Automox is an endpoint management platform built for the era of autonomous operations. It provides a cloud-native foundation that unifies automation, speed, visibility, and trust.
$1
per month per endpoint
Progress Chef
Score 6.5 out of 10
N/A
Chef IT infrastructure automation suites were developed by Chef Software in Seattle and acquired by Progress Software in September 2020. The Chef Enterprise Automation Stack is an integrated suite of automation technologies presented as a solution for delivering change quickly, repeatedly, and securely over every application's lifecycle. The Chef Effortless Infrastructure Suit is an integrated suite of automation technologies to codify infrastructure, security, and compliance, as well as…
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Pricing
Automox
Progress Chef
Editions & Modules
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Automox
Progress Chef
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Automox can patch macOS, Windows, and Linux endpoints with PatchOS, an offering at $1 per endpoint/ month with an annual commitment.
The Automate Essentials or Automate Enterprise packages are for scaling IT automation, endpoint configuration, and software updates.
Modules are available with Automox Assist, a one-on-one remote endpoint control and assistance for helpdesk technicians.
Every organization would work better with Automox on board. It not only approaches patch management as a whole, but also ensures that our third-party applications are secure against all vulnerabilities. It ensures that we keep track of all software and hardware in our OS. As a health tech company, we cannot overemphasize the need for Cybersecurity compliance.
Chef is a fantastic tool for automating software deployments that aren't able to be containerized. It's more developer-oriented than its other competitors and thus allows you to do more with it. The Chef Infra Server software is rock-solid and has been extremely stable in our experience. I would definitely recommend its use if you're looking for an automation framework. And it also offers InSpec which is a very good tool for testing your infrastructure to ensure it deployed as intended.
There are some applications that updates to the wrong version causing Channel version issues, this then needs to be excluded from the policy and updated via a script.
Certain software like NET. is not updated
The worklet / remediation / evaluation system is not always effective, does not work all the time. Needs to be very detailed for it work.
Chef could do a better job with integration with other DevOps tools. Our company relies on Jenkins and Ansible, which took some development and convincing for plug-ins to be created/available.
It would be nice if kitchen didn't only have a vagrant/virtual-box prerequisite. Our company one day stop allowing virtual-box to run without special privileges, and that caused a lot of issues for people trying to do kitchen tests.
Chef could use more practice materials for the advanced certification badges. There was not a lot of guidance in what to study or examples of certain topics.
This is a software that just works. Once configured its a set and forget kind of tool that keeps things up to date and alerts me if something is wrong. I was able to work through an expansion project to deploy an additional 500 devices in almost no time and create a robust self-patching environment.
It's great at what it does. We're able to veiw endpoints that are online in real time, and run scans on them to ensure they're still compliant. The software itself is very easy to use and set up on end points, with the main admin portal having a clean and very easy to understand set up
The suite of tools is very powerful. The ability to create custom modules allows for unlimited potential for managing all aspects of a system. However, there is pretty significant learning curve with the toolset. It currently takes approx 3-4 months for new engineers to feel comfortable with our implementation
It loads quick enough for basically all our systems. Because we have this for local dev environments, speed isn't really a big issue here. Yes, depending on the system, sometimes it does take a relatively long time, but it's not an issue for me. One thing that is annoying is that if I want to make a small change to a cookbook and re-run the Chef client, I can't just make the change in the cache and run it. I have to do the whole process of updating the server.
I did not need to reach out to support often but when I did the answers were relatively correct and they were answered quickly. The only thing I might "ding" their support on was their lack of understanding of OS's different from Windows and especially Linux. Other than that I was satisfied
Support for Chef is easily available for fee or through the open source community as most the issues you will face will have been addressed through the Chef developer community forums. The documentation for Chef is moderate to great and easily readable.
Implementing Automox successfully starts with a clear strategy for organizing and grouping devices based on operating systems, environments, or business criticality. This ensures that patching and configuration policies can be applied with precision. A phased rollout approach is essential—beginning with a pilot group allows teams to test patching schedules, reboot behaviors, and custom Worklets before scaling across the organization. Leveraging Worklets from the start can significantly boost automation by enforcing security baselines and performing routine system tasks. Integration with existing SOC tools, such as SIEMs, enhances visibility and response time by correlating patch compliance with threat intelligence. Additionally, aligning patching schedules with operational downtimes minimizes disruptions, and consistent monitoring and reporting helps maintain compliance and prepare for audits. Overall, Automox offers a streamlined and effective solution, but its true value is unlocked through thoughtful planning, testing, and integration with existing IT and security workflows.
We felt that Automox provided us with the functionality our MSP offered, including OS and device patching, as well as remote control capabilities, but in a better and more manageable way. We also felt the usability of the tool gave us the ability to be effective in our way of working, as well as integrating with Rapid7 was a massive benefit for us.
We considered the three leading competitors in the field: Chef, Puppet and Ansible. Ansible is a very strong competitor and has a nice degree of flexibility in that it does not require a client install. Instead the configuration is delivered by SSH which is very simple. Puppet seems like it has fallen off the pace of the competition and lacked the strong community offered by Chef. We chose Chef because of the strong support by the company and the dynamic and deep community support.
The entire professional services team was great to work with. The curriculum was tailored to our specific use cases. The group we worked with were very responsive, listened to our feedback, was very easy to schedule and accommodate. I cannot say enough good things about our professional services experience
Chef is a good tool for baselining servers. It will be a good ROI when there are huge number of servers. For less number of servers maintaining a master will be an over head.
One good ROI will be that the Operations Team also gets into agile and DevOps methodologies. Operational teams can start writing scripts/automations to keep their infra more stable and their application stack more reliable.
Implementation of Chef eliminates the manual mode of doing things and everyone aligns to automation mind set. It helps in change of culture.
