Absolute Visibility vs. Apple Business Essentials vs. Jamf Pro

I do think it is well worth the cost and consideration, especially if you are using it on devices containing electronic medical records, personal health information or personal privacy information or devices that contain proprietary information, critical business information or other information that needs to be securely protected. It can also be used to track a device (individual) as well if that is your goal. We use it as an extra precaution to track our mental health clinicians that do home visits. It allows us to keep track of their whereabouts, in case an issue arises at a client's home. We are able to send someone out to check or assist, alert emergency services or send law enforcement if a situation should arise.

Incentivized

I would recommend Apple Business Essentials manager to any organization that orders and uses iPads or iPhones on a large scale and wishes to manage them. Even if you do not intend on applying an MDM to your corporate Apple devices, it is nice for asset management and corporate application purchasing from a central location. If you do not care about any of those features, this functionality is not for you.

Incentivized

Well suited for any organization that wants to manage apple products. It's extremely easy to integrate and has many connectors for existing enterprise infrastructure applications. Certificate management is a breeze. Not so suited for smaller businesses that only have 10-20 devices. Jamf has another product called JAMF Now that would suffice for those areas.

• I tracked a stolen computer all the way to Africa from USA and disabled it.
• I set up geofences with alerts. As soon as a computer got a wifi connection outside of our fences it would email me its current location.
• Absolute's persistent technology was helpful. -Even when a pawn shop would attempt to "wipe" a device before getting it online, as soon as it got online it notified me of the OS re-installation and current location. We could call authorities and they could recover the device for us. And they were happy it made their job easier and deterred the pawn shop from reselling stolen devices.

Incentivized

• Ease of use to manage. Some other solutions can be a little hard to navigate. Fleetsmith is intuitive.
• DEP Enrollment is really nice. If you are shipping a laptop out to the user you can set their password and when they turn on their computer they will have access.
• Adding software to be pushed out. Pretty easy to do.

Incentivized

• Jamf Pro's Self Service is a great mechanism for making software available to end uses as they need it.
• Jamf Pro is also great for creating plans called PreStage Enrollments that allow for computers to skip many of the setup screens, as well as automating account creation.
• Jamf Pro in combination with Apple Automated Device Enrollment (formerly DEP) allows for devices to supervised and managed, this combination allows for locking, remote wipe of devices, and finding locations of devices when put into lost mode.

• I do not know where I would consider this product to be deficient in functionality, difficult to use or any major changes that needed to be addressed.
• I wish the pricing of this product was a little lower, but I do think it is well worth the cost and consideration, especially if you are using it on devices containing electronic medical records, personal health information or personal privacy information.

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.

• Training options are terrific, but costly.
• Finding what you need in Jamf Pro can be tough at times. The interface is not what I would call friendly.
• You'll need static credentials for Jamf Pro. They don't integrate with the Jamf Account, and it doesn't offer 2FA. SSO is an option, but it's not simple to set up.

We stepped away and are looking at different products that integrate with our entire fleet MDM solution rather than focusing specifically on Apple products. An all in one solution fits our needs better and is more cost-effective in the long run. Jamf Pro needs to improve some features and support but overall its a good product.

Incentivized

The installation steps are very easy and the UI for admin panel is user-friendly. Enrolment all based on Gmail accounts and the import function is there to fetch the user accounts. Navigating in Fleetsmith admin panel is simple and clean.

Incentivized

Jamf Pro has done pretty much anything we've needed with little setup headache. If we hit a wall, the Jamf user community and tech support departments both are more than willing to help solve problems. Tech support is excellent, but the surprising thing is the user base is by far the biggest resource. Jamf users love to help each other, by directly chatting about issues, posting best practices, or just posting info on the forums.

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.

Jamf Support is very responsive and usually assists in any challenge we are tackling. They are also very transparent when they are allowed to be. I personally love our Jamf Pro support rep and don't fear messaging their support team.

They made me more comfortable using the product.

The training session was beneficial because it expanded my knowledge about Jamf products and really learn what I am capable of doing with Jamf Pro in terms of managing Apple computers and devices. Immediately after the training course, I was able to implement what I learn to our cloud instance.

Migration from an existing MDM requires device wipe and reenroll for full supervision of the device. It's somewhat painful. User enrollment makes things easier, but you miss out on full management.

I have only used Absolute Data and Device Security (DDS). It was recommended by my Dell sales rep. After reviewing the product info, and loading a demo, it became clear that this is what was needed to add to our existing security to protect us from information loss due to a data breach on our portable devices. I presented this solution to the appropriate departments, and they agreed that this was something well worth the investment.

Incentivized

The primary products we checked out were Mosyle, JAMF, and SimpleMDM. In the end it really came down to the simplicity of our needs and the simplicity of Fleetsmith's approach being in tight harmony. We kicked the tires, hard, for about a month and then dove all the way in.

Incentivized

Even thought we are using this solutions for different purposes (macOS device management VS mobile device management), I think at the end Jamf Pro is more focused or aimed for macOS management, and mobile device management is just a good addition to that. Same I can tell about Ivanty, is more about iOS/Android management rather than macOS

• Recovery of stolen assets.
• After recovering a few devices and students becoming aware of Absolute being deployed, it had a prevention effect deterring additional theft.
• It deterred pawn shops from accepting our stolen machines.

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

• Jamf Pro has allowed us to minimize the time it takes to deploy devices. We can use zero-touch deployment methodologies which allow devices to go directly to end users and allow end users to get up and running without needing IT's help.
• We have implemented both a third-party & macOS patching service, which allows us to ensure all apps and versions of macOS are updated and secure.