Apple Business Essentials vs. Scalefusion

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

There a few things I wish I knew before committing to this software. 1. If you plan to track locations of devices then it drains battery life of phones quickly, I had to reduce the location ping to every 15 minutes to mitigate the poor battery performance. 2. The built in mapping on the Scalefusion site is not very useful, you can only map one device at a time. I had to write an app to map all the devices onto one map. I offered to sell them my map, they did not reply and have since copied it, so now they have group mapping but it is not as good as mine. (no satellite view options and does not use google maps)

• 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

• Working on cloud. No physical device needed.
• Supports big number of devices.

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.

• battery life of phones is dramatically affected if location is used

We need this type of software, Scalefusion although clunky, it does function. And their prices are good compared to the competition. Note I have not tried the competitions software, just looked at their prices.

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

Installation is easy. There is a steep learning curve of what the software can and cannot do. It is also quite comprehensive, so the is much to absorb. The user interface is not intuitive, many setting are buried very deep.

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.

The support is quite good, usually you can get a response answer within an hour, however many issues take quite a while to resolve.

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

• 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

• Once we set up our device through Scalefusion we manage our devices from end to end. That's why it's cost friendly and easy to manage our environment.

Incentivized