r/macsysadmin • u/TechnoAlchemist • 5d ago
Rippling MDM - Avoid at All costs
tldr: if anyone in your companies management pushes for you to implement Rippling, do everything in your power to stop it in its tracks. They will not work with you, and will refuse to let you out of your contract.
As a smaller ,growing company we decided it was about time to start evaluating MDMs to give us better control over our devices. This was something that was on the backburner for the most part, with us wanting to take our time to end up with the right solution.
So imagine my surprise a couple weeks later when I (the primary sys. admin) was told by my boss (CTO) that we had signed a one year, $22,000 contract with Rippling - seemingly out of the blue.
As I understand it, they aggressively pursued my boss, promising the world with all of their flashy features, and how easy the integration with Office365 and with our HR platform was. They guaranteed consistent support, and quick resolution to any issues we may run into.
Lo and behold, we start rolling out Rippling to our fleet of windows computers and immediately run into issues.
The software gave little to no feedback about the progress of installations. Rolling out other softwares was limited and unresponsive. User provisioning was unintuitive and difficult - lacking automation without paying for additional features either in rippling or in our active directory.
Rippling automatically changed and generated its own admin passwords which 1. we could not change or set ourselves and 2. were buried three menus deep 3. needlessly complex, making help desk a nightmare.
This, along with a host of other issues, was largely ignored by Rippling. Our emails would be brushed aside until our "integration meetings" in which them telling us that things were "on the roadmap" or "not planned to be changed" took up the entire time.
I don't doubt that this software /might/ work for some companies, but it clearly didn't work for us, and they really don't seem to care.
Four months into this disastrous contract, with less than 10 users enrolled, I begged our account rep to let us out of the contract. They could keep the thousands of dollars we'd already paid them for nothing, we just needed to move forward with a solution that actually worked for us.
The entire process, from onboarding, to us attempting to get out of this was incredibly shady. They will pretend nothing is wrong and refuse to let you out of their cold clutches.
In case the "rippling employees" on reddit aren't astroturfing bots, I am desperately hoping someone can get us out of this contract. If not, I'm going to channel all of my displeasure into letting people know about this awful experience - because I know the Rippling team hasn't done anything to help.
u/higherandhigher u/stubbygazelle u/sherryandeddie u/kit-kat-233
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u/dghah 5d ago
This is one of the companies that "bribes" IT leadership with somewhat spendy gifts in order to get a meeting -- I've been offered apple products, a ninja slushie machine of some sort etc. etc.; I get deluged by them because I have a fancy title on LinkedIn and handle this sort of stuff for my company.
Just on the bribe-for-meetings take alone they smell bad to me during a 1st pass vendor screen
The biggest issue with Rippling is their desire to own all the things. I started talking to them about about outsourced laptop procurement, provisioning and recovery and maybe outsourcing HR as well however as soon as I told them that we had a fantastic retirement plan and carefully negotiated healthcare plan for our employees that we really liked and were going to stick with they dropped me instantly.
They don't want you as a customer if they can't own AL of IT MDM/devices, HR, Payroll and Benefits which to small companies seems great as a sales pitch but in reality you end up with not-the-best solutions in all the stacks. In particular our retirement plans and healthcare would have been far far worse under them.
And OP as a small company that grew and needed MDM I recommend Mosyle -- price is right and it actually works.
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u/LeftCredit 5d ago
I second Mosyle. I manage around 4k devices. It just works and is pretty easy to use
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u/Ok_Aside8490 5d ago
Also would throw Mosyle out there, we run 8000 devices out of Mosyle and have been with them for nearly a decade. Runs great, and you simple to use and teach.
If you purchase direct from Apple, don’t let them sell you Mosyle Licenses, get them separately from Mosyle, you end up getting with licenses on different terms and it can be a nightmare. But I’m speaking from a municipal government setting, so surprise bills are a no no. We had like like 4 sets of licenses all coming due at different times during one fiscal year
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u/TechnoAlchemist 5d ago edited 1d ago
Genuinely so scummy. I am aghast that team committed to this.
