Tanium vs. BigFix HCL
Tanium provides organizations an endpoint control plane that is fast and flexible enough to adapt to the demands of modern enterprises.
Why customers trust Tanium over BigFix HCL
Complete, real-time visibility
BigFix relies on outdated hub-and-spoke management architecture which is susceptible to WAN saturation and network slowdown. That severely limits how often you can communicate with your endpoints. Tanium’s distributed, linear chain architecture, on the other hand, can continually poll and provide data to your endpoints.
One tool with zero additional infrastructure and tooling
BigFix requires multiple intermediate servers to communicate with endpoints. That means maintaining extra infrastructure and additional third-party agents just to manage your existing estate. Meanwhile, Tanium lets you operate your entire estate without introducing additional agents or relay servers into your environment.
Single source of truth
BigFix specializes in traditional workloads and operations-focused use cases. Tanium offers a single platform for visibility and control of every endpoint, with solutions for operations, security, risk and compliance — allowing you to reduce complexity and manage risk with one solution, without additional agents or infrastructure.
Tanium vs. BigFix
Should you augment or replace BigFix?
| Is your priority… | Use cases | Replace BigFix with Tanium if you’re looking for... | Augment BigFix with Tanium if you’re looking to.... |
|---|---|---|---|
| Complete, real-time visibility across your endpoint estate in minutes vs. days or weeks? | Discover every connected asset within minutes with minimal WAN traffic | Accurate, timely visibility across every endpoint (servers, workstations, VMs, routers, etc.) | Identify assets that are not currently managed by BigFix agent |
| Manage every endpoint with the same, single agent | Manage traditional and ephemeral workloads (including containers) using the same agent | Manage endpoints that require specific MDM-based provisioning methods (MacOS, iOS, Android) | |
| Granular profiling and inventory of your entire managed and unmanaged endpoint estate? | Identify underutilized hardware and software to target for reclamation and decommissioning | Accurate, timely software and hardware usage data | Validate software and hardware usage data provided by BigFix |
| Performance monitoring across every endpoint | Monitor and alert on performance characteristics, including application crashes, CPU utilization and memory usage | Understand the experience impact on your endpoints for existing endpoint agents like BigFix and AV | |
| Profile devices not under management | Discover devices that have not been or cannot be brought under management in real time | Validate devices discovered by BigFix | |
| Remotely establish visibility into end-user devices and infrastructure | Gather real-time data from a user’s device to triage an incident | Initiate a remote session with BigFix combined with remote triage from Tanium | |
| Rapid, comprehensive control of your entire managed endpoint estate? | Operating system patching and software updating | Improving patch/software compliance numbers and reducing vulnerabilities more reliably and faster | Validate BigFix is not missing patches due to the way BigFix uses its own logic to determine patch applicability rather than the OS vendor’s |
| Deploying and updating software from pre-defined gallery | Reduce the person hours required to support ongoing software maintenance by leveraging packages built by Tanium for common software and updated as vendors release updates Automate software updates | Leverage Tanium pre-defined packages for software bundles not included within BigFix out-of-the-box | |
| Enabling users to manage software distribution timing | Leverage maintenance windows to define when endpoints are allowed to install software and/or reboot Provide Notifications and reboot postponement options to users Create self-service profiles with centrally managed approved software that users are allowed install without wasting a call to the service desk | Manage software distribution timing within global parameters established within BigFix | |
| Bare-metal imaging | “Build-room”, locally centralized bare-metal imaging | Distributed, subnet-based imaging | |
| Write arbitrary sensors and deploy arbitrary packages | Ability to develop custom content using native scripting languages | Validate scripts developed in proprietary Relevance language | |
| Server Orchestration | Configuration on a single endpoint | Server to server orchestration | |
| Client management with minimal end-user impact and zero incremental infrastructure? | Run agent-based scans for traditional endpoints without intermediate infrastructure (e.g., relay servers) | Cost and infrastructure savings while enhancing speed and accuracy with which you manage operations for traditional endpoints (e.g., servers, workstations, VMs, etc.) | - |
| Run credentialed scans against remote devices without introducing dedicated network scanners | Cost and infrastructure savings when scanning remote endpoints (e.g., routers, ESX environments, etc.) | - | |
| Leverage the same agent for all endpoint-related workflows | Minimize the load and the number of agents required to manage all your endpoints | - |