Hexnode vs Intune for Indian field teams: a 110-supervisor Ahmedabad bake-off

Three weeks into running Hexnode vs Intune for Indian field teams in parallel, we hit a wall no deployment plan had warned us about. The supervisor on the Naroda site had been enrolled twice. Once on Hexnode in pilot week, once on Intune the week after. He was logging into both kiosks. Neither of us on the IT side had the full picture of what he was actually using to clock in.

I am Arjun. I have lived through three field-MDM rollouts. This Ahmedabad bake-off of Hexnode vs Intune for Indian field teams is the cleanest comparison I have run on the ground, and the answer surprised me.

The setup: a 240-person facility management company in Prahlad Nagar, Ahmedabad. 110 of those people are field supervisors covering 38 client sites across Gujarat. They check in, photograph the shift, log housekeeping rounds, raise tickets when an AC tonnage drops or a lift card-reader stops reading. The handheld for that job is a rugged 8-inch Android tablet. The buyer ask was one line. “Pick the MDM. Don’t make my life harder.”

Why we ran Hexnode vs Intune for Indian field teams in parallel

Most comparison content is a feature checklist. Both vendors do enrollment, kiosk, app deployment, remote wipe. The checklist will not tell you which is right for a 110-supervisor facility-services fleet on Android handhelds on patchy 4G across Ahmedabad and Surat.

The pilot window was 90 days. Procurement wanted a recommendation by Day 60 with 30 days for steady-state rollout. So we did what we tell every IT head to do and what almost nobody actually does. We ran them in parallel on real users, in two separate Ahmedabad zones.

Zone A was 14 supervisors covering 5 sites in the eastern industrial belt around Naroda and Vatva. Hexnode UEM ran the show there. Zone B was 12 supervisors covering 4 sites along the SG Highway corridor. Intune ran the show there. The remaining 84 supervisors stayed on a basic Android device-policy app while the pilot ran.

The setup week each MDM cost us

Hexnode was live on Day 2. We had picked it for Android-only per-device pricing well under the Microsoft equivalent on a kiosk use case. Enrollment QR generated Day 1, tested on one device, rolled to 14 supervisors Day 2 by their area manager. The kiosk-mode lockdown to two apps (shift log plus camera) took an afternoon. The supervisor cannot reach Play Store, Chrome, or settings without an admin PIN, which is what the operations head wanted.

Intune took us seven working days to a comparable state. Not because Intune is harder. Because Intune lives inside the Microsoft 365 tenant, and getting Android Enterprise wired up through the Managed Google Play work account, with the right enrollment profile and the right compliance policy and the right conditional-access exemption for a kiosk device with no real user, is six steps in three consoles. Bhoot of an old test profile from the previous IT vendor was still hanging on, and it took a 90-minute call with Microsoft support on Day 5 to clear it.

Once up on Day 7, Intune ran. The integration into the back-office Entra ID identities and M365 group membership was the cleanest I have seen across any MDM. Hexnode had been faster to first enrollment. Intune was about to win the second half.

What broke on the floor in Weeks 3 and 4

Week 3 was when the Hexnode side hit its first jhamela. Two supervisors at the Naroda site reported that their kiosk had unlocked itself overnight. The cause turned out to be a policy-sync timing issue when the device sat on Wi-Fi at night but lost it before the morning shift. The Hexnode support response was fast, on a chat-and-screenshare in under three hours, and they had us patch a tertiary policy that locked the device when network changed. Solved by Day 24.

Intune in Week 3 was quietly fine on the kiosk side. But the audit trail surprised both of us. Each device action, each policy push, each non-compliance flag, was timestamped in the Intune console with the Entra ID identity of the admin who made the change. That is the report the DPO had been asking for since the pilot started. Hexnode does log actions. Intune logs them in a format the auditor was already used to reading from the back-office M365 estate.

By Day 30, the operations head had a working pilot on both. By Day 45, the DPO had a question that I had not anticipated. “Which one of these gives me one trail across the field tablets and the head-office laptops?”