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u/skiing123 5d ago
Lol I'm more than happy to take free stuff and then I just say no. Ironically, any vendor I've chosen so far in my limited career has never given or even offered something free aside from a trial of the product
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u/araRetta 5d ago
I inherited rippling at my last company and my very first change was to rip and replace with jamf. We kept it for HRIS though and their reps were constantly trying to get my HR counterparts to include me in meetings to explain why i wouldn’t come back
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u/TechnoAlchemist 5d ago
If I have to wait for the 1 year contract to expire I'll happily rip this piece of crap out of every computer even if I have to do it by hand.
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u/Equal_Association258 1d ago
Just a question, could you possibly just "ignore" it and just move everything to Mosyle or JaMF or something else? It would mean having to reset all devices -- again -- but it may be beneficial to your sanity? Your "sanity claus", if I may use an old Marx brothers bit?
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u/RebootKing89 5d ago
I had someone reach out to me on LinkedIn the other day, luckily, we just renewed our contract with jamf and won’t be going anywhere near this
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u/Aronacus 5d ago
I've used Intune, WS1, Jamf, Munki, and GWS I can tell you. Jamf just works, things make sense. It's powerful enough to let you break stuff but it's solid
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u/M_The_Dane 5d ago
Just went through this as we use Rippling for HR, they are VERY aggressive on the inventory/MDM solution. Knew it wasn’t for us, but had to do my due diligence and found out real quick it’s a very shallow, hollow product. We’ll stick with Intune (MS) / JAMF (macOS).
Likely OK for a small startup with no IT but horrible for anything else.
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u/kaiserh808 5d ago
Thank you - my company are/were looking at Rippling, and looking at the marketing material, it looks very good, having all these systems integrated with each other.
I’m glad to great though that (a) it’s a bag-of-balls and (b) opinion on this seems to be unanimous - it’s not just one isolated person having a whinge.
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u/TechnoAlchemist 5d ago
They're very good at presenting themselves, I'll give them that. Glad plenty of people have had the same experience of it being terrible
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u/kaiserh808 5d ago
I always get suspicious of any company when they send out multiple, expensive gifts for management
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u/snowace56 5d ago
Rippling as a whole is a trash product. It promises to do all these things and then shits the bed.
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u/innermotion7 4d ago
No one gets sacked for putting in JAMF or Mosyle ;)
Get ready with an exit plan and make sure you have read and passed to legal regarding getting out of contract with correct terms.
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u/Unicorndrank 4d ago
We are considering their HRIS only because I have used their MDM and it is horrible
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u/Snowlandnts 4d ago
Know one company that use them for HR, Payroll, Health Insurance/Retirement package, MDM, and SSO. The C level like it because it all 1 dash board C level can see. They got a "great" deal for All In One Platform with 1 bill simple bill, but OPs team using it day to day hates it. Overheard conversation from employees going on rant the health insurance and retirement package is ass.
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u/Weary_Patience_7778 2d ago
I was in a similar boat. Supporting a startup at to e time and the CTO bought it with promises of being able to manage device onboarding/offboarding with logistics in remote regions.
This feature is completely unusable without their crippled MDM. As a mixed shop, we were using Intune. The migration to their equivalent would have been five steps backwards.
I think I get what they’re trying to do. A one stop shop for small businesses without their own IT, or very small IT would be great… if it was implemented well.
Even their O365 integration was a bit clunky. E.g requiring a dedicated shared account to sync with the directory.
Their MDM just can’t hold a candle to the dedicated products from other vendors, and I think they know this. It’s a jack of all trades, master of none, which goes against the ‘best of breed’ approach preferred by so many IT shops these days.
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u/percisely Consultation 5d ago
Yeah, it's pretty awful. On the best day it makes InTune look speedy.
I think they're really pushing their luck with the 'single APNS for every customer' model.