Intune vs Group Policy: Managing Devices Without a Domain
Intune replaces Group Policy for organizations moving to cloud-only identity. Configuration profiles, compliance policies, and the settings catalog now cover the vast majority of what GPOs did — and Intune applies policy to devices anywhere on the internet, while Group Policy only reaches machines that talk to a domain controller. For a remote or hybrid workforce, that difference alone settles the comparison.
- Settings catalog now exposes thousands of settings, closing most historical GPO gaps
- Policy applies over the internet — no VPN or office visit needed for updates
- Compliance policies add something GPO never had: conditional access based on device health
- Autopilot replaces imaging — new laptops ship straight to users and self-configure
- Honest gap: complex logon scripts and some legacy app configurations need rework (usually via PowerShell deployed through Intune)
The migration isn't one-to-one — and that's mostly good news, because a decade of accumulated GPOs usually contains more archaeology than policy. The full article covers Group Policy analytics (Microsoft's own GPO-to-Intune mapping tool), the co-management transition state, and the settings that genuinely have no cloud equivalent yet.
Prefer answers about your environment specifically?
Reading is good. A 30-minute session with an engineer who can see your actual tenant is better.
Schedule a Microsoft 365 Strategy Session