Kandji
Kandji combines a polished modern UI with prebuilt Blueprints and Auto Apps, optimized for in-house Apple IT teams that value design.
Verdict
// Kandji combines a polished modern UI with prebuilt Blueprints and Auto Apps, optimized for in-house Apple IT teams that value design.
Kandji’s pitch has always been: take a Mac admin who’s tired of XML and give them blueprints, Liftoff flows, and a UI that looks like it was made in this decade. Years in, it still feels good to use. The trade-off is rigidity — when the prebuilt path doesn’t fit your workflow, you feel the walls.
For an in-house IT team standing up Apple management from scratch, Kandji’s onboarding ramp is among the shortest in the category. The blueprint library covers most common configurations out of the box, and Liftoff makes zero-touch deployment feel like a finished product rather than a config exercise.
Kandji has been extending past pure MDM with EDR and vulnerability management modules, putting it in closer competition with Jamf’s bundle and Mosyle’s hardening tier.
Specifications
- Best for
- Design-conscious in-house IT teams
- Pricing model
- Per-device, annual; sliding scale
- Deployment
- Cloud-native (SaaS)
- Platforms
- macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS
- Founded
- 2018, San Diego, CA
- API
- Public REST API
Strengths and watch-outs
- Polished UX and onboarding
- Prebuilt blueprint library
- Strong auto-remediation features
- Less flexible off the blueprint path
- Pricing climbs at scale
Notable features
- Blueprint-based configuration
- Liftoff (zero-touch onboarding UX)
- Auto Apps (managed updates)
- Passport (cloud identity)
- Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
- Vulnerability management
- Self-service app catalog
- Custom scripts
- DDM support
- Public REST API