Casper vs Apple's profile manager

[kyoung]

Being new to Casper I would like users thoughts on Apple's profile manager vs using Configuration profiles in Casper. Does one or the other provide more capability or is easier to use etc...?

Thanks for any insight.

[kyoung]

I just got off the phone with my JAMF rep who said if I am starting from scratch Casper will probably provide an easier, more capable experience than trying to learn Apple's profile manager.

[RobertHammen]

There are two kinds of Profile Manager users...

Those that have had their Postgres database back end eat itself... and those that will.

I'm kidding, but have seen/had to fix many DB issues (which may or may not be caused by Server.app upgrades) for any client that has tried to do more than very basic things with Profile Manager. I have not had this experience using the JSS. If you already own Casper, no reason for most folks to reinvent the wheel.

[gskibum]

Robert is totally correct. Several times I've had the Profile Manager service go FUBAR - on baisic, simple servers that have never even had the service turned on!

Profile Manager is utterly fragile.

Tonight I rolled up my sleeves to find out why a Python process was running amok. Turned out to be a FUBAR Profile Manager, which had never even been enebled on this server. I reset it back to factory and all was back to OK.

[davidacland]

Same from me. The functionality is very similar in the profiles themselves, the extra flexibility comes with the smart group scoping etc that you get with Casper.

That being said, even if they were identical, Profile Manager is way too fragile for us to install these days. We used to deploy it a lot, but the number of repeat visits to fix it really put us off.

[nkalister]

I like to use profile manager as a profile generator, but even then I sandbox it inside a VM so it can't go crazy on my actual machine. Using it in production to manage devices would be madness.