Kandji vs Jamf - Apple MDM Solutions Compared

Although Kandji and Jamf Pro both receive high marks for customer satisfaction, G2’s overall appraisal is that, “When assessing the two solutions, reviewers found Kandji easier to use, set up, and administer. Reviewers also preferred doing business with Kandji overall.”

And while Jamf Pro’s overall score is no doubt helped by its legacy position as a market leader, Kandji’s innovations seem to give it an edge with Apple MDM customers.

Worth noting: The largest sector of G2 reviewers for Jamf Pro are educational institutions with more than 5,000 devices. By contrast, the largest sector of G2 reviewers for Kandji are software or technology companies with between 50 and 5,000 employees.

In the head-to-head comparison with Jamf Pro, Kandji really stands out for ease of use. Built from the ground up to provide a modern and native Apple look and feel, Kandji was designed with an eye on the ways Apple users and admins like to work. Creating configurations, specifying settings, and managing apps can all be accomplished with a few clicks, rather than complex scripting.

One example: Blueprints. You create a Blueprint, populate it with Kandji Library Items, and assign devices to it. No need to spend days or weeks scoping endless policies and content for your devices.

In Jamf Pro, you can do almost anything you want—if you’re willing and able to put in the time to spin it up yourself. For example, you can create a policy to install Adobe on devices in a certain group, then build a dashboard to display a pie chart of how many Mac computers have received the Adobe apps. But you need to know what you want to see and then create it yourself. 

Kandji, on the other hand, doesn’t try to overwhelm you with data. It shows you small, focused dashboards that give you the data holistically. So if you want to know what Library Items have been installed, you don’t have to create a dashboard; instead, you click over to the library item in question and see there what’s been installed. And you don’t need a dashboard to see which computers have FileVault enabled or not; Kandji automatically remediates devices on which it’s not enabled. That said, if you do want to create customized data workflows, the Kandji API is there.

The code for Jamf Pro has been around for almost 20 years, with a legacy architecture. (For example, it was originally on-premise only, but now is also cloud-based.) Jamf’s products have evolved to a great extent through acquisition and integration, rather than building products from the ground-up with a consistent philosophy.

By contrast, Kandji operates with an agile, cloud-native architecture born out of the pain points that many Mac admins face when struggling to achieve and maintain a desired state with Jamf Pro. Kandji saw a clear opportunity to lead with a new approach to MDM.