Which IT Automation Tool is Right for You?

Whether you begin your infrastructure automation journey with Puppet or start building with another tool, there’s no replacement for scalability. With unmatched visibility, resilience, and repeatability built in, Puppet is the only infrastructure automation solution truly built to provide value at enterprise scale.

Puppet Enterprise

Drive efficiency at any scale with Puppet’s secure infrastructure automation and configuration platform.

Puppet Enterprise Advanced

The strength of Puppet Enterprise with Security Compliance Enforcement and Impact Analysis included.

Impact Analysis 

Reduce errors in your infrastructure’s future state by seeing the impact of changes to your Puppet code before you make them.

Security Compliance Enforcement

Set and maintain compliant infrastructure, stay ahead of regulations, and prove compliance automatically.

Why Would You Use Puppet vs. Ansible?

Puppet is built from the ground up with a focus on scalability. Our infrastructure automation solutions are designed to support the infrastructure you need today and what you want it to look like in the future. Our customers use Puppet to build and maintain complex infrastructure that can support growing teams, keep up with your organization’s goals, and ensure resilience across platforms (cloud included). 

Desired State Automation: Just a few lines of Puppet code can do the work of tens or even hundreds of lines of playbook commands and logic. It will apply all resources that aren’t dependent, regardless of failures in another resource.

Reporting: Puppet makes it possible to understand dependencies and overall state structure. PuppetDB also provides an unmatched inventory of metadata about every node in your infrastructure and makes every single managed resource searchable. It also integrates into monitoring tools like Splunk.

Visibility: Impact Analysis (available in Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise) shows you how new Puppet code will impact your Puppet-managed infrastructure before you actually merge the new code. It’s pre-access catalog and state visibility no other tool can do, including Ansible.

Consistency: Puppet’s reusable blocks of infrastructure as code (IaC) can apply policies at scale across complex IT environments.

Ansible has earned its reputation for being a turnkey tool for provisioning infrastructure. Like Puppet, it’s also an open-source automation and configuration management tool, which is why many new or growing IT teams turn to Ansible to build their infrastructure. But teams using Ansible often find that just when they start to see the benefits of IT automation, they run into common issues: 

Ansible’s task-based automation makes it hard for teams to understand, troubleshoot, or update.

Ansible automation can technically be written declaratively, but it takes a significant amount of effort. It also can’t discern dependencies in tasks – so if one task fails, they all fail.

Ansible Tower provides a graphical user interface to schedule and run jobs, but without reporting and historical auditing capabilities.

The number of scripts required leads to errors and conflicting commands, especially at scale.

Conflicts between scripts and playbooks generate app instability.

Compare Puppet vs. Ansible Side-by-Side

Puppet is powerful, scalable, and designed for the future of your infrastructure. Stack us up next to the competition and the differences are clear. 

 

Language

Declarative/desired state – tell Puppet what you want, and Puppet will figure out how to get there

Procedural/task-based – can be written declaratively with more effort

Architecture

Server/client

Client only

Interface

GUI in Puppet Enterprise with visibility to events & config details

Basic GUI in Ansible Automation Controller (formerly Ansible Tower)

Setup

Built to scale with your automation needs

Quick setup, but complex at scale

Community

A bustling dev community and thousands of modules on the Forge (including many supported by Puppet)

Global meetups, large community, supported Content Collections

Free Trial

Automate 10 nodes for free as long as you want

60-day limited trial

Scalability

Designed to scale for enterprise automation

More nodes, more problems

Management

Requires Puppet DSL

YAML and Jinja files

Cloud Availability

AWS, Azure, GCP + more

AWS, Azure, GCP + more

Communication

SSL

SSH/WinRM

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Puppet PLUS Ansible?

Sometimes, together IS better.

Maybe you inherited Ansible from a previous team. Maybe you got it included with IBM Power®. Or maybe you just wanted to start building your infrastructure with Ansible instead of Puppet. In any case, we get it: You need to find a way to use multiple tools for your infrastructure automation and configuration management. The dirty secret is that you’re not alone.

Tons of infrastructure is built using a set of competing tools, including Puppet and Ansible. It’s not uncommon for an organization’s IT to be built on one platform and transition to another tool – or supplement it with a more powerful solution – when they outgrow the solution they started with. 

See For Yourself

Find out firsthand why Puppet outpaces the competition for automation. Schedule a demo to see how Puppet can make your organization’s IT a snap.