Ansible made it easy to start automating, but it wasn’t built to scale. As your infrastructure grows across hybrid environments, networks, and edge devices, its manual playbooks and ad-hoc workflows can’t keep up with the need for visibility, security, control, and consistency modern IT demands.
Perforce Puppet with Puppet Edge unifies automation and compliance across your entire IT stack. Govern servers, cloud, network, and edge from a single intelligent platform that combines agentless speed with policy-driven control.
And the best part — you can even run existing Ansible playbooks directly in Puppet without any additional Ansible licensing.
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 across 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
Built to scale with your automation needs
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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?
Built to only manage Windows hosts
Built to manage Windows and Linux environments, simultaneously across on-prem, cloud, or hybrid
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What architecture does it use?
Agentless
Flexible — Agent-based for scale or Agentless with enhanced imperative orchestration
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How well does it scale?
Struggles at scale due to real-time execution; higher 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."
How Puppet Modernizes Enterprise Automation
Efficient, Scalable Automation
- Streamline repetitive tasks and eliminate repetitive work with desired state automation.
- Automate configuration and patching across environments.
- Scale from hundreds to tens of thousands of nodes without overhead.
- Deliver consistency across on-premises, cloud, and edge estates.
Continuous Compliance & Risk Remediation
- Reduce compliance burden by enforcing security baselines continuously, not just at audit time.
- Align automatically to CIS Benchmarks, NIS2, DISA STIGs, GDPR, and more.
- Detect drift and remediate before it becomes a risk.
- Generate full, auditable compliance reports across your entire infrastructure.
Velocity with Visibility
- Integrate automation seamlessly into your DevOps tool chain to accelerate delivery without losing control
- Gain real-time insights into configuration state, changes, and risk posture.
- Empower DevOps teams with self-service automation that stays compliant.
- Access AI-powered interfaces make it easier for any team to start automating.
Unified Platform Governance
- Move beyond fragmented tools and scripts with a single platform for automation, compliance, and governance.
- Manage servers, VMs, network devices, and edge environments together.
- Govern all configuration changes through centralized RBAC and audit policies.
- Puppet Edge extends centralized governance to every site — minimizing tools, lowering costs, and simplifying control.
Modernize Your Ansible Automation with Puppet — Without Starting Over
Puppet lets you transition from Ansible seamlessly, reusing what you’ve built while gaining continuous compliance, scalability, and real-time visibility across your entire infrastructure. Puppet helps you modernize without disruption, reduce manual effort, and enables your organization to:
- Run existing Ansible playbooks directly within Puppet workflows.
- Eliminate Ansible licensing costs while retaining automation continuity.
- Add continuous enforcement and compliance checks to existing scripts.
- Unify automation and compliance under a single platform for servers, network, and edge.
- Accelerate remediation and reduce MTTR through automated, policy-driven actions.
By extending existing Ansible automation with Puppet, teams benefit from reduced manual effort and scripting overheads while strengthening compliance and configuration consistency. They gain faster remediation times, simplified toolchains, and the flexibility to modernize at their own pace — achieving modernization without disruption or vendor lock-in.
Why Puppet is the Smarter Long-Term Choice Over Ansible
When building infrastructure that’s secure, scalable, and easy to manage, Puppet outperforms Ansible over the long term. By unifying automation and compliance with Puppet