What is the difference between Hexnode MDM and Apple Profile Manager?

Profile Manager is Apple’s own MDM solution for managing Apple devices. In contrast, Hexnode MDM is a unified endpoint management solution that can manage not only Apple devices but also Android, Windows 10, and Fire OS devices.

These are some of the major differences between Apple Profile Manager and Hexnode MDM.

• With Hexnode, you can associate the policies to users, devices, groups, and domains. Profile Manager does not support associating profiles to domains.
• You can automate the device grouping using the dynamic group feature in Hexnode. Thus, the policy associated with different devices can be automatically altered based on the device’s movement inside and outside of the group. Profile Manager does not support such a feature.
• In Profile Manager, when a profile is associated with a device, the device is sent a notification to download and install it. And when the profile is associated with the user, it has to be downloaded from the user self-service portal. Whereas in Hexnode, the policy will get silently associated with the device or with minimal manual intervention.
• Using Hexnode MDM, you can fetch the location in real-time on Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows devices. The location history of these devices can be fetched and stored. With Apple Profile Manager, you can find the device location only by enabling the lost mode.
• Geofencing is a location-based service that lets you create a virtual fence around a geographical region and restrict the availability of corporate resources on mobile devices as it enters or exits the virtual boundary. This feature is not available in Apple Profile Manager.
• Hexnode MDM portal allows you to have multiple role-based admins. The user who signs up for the portal is the Super Admin. You can assign any of these roles to a new technician – Admin, Reports Manager, or Apps and Reports Manager. Apple Profile Manager does not support role-based admins.
• For easy installation of the required apps, Hexnode MDM provides a custom app store experience for the users using App catalogs. You can add app groups and individual apps to a catalog and provision them to different target audiences. Users can use this catalog as their enterprise app store. Profile Manager does not support deploying apps via app catalog.
• Profile Manager only supports the distribution of apps purchased through ASM/ABM and the custom apps. With Hexnode, you can also distribute the App Store apps along with the custom and ABM/ASM purchased apps.
• Apps like the store, web, enterprise, VPP, private, and managed Google apps can be deployed, maintained, and managed using Hexnode. Apple Profile manager only supports the deployment of in-house apps and apps available via ABM/ASM.