyone considering moving away from an existing MDM setup
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.
When we were using Mosyle it was a joy to work with and use. I'd switch back if I didn't already have a full MDM environment up and running.
Mosyle development and support are responsive. When I first set this up, I made a feature request that I had ready for use within a 3-hour turn around.
