JAMF Pro vs. JAMF School

I started at our school the beginning of summer last year, when my tech coordinator decided to switch from Jamf Pro to Jamf School. I became the designated Jamf School guy to learn how everything works and get the configurations as close as possible. These are things that I have noticed from taking glimpses of Jamf Pro and spending almost a year with Jamf School.

Jamf School Pros compared to Jamf Pro:

• Cost (especially for MacBooks)
• In the cloud (Jamf Pro has additional cost for cloud, I believe)
• Less complicated interface (imo)
• Scripting module is available if simple scripting is needed

Jamf School Cons compared to Jamf Pro:

• Not as much control over MacBooks
  • Blocking specific apps is unreliable
• Seemingly lax development/support
  
  • There are a few major bugs we have had to work around
  • Still no recovery password option, leaving M1 devices vulnerable
• No easy way to migrate devices from Jamf Pro to Jamf School
  • iPads have to be wiped to migrate
  • MacBooks have to go through On-Device enrollment or be wiped like iPads
• Self Service (or Jamf Teacher/Student) isn't anywhere near as configurable

In my personal opinion, if you are a school larger than us (~1,200 student and staff devices) I would advise you take make sure you would be able to handle the migration itself. We still have a dozen staff with devices managed under Jamf Pro that "didn't see our emails" almost a year later.

And as for clarification on the bugs, we have not been able to successfully do a remote OS update on a device and have instead came to the decision of upgrading devices over the summer with AC2 for less headache. I am also working with support on fixing an issue with devices not getting scoped items when changing device groups after enrollment.

In the end, we're keeping it for the cost alone, as that was the major deciding factor in the first place. I consider myself to be a critical person, so maybe take this post with a grain of salt. I hope this was helpful!

That's a good question.  I'd be willing to bet there's others that have considered this too.

We have approx. 700 macOS computers and 5000 tvOS/iPadOS/iOS devices.

We use Jamf Pro for the macOS computers because of the ability for custom scripting primarily but also for the additional features.

We use Jamf School for all the rest because we don't need the additional features and because perpetual licensing is cheaper for us.  Jamf School has been good enough for what we use it for.

We are in education so that does influence the price too.