Cron is not a very good task runner on its own if you have lots of hosts, care that your tasks actually run, care that they succeed, need sequencing or need to ensure that multiple instances don't conflict.
cron is fine as part of a task scheduler, but even for very basic use cases you'll hit its limitations and will have to work around them.
I can assure you that my use case is a bit more involved than what cfengine can provide.
Cheers.