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Managing Macs at a distance with Fleetsmith
August 20, 2019

Managing Macs at a distance with Fleetsmith

Pax Whitfield | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Fleetsmith

We manage about 170 Macs across four states. It has replaced manual provisioning for new computers and OS imaging on re-issued computers and upped our security stance considerably.
  • Escrow of FileVault keys
  • Managing of common 3rd party software apps (Office, Zoom, 1Password)
  • Hardware reporting - battery, storage use, etc.
  • Zero-touch deployment of newly purchased machines
  • Handling of updates and/or communication about undeployed updates on Macs with limited storage space
  • I hope they're working on a way to do automatic macOS user account creation as part of a hardware 'refresh' when reassigning a unit from one staff member to another.
  • Easier/more customization options for deploying in-house and other custom softwares
  • improved security posture
  • painless application updates
  • zero-touch remediation of recent Zoom security issues
  • happier users
Fleetsmith is so excellent. It's only when we want to do something out of scope that I wish there were more options for customizations.
Responsive and friendly and helpful. I do sometimes wish I could call someone directly, but it's also rarely necessary.
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.
Fleetsmith is best for newly purchased machines being given to a single user. Excellent for portable computers. It's not as well suited to shared machines, computer lab or kiosk type scenarios, etc. Fleetsmith doesn't really manage iOS or tvOS, either, but if they added this functionality in a competitive way, we have a fleet of both that I'd consider moving!