Patch Management

[itguy77]

There are mentions on here and other forums of patch management and people trying solution but not a lot with costs or people going beyond trials, the problem is with a lot of these companies they want to present to you for an hour before they will give you a cost. Which may then be so much, you've just wasted an hour of your life. Not used any of these companies before, and its difficult to compare without loads of trials. So hoping for some insights from anyone who has used any of these, or any other products? I am also interested if you went for a more expensive end tool how you justified and felt it was better than cheaper alternatives.

We have around 4000 devices across the trust. We predominantly have Windows Pcs but some Macs but the priority is the Windows PCs.

 

PDQ Connect - £15 per license (this is their list price) - trialled the product and think its great, but at £60k to do all our devices i'd struggle to ever get the ok. I assume it isn't modular and while a lot of stuff in there is great i don't think i'd use.
PDQ Deploy looks fine at £1200 a technician, but we're starting to move to intune, so not sure it makes sense to go for an on-prem solution?
Action 1 - {REMOVED AT ACTION 1 REQUEST}, again probably does more than we need to.

Faronics Software Updater £3.40 per license

Patch my PC £2.60 per license 
ManageEngine I don't have a cost yet but trialled first and didn't love interface and it didn't deploy well

Thanks

 

Edited June 30, 2025 by ZeroHour
Action1 Requested pricing removal

[RobFuller]

Big fan of PatchMyPC, been using for many years with SCCM but now fully Intune. Load all my third-party apps via there portal also as find it easier and more granular. Support has always been top rate and they don't shy away from digging deep into issues that I would have assumed would have been out of scope so have always been impressed and reassuring to know a wealth of deployment knowledge I there, Mac OS support coming very shortly I see.

 

Might also be worth looking at the Intune Suite as Microsoft have their own managed application library now, license your techs and it enables the module to certainly do some testing...

[Olliedawg]

We use Action1.

 

They offer up to 200 endpoints free of charge, so you can trial this at no obligation

[altecsole]

We use PDQ Deploy for on-prem (PDQ Inventory is very good too), and Action1 for the limited number of laptops that are Intune only.

[dmj]

Ansible is opensource, but you can pay Redhat if you want. 

You can use it as a "push" model by itself, or as a "pull" model using Tower. 

Works across Windows,Mac and Linux.

 

https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/os_guide/windows_usage.html#installing-updates

[mavhc]

chocolatey, it's free

[nadeem]

Look at Robocopy  - they have a pricing calculator on their website

[FN-GM]

1 hour ago, dmj said:

Ansible is opensource, but you can pay Redhat if you want. 

You can use it as a "push" model by itself, or as a "pull" model using Tower. 

Works across Windows,Mac and Linux.

 

https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/os_guide/windows_usage.html#installing-updates

 

Products like Patch My PC are addons that automatically deploy application patches. I am not sure Ansible can do this out of the box?

[FN-GM]

We use Patch My PC - awesome application. Worth every $

[TwistedHelixis]

Tested loads out a few years ago and found Action1 to work perfectly for my needs. It does slightly more than just patching / deploying / updating, but not too much.

[pete]

Moves around a lot?  Action1 (or Jamf School for iPads).

 

Mostly stays in one place?  Currently WSUS.  Looking at winget update for Win11, but needs more thorough testing and investigation around reporting options.

[dmj]

5 hours ago, FN-GM said:

 

Products like Patch My PC are addons that automatically deploy application patches. I am not sure Ansible can do this out of the box?

If you have the patch it will deploy it, but it needs a package manager to know what patches to get, for windows patching it's already covered.

[MatthewL]

ManageEngine is good, great bit of software.

[StephenPink]

Currently trialling Action1. Been very impressed so far; as others have mentioned 200 endpoints free, forever - fully featured as well. 

I'm using it to meet Cyber Essentials compliance initially, and will likely then review further and potentially roll out across the college, then Trust. I looked at several others; most were similar sort of pricing (there were some outliers that were a lot more!) but the biggest thing with Action1 was the software repository - it had far more software in there that was relevant, than any others. Adobe Creative Cloud was hugely attractive.

 

Cheers

[George_ARO]

Always worth checking the supported applications - they vary massively.  Some will even offer support for custom apps (at a cost, of course)

 

We typically implement Heimdal with our Edu customers mainly due to price (50%+ saving) and the fact they can roll out patches super fast.

 

 

[itguy77]

Thanks for your suggestions. I have already tried PDQ Connect and Action1 and am looking at couple of others. 

I'd appreciate anyone who has gone beyond a trial with a product giving me an idea of the pricing you're paying by private message. Its disappointing that a lot of companies aren't more transparent about pricing and when I put something in an educational forum regarding price its censored. 

