I'm the sysadmin at a small company with roughly 280 users. In my previous roles, I used Baramundi for hardware and software inventory, software deployment, and Windows patch management, but its cost is beyond what my current company can justify. We already use Intune for basic device management, though software deployments and patching feel frustratingly slow. I've tested a few alternatives, but each has been missing features I consider important. What affordable, reliable tools have you used successfully for inventory, software deployment, and Windows and third-party patch management?
4 Answers
PDQ Deploy and Inventory are excellent for on-premises Windows devices. The combined package is relatively inexpensive for a small team and is generally licensed by administrator rather than endpoint. If you need cloud-managed devices, PDQ Connect is their agent-based option, with pricing and features based on the plan.
You can also use Ansible with a few carefully designed playbooks for Windows updates and selected third-party applications. It can work well if you already have the skills and infrastructure, but you’ll likely need to maintain the application logic and testing yourself rather than relying on a large ready-made software catalog.
Action1 is worth evaluating, especially as a supplement to Intune. It has a strong third-party patch catalog, straightforward automation, and deployments tend to be much faster. The free tier only covers the first 200 endpoints, so you’d need to budget for the remaining devices at a 280-user company, but it may still be cost-effective.
Intune can handle patching if you organize updates into deployment rings—for example, a small test group, a pilot group, and then the wider production population. That approach improves safety, but it probably won’t solve the slow deployment experience or provide the same level of third-party application coverage as a dedicated patch-management product.
It’s more focused on patching and endpoint operations than a full RMM suite, but that can be an advantage if you mainly want reliable software updates and simple automations.