Kandji

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.

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.

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.

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.