Is Unidesk an AppSense alternative?

In pure VDI environments, yes.  AppSense, like RES, RTO (acquired by VMware), and Sepago (acquired by Citrix), is a profile management tool that focuses only on the user experience.  Even in this sole area of focus, this class of tools is limited, capturing only profile elements - display settings, icons, shortcuts, etc.  Unidesk goes well beyond profiles to offer 100% persistent personalization uniquely capable of capturing and sustaining ALL user customizations – not only profile settings, but user-installed applications, plug-ins that users install on top of IT-delivered applications (e.g. Word plug-ins, browser plug-ins such as WebEx and Google Toolbar, etc.), GUIDs that get written to the C: drive and are required for many applications to work, and even data saved locally anywhere on the C: drive (e.g. Outlook PST files).

Not only does Unidesk go far deeper than profile managers in providing a consistent VDI user experience, but as a comprehensive virtual desktop management solution, we also manage the other two components of the virtual desktop stack – applications and Windows itself.  With Unidesk, administrators can create and update VDI desktops from a single instance of Windows and single instances of any application, even the applications that traditional application virtualization can’t package.  And our ability to share these single images of Windows and applications across many virtual desktops enables Unidesk to reduce VDI storage use up to 70%, so you don’t need costly de-duplication solutions.

Many customers are adopting Unidesk as the only management companion they need for VMware View, Citrix XenDesktop, Pano Logic, and other VDI access solutions, and choosing to eliminate the cost/complexity of trying to integrate profile management, application virtualization, traditional PC configuration/patching tools, and storage de-duplication. Other customers are using Unidesk in concert with profile managers such as AppSense, using Unidesk to create, update, and maintain 100% personalized VDI desktops, and AppSense to provide profile transience between virtual and physical desktops. Unidesk is also completely compatible with application virtualization, with many customers using Unidesk to provide the centralized version control, desktop assignment, and updating capabilities for ThinApp packages that ThinApp lacks.