Jamf Pro vs. TrueNAS

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.

We have many TrueNAS units deployed and they've served us well everywhere. Our most common use case is using it as storage backing for virtual machines. We have Proxmox talking to it, as well as having it acting as the hypervisor. We've never lost data with it, even when faced with multiple disk failures. We've also always found the performance to be robust and able to handle the needs of our clients. Our clients range from libraries, to medium sized enterprises and we've always been able to make it work, and work reliably.

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• 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.

• iSCSI Datastores for virtualization.
• NFS store for unix storage or backups over networking.
• Very fast performance, sometimes outclassing SSD arrays even in NFS.
• The ZFS filesystem has given use much greater flexibility.
• Using their newer servers we could in theory scale to any height of required storage.

• 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.

• more graphical interface to admin features like plugins, jails, list are well but a tiles aproach will be better
• allow bulk upload/download/update to Groups or user accounts from SMB shares.
• some script language template featured to create/config/change/delete storage pools /dataset or shares .

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.

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The software has been amazing. It has saved me a lot of headache in the past few years. Also, it's nice to knowing that if any of our current Synology devices were to die I can have an iSCSI system up and running very shortly. I didn't give a 10 score because I find their support to be rather slow and pedantic. They test many things when the answer is right in front of them. The compute sytem (not storage) we purchased from them came with pcie gen4 nvme's. They didn't work, but rather than believe me about the spec's in the motherboard manual saying the onboard was pcie3 ONLY they shipped me 2 replacements until I showed them an old pcie3 device worked just fine. The part that rather frustrated me was the machine was claimed to have been tested / burnt in. How can this be true if the server won't even boot up into the BIOS?

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.

The software is fairly straight forward and if you mess up the network interfaces you can login locally at the console and fix any issues that you may have had with VLANS etc denying you network access. There was a little bit of annoying issues when setting up multiple network interface cards. Rather than keeping one interface setup with DHCP, when you add a second one with a new network it disables the first. Which makes it impossible to login again. However if you wait it will revert. I learned after works that you need to set up the network cards and then go back and setup the first one again and THEN test / apply. After that it was pretty good. The summary of the devices is very nice to. You get an accurate snapshot of how well your system is doing as soon as you login

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.

The support was responsive for opening cases. However I found solutions to simple problems took far too long. When we had a bad power supply and we had another with the exact same firmware version they should have sent replacement for both. We had to file another case for the other PSU that started dyeing the same week. They also had to do a lot of troubleshooting to replace the fans that were not behaving as they should. I'm not a home user. I know when certain things are failing and the silly hoops the jump through made it frustrating. However, once we finally got the problem identified we had parts shipped out via advance replacement which was nice.

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.

The implementation went well after we got the boot drive working properly. The device was setup exactly as i asked with the hardware except for the boot drive. The reason I chose 9 instead of 10 was the boot drive put us back about a week for the part to arrive. I ended up using a personal drive to show them that they were wrong sending use the gen4 drives.

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

I chose TrueNAS (upgrading from FreeNAS) because of the small footprint, ease of use, and reliability of the ZFS file system. The file sharing protocols supported as well as the intuitive interface all make TrueNAS a great choice for business and hobbyists alike.

• 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.

• Using a TruNAS integrated solution has reduced support overhead compared to using custom hardware.
• Being cheaper than full flash storage arrays, this unit allows for a good balance of speed with its use of SSD-based caching drives.
• The reliability of the hardware/software integration means I spend less time troubleshooting and more time doing business. Coming from a custom-built solution it is apparent that IX Systems has done some extensive testing.