JumpCloud

What differentiates JumpCloud from other similar products?

It's a good (initially free) alternative to Active Directory for rolling out system policies. If you're a small business and can't afford or justify rolling out an AD server then JumpCloud is a great alternative.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

Policy management and grouping.

What do you dislike most about this product?

Policies can take a few attempts to be implemented.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

Give it a try on a small batch of PCs first before rolling out en masse.

What differentiates JumpCloud from other similar products?

We have a lot of Linux systems around the country that all need central authentication without custom or crazy software. All our other systems use Active Directory, so getting AD to work on Red Hat, CentOS, and Ubuntu in a repeatable format is next to impossible. This was three clicks and it's installed on a box forever. So easy! No other vendor has this that we found, and not for a company as small as we are with so few devices.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

The ease of use for local authentication on non-domain machines using domain credentials. Building domain integration for all of our devices all around the country was near impossible, but here we can get the best of Active Directory (authentication) without needing custom software or unusual packages on Linux. It only took us a few minutes to get the AD integration installed on our domain controllers, and a lot of that was picking the utility user/password we'd use to authenticate the integration. Once we had the user setup, we were able to get it installed and users were live in the cloud instantly.

What do you dislike most about this product?

They try to be a lot of things to a lot of people, but there isn't a good "basics" package just to get the authentication portion. We don't need an MDM and group policy interface. I also wish we could assign login permissions to AD groups instead of having to grant access to each person separately. I also dislike that the user account for integration is statically named and must be in the Users OU. Any groups that enable access to Jumpcloud also require you to create them in the Users OU, which makes it difficult to manage. We, like many companies, use OUs to hold our groups, our users, and our machines to make them easier to manage.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

Make sure you follow instructions on AD integration and install the agent on every AD server. We missed one and it caused major issues until we were able to go back and properly set this up with each domain controller. It is very simple once you do it the right way, and even alerts you if the agent goes out-of-date because of new patches. Since we're a GPO shop for deployment, the silent installer makes it simple to deploy to our AD controllers and stage as a part of our regular monthly maintenance cycle.

What differentiates JumpCloud from other similar products?

One of the biggest reasons we decided to purchase Jumpcloud was the ability to manage user accounts on MacBooks. At the time, there was no other cloud (or on-prem) directory that could give us that functionality. Since then, there have been many improvements made to the product and additional features released, making it better and better with every new version.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

Providing the ability to maintain a truly cloud-based directory for my organization has been crucial and we are able to utilize Jumpcloud for not only that, but for SSO, device management, and it even provides the ability to run scripts from a central location. This works very well in a Windows environment but it really stands out for those managing MacBook environments.

What do you dislike most about this product?

It can be a little difficult to reset MFA properly in this product, and a feature I'd really like to see is Jumpcloud allowing MFA to be utilized for device logins, not just Jumpcloud logins. We utilize Jumpcloud for our MacBook logins (among many other features) and would really love to make that login protected by MFA.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

If you're planning to utilize this product for SSO, definitely make sure your intended applications are compatible. Jumpcloud can integrate with a lot of platforms for SSO but it's still developing this capability so there are directories Jumpcloud is not currently compatible with.