Where the Enterprise App Catalog is the better choice
- You already license the Intune Suite (or will through Microsoft 365 E5) and want nothing outside the admin center and no third party in the chain.
- Your fleet is Windows only and the apps you need are in Microsoft's list.
- You want catalog apps as blocking apps in Autopilot's Enrollment Status Page without building them yourself.
- Microsoft hosting the installers matters to your security review more than publisher-direct downloads with hash verification.
Where PatchBee is the better choice
- You manage Macs: 1,300+ macOS apps packaged as PKG or DMG with bundle-identity detection, from the same console.
- You want updates to go out in rings with a delay between them, and a rollback when a build is bad. Microsoft's auto-update sends a new version to every targeted device at once and documents no rollback.
- The app you need is not in Microsoft's list. PatchBee's Windows catalog is the winget repository, scoped to business software, at 5,000+ apps.
- You want CVE and CVSS data on the queue and a fast-track for exploited vulnerabilities.
- You are on Intune Plan 1 and do not want to buy the Suite for app management alone, or you run under 50 devices, where PatchBee is free.
Using both
Nothing stops a tenant from doing both: Microsoft's catalog for the apps it has, as Microsoft-hosted packages, and PatchBee for macOS, for the long tail of Windows apps and for the rings and rollback. Keep each app in one tool, though: two deployments targeting the same app is the conflict Microsoft's own documentation warns about.
Sources
Intune Enterprise App Catalog figures are quoted from these public pages as read on 11 October 2026. Vendors change prices and features; if something here is out of date, tell us at contact@patchbee.io and we will correct it.