The split-fleet decision the CFO actually signed

I came in convinced Hexnode would win this. Faster setup, lower per-device cost, kiosk-mode that felt natively built for the use case. The numbers backed that read for the field supervisors. For 110 field supervisors, Hexnode worked out cheaper by Rs 680 per device per year on indicative MOP for a 110-device three-year commit.

Then the DPO talked to the CFO. The back-office estate, 130 area managers and admin staff, was already on M365 Business Premium. Intune was included in that licence. The DPO did not want two MDM consoles, two policy languages, two audit exports. She wanted one.

The decision arrived at on Day 56 was not the recommendation I walked in with. We split the fleet. Hexnode runs the 110 supervisor tablets. Intune runs the 130 back-office laptops and the area-manager Android phones that need conditional access into Outlook and Teams. Both MDMs feed a single DPDP device register the DPO maintains in a SharePoint list, with device ID, custodian, classification of data the device touches, and date of last policy sync. The auditor reads one register. The CFO signed on Day 58.

Indicative prices reflect the three-year quote we received on a 110-device commit. Intune Plan 1 standalone is the right comparison if you do not already have M365 Business Premium. If you do have it, per-user Intune cost is effectively zero on the M365 side, which is why the split made sense here.

What I would tell future Arjun about this MDM call

Future Arjun, if you are reading this: ask the DPO question on Day 1, not Day 45. The right MDM for a field fleet is not the cheaper one or the faster-to-enroll one. It is the one whose audit trail and policy console the people who already use a console can read without a relearn week. For a facility-services client whose back-office runs M365 Business Premium, that is Intune. For the field-supervisor handheld where M365 is overspecced, that is Hexnode. The honest answer is often a split. Two consoles. One register. Bas, you have to be willing to defend the split to procurement and to whoever in IT will inherit your seat in 18 months.

Achha, two more things I wish I had known earlier. Pilot with the area manager who hates new systems, not the tech-friendly one. He is the one who will catch the policy-sync bug at 6 AM on a Tuesday because his supervisor cannot clock in. Arre, you want that bug found in pilot. And write the device register before you pick the MDM, not after. The register is the DPDP artefact that outlives the contract.

This bake-off ran January through March 2026. The split-fleet decision has been live for ten weeks and the operations head has not called me with a fire. For an MDM rollout, that is the closest thing to a win I will accept.

FAQ

Can we use Intune without M365? Yes. Microsoft Intune is sold as a standalone Plan 1 licence at indicative MOP of around Rs 1,700 per device per year on a one-year commit. The standalone Plan 1 covers device management, app management, and basic conditional access. Most kiosk field fleets land cheaper on a dedicated Android UEM.

Does Hexnode meet DPDP audit requirements? Hexnode supports the policy controls, audit logs, and device-register exports that a DPDP audit will ask for. The audit trail is exportable. What matters more than the MDM brand is the device register your DPO maintains. Our DPDP readiness assessment covers the register, the classification map, and the policy controls in one engagement.

What does this look like for a 30-supervisor field team? For a 30-device field fleet without an existing M365 estate, Hexnode standalone is almost always the right answer. For a 30-device fleet inside a company already on M365 Business Premium, Intune is usually the simpler path. The pivot point we have seen sits around 80 to 100 field devices where the audit-trail and console-unification question starts to matter.

Where to read more on the cluster

For the Samsung Knox side of the field-MDM conversation, read Samsung Knox vs SOTI and the Pune FMCG bake-off. The bigger-picture cost question is in what MDM actually costs in India. The field handheld hardware decision shows up in our Honeywell CT45 writeup. The SBU hub is Cloud Solutions.

P.S. Sudeep here. Arjun ran this Ahmedabad bake-off for a facility-services client we have worked with since 2022. The split-fleet answer is one no vendor will steer you toward because both vendors lose half the deal. If you are in the middle of a field-MDM pick, message me on WhatsApp at +91 91375 93228. The first call is a working call. Bas.