As infrastructure expands across servers, network devices, firewalls, cloud, and edge, siloed tools and ad-hoc playbooks can’t keep up. With Perforce Puppet, you solve enterprise-scale challenges through one platform for automation and compliance everywhere infrastructure lives.
The difference between Ansible and Puppet becomes clear as you scale: Ansible runs tasks, while Puppet continuously enforces policy across your entire estate. With Puppet, you can:
Unify automation, observability, and security in one platform for complete visibility
Run existing Ansible playbooks inside Puppet without paying for an Ansible license
Automate across agent-based and agentless architecture
Prevent configuration drift by continuously defining and enforcing desired state
Mitigate known vulnerabilities automatically with security scanner integration
Deliver always-on security with policy enforcement
Confidently scale automation to thousands of nodes
Ansible vs Puppet: What’s the Real Difference
Puppet and Ansible both provide configuration management, but the difference is clear: Puppet delivers consistency, compliance, and control at scale, helping you avoid configuration drift and code conflicts.
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Ansible
Puppet
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How easy is it to set up?
Quick setup, but complex at scale
Designed to scale with enterprise automation needs. AI-powered insights and code generation for network/edge device configurations.
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How does it automate?
Imperative automation: You have to specify every step to reach a desired state
Declarative automation: You define your desired configurations, and Puppet will handle the rest
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What language does it use?
Procedural/task-based
Declarative/desired state and procedural/task-based capabilities
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Where does it work?
Support for Linux (SSH) and Windows (WinRM). Network and cloud support available through additional modules.
Native agent support for Windows and Linux systems, plus agentless support for network/edge devices, across on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments
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What architecture does it use?
Agentless
Flexible — agent-based for resiliency and scale, or agentless for quick, targeted control.
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How well does it scale?
Real-time execution can limit scalability and increase operational overhead.
Proven at enterprise scale (500 to 50,000+ nodes) with stability, reporting, and performance
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How does it ensure security and compliance?
Often, manual or external
Intelligent and automated remediation, continuous compliance reporting and enforcement across all managed devices
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How does it orchestrate?
Playbook chaining; lacks structured error handling or policy workflows
Tasks, Plans, Event-driven workflows with GUI, RBAC, and drift detection
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How does it manage desired state?
Imperative and stateless; requires manual or scheduled re-execution to maintain state. Systems can drift without detection
Declarative and continuous; automatically detects and remediates drift
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How well does it integrate?
Broad integrations with CI/CD, cloud, and GitOps; flexible plugin system
Deep integration with CI/CD, ITSM, Puppet Forge, and hybrid/multi-cloud platforms, plus thousands of supported modules
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How does it reuse Ansible content?
Native platform. Strong community and ecosystem (Ansible Galaxy)
Can run Ansible Playbooks directly — without requiring an Ansible license
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What’s the community like?
Large community and supported Content Collections
Vibrant dev community, and more than 7,000 modules on Puppet Forge
"After Puppetizing, we can now push out changes within hours. We can build data centers in a few weeks. Everything has become much easier to understand."
Safeguard and Scale Your Infrastructure with Puppet
Anticipate and Control Change
Predict the impact of code changes before deployment with Impact Analysis, a premium feature of Puppet.
Reduce risk and eliminate conflicts, even in complex and dynamic environments.
Automated drift correction that prevents configuration vulnerabilities and ensures infrastructure resilience.
Consolidate governance and control of servers, VMs, network devices, and edge systems into a unified platform.
Always-On Security, and Compliance
Complete transparency into infrastructure changes across all environments
Proactive vulnerability remediation and automated patching reduce mean time to remediation and lower risk.
Stay audit-ready with continuous compliance monitoring and reporting.
Automatically enforce security and compliance policies across systems.
Built for Enterprise Scalability
Scale your infrastructure seamlessly without manual configurations, unlike Ansible
Manage thousands of nodes across on-prem, cloud, or hybrid environments
The Difference Between Puppet and Ansible is Clear
When building infrastructure that’s secure, scalable, and easy to manage, Puppet outperforms Ansible over the long term. Contact a member of the Puppet team to see how we can help your organization achieve consistent automation and compliance today.