Kandji

Avantages

As a smaller company without a dedicated IT team, Kandji makes managing our fleet of Macs simple. Transitioning from our previous MDM was straightforward and Kandji gives us the advanced features we need. I really like the in-built templates which gives you a configuration which is aligned to specific security standard, which can then be customized as desired. This allowed us to get up and running in less than a day. The software itself also feels modern - this comes across in the user experience and ease of use, especially when compared to other MDM solutions.

Inconvénients

As a relatively new offering, there are some features I wish were present - one example would be being able to assign an application to a single device without having to create an entirely new blueprint. To thier credit the Kandji team have acknowledged this and seem really receptive to feature requests.

Avantages

The auto-app library makes app installation very simple. Custom apps are easy to set up and deploy as you would expect. Their support team is astounding. Their knowledgableable, effective, and quick! Using blueprints to group devices and deploy apps and settings is simple and straightforward.

Inconvénients

Kandji's method of deploying configurations and apps to devices is it's best, and unfortunately the most crippling feature. Blueprints can help organize systems but leads to some frustration when attempting to make a one-off commands. Creating views for your devices doesn't work as expected (although I'm told this is something they are working to improve). Auto-apps require installation if you only want to keep them updated (I'm also told a self-service option is in development that will resolve this).

Avantages

Kandji has taken the time to truly rewrite the underlying engine that is running their MDM and management tools, and it's easy to tell when you're using the tool. Utilizing modern development practices and cloud resources, Kandji is extremely fast at pushing out commands that you send from the dashboard, and the Mac client is fast, reliable, and helps enforce policies even when a computer is offline.

Other management systems that I have used extensively have extremely flaky clients on the computer and require that you do all of the work to make scripts to "self-heal" the client. I have never had to do that with Kandji.

The dashboard is really easy to use and allows you to do some incredibly powerful things with minimal training on Kandji itself.

Inconvénients

There are a few minor features that are available in most other MDM's that aren't available in Kandji yet, but for our use cases, they haven't been a very big deal. It is something to be conscious of when looking at the solution, however.

Additionally, in general, I like the "Blueprint" concept of managing devices, but there are some downsides. If we have a computer that needs one application that others don't, for instance, we have to clone the blueprint and move that one computer to a new blueprint. There's no way to apply a setting to only one computer. Then with the additional blueprints, when you want to make a change, you have one more place to remember to do it. I would love if there was a method of applying certain things based on a computer "tag" or something similar to help with one-off situations while still taking advantage of the good parts of blueprint based templates.

Avantages

The UI is extremely intuitive, and is obviously very UX driven. I've been using it for well over 6 months and have yet to have an issue.

Inconvénients

I literally have zero complaints about Kandji, but if I had to choose something, it would be nice if we could manage the handful of PC's that we have in our org (primarily a Mac shop).

Avantages

The setup of Kandji with G Suite defies belief when it comes to ease of use. Importing users took literally seconds with about 220 users. Setting up the Apple MDM certificates with Business Manager is about a few minutes (only limited by internet speed) but the true magic comes in when creating ones first Blueprint. And this is where one grasps the potential of the product as nothing can beat the UI, the speed and the simplicity. I had it up and running so quickly I thought I had forgotten something. This can be handled by first level employees with almost zero experience in the MDM arena. If they can use iTunes, they can use Kandji.

Inconvénients

There honestly is nothing I like least. I am looking forward for them to have an admin client for iOS but again, the website works so well in Safari, it’s not really required.