[mavhc]

Do you have a list of applications you want to patch?

[itguy77]

@mavhc its mostly your standard stuff that the likes of the basic products do, except Adobe creative cloud which isn't covered by the cheaper end products. 

[mavhc]

16 hours ago, itguy77 said:

@mavhc its mostly your standard stuff that the likes of the basic products do, except Adobe creative cloud which isn't covered by the cheaper end products. 

It's all so simple, compare version numbers, run installer, that paying for anything seems a waste of money, unless they're packaging stuff for you for free, so I just went with Chocolatey, once it's installed everything via an xml file then just running "choco upgrade all" as a scheduled task is pretty much all you need.

 

Unless you have 2000 machines and paying a flat site licence fee for something else

[Dos_Box]

On 01/07/2025 at 17:26, itguy77 said:

Thanks for your suggestions. I have already tried PDQ Connect and Action1 and am looking at couple of others. 

I'd appreciate anyone who has gone beyond a trial with a product giving me an idea of the pricing you're paying by private message. Its disappointing that a lot of companies aren't more transparent about pricing and when I put something in an educational forum regarding price its censored. 

We usually wouldn't remove pricing, but when we receive requests to remove pricing posted in the forums (it happens a every now and again) due to the quote being confidential, then we have to do this I'm afraid.
This isn't done for us, but to prevent members getting into hot water.

[itguy77]

Action 1 gave me a verbal quotation, which they said they'd send and never did. At that point I wasn't told it was confidential anyway. When I ended the trial and complained at lack of receiving written quote, I got it in an email with the word confidential attached, with no other terms. I didn't have a good experience with the trial, as when I deployed went slightly over the "200 free" and then I couldn't interact with the 200 free devices which contradicts how its meant to work. How they deal with trials and customers needs some work.

 

Contractually I have no agreement with Action 1, I have signed no NDA, and even if I had of got the email quote before I put any post up, because someone puts the word confidential in an email I don't believe is legally enforceable anyway - so I can't see there is any hot water to get into. And if there was, would it really reflect well on any supplier to be seen to censor posts in an educational forum and take educational establishments to court over something which *arguably* we should be able to share and shouldn't be a secret anyway. Personally I'd rather manually update all our products a year than buy from a supplier like this.

Again *arguably* the issue is that while its an educational forum I am posting in, there isn't any validation of who sees content and who is posting. 


 

[mavhc]

1 hour ago, Dos_Box said:

We usually wouldn't remove pricing, but when we receive requests to remove pricing posted in the forums (it happens a every now and again) due to the quote being confidential, then we have to do this I'm afraid.
This isn't done for us, but to prevent members getting into hot water.

Can you add "pricing removed because of request by <entity>"

[Cat_Jam148]

44 minutes ago, mavhc said:

Can you add "pricing removed because of request by <entity>"

 

I agree, I think it should be made as clear as possible when this has been requested. If a supplier is that petty regarding their 'confidential' pricing, I would not like to see how petty the rest of the company is.

 

I find it extremely helpful when costs are discussed as it helps put in perspective what we pay for licenses and equipment. At the end of the day school budgets are public money (in most cases), why shouldn't we be sharing what we are paying to make sure we aren't all being ripped off?

  

1 hour ago, Dos_Box said:

We usually wouldn't remove pricing, but when we receive requests to remove pricing posted in the forums (it happens a every now and again) due to the quote being confidential, then we have to do this I'm afraid.
This isn't done for us, but to prevent members getting into hot water.

 

It does trouble me a little regarding EduGeek that companies have the power to censor us on here... I know bills need paid, and that is done a lot by supplier sponsors, but it could be a slippery slope.

Edited July 10, 2025 by Cat_Jam148

[ZeroHour]

1 hour ago, Cat_Jam148 said:

It does trouble me a little regarding EduGeek that companies have the power to censor us on here... I know bills need paid, and that is done a lot by supplier sponsors, but it could be a slippery slope.

Its not actually anything to do with sponsorships, and we have pushed back a lot with companies in the past with these things, I just fear tech's ending up with the sharp stick if Y company goes OTT which is rare but has happened.

When this reoccurs we will try and do it differently if possible though. There is also a bunch of things coming soon to the site which may have an effect.

 

On a side note, I too hate it when companies dont publish even indicator licensing costs online.

[dmj]

7 minutes ago, ZeroHour said:

 

On a side note, I too hate it when companies dont publish even indicator licensing costs online.

Totally agree, we just had this (with unnamed company) who dragged us into four different meetings (that's a lot of engineers wages) and when pressed quoted us £200k. We were expecting half that, so the whole process was a colossal waste of time and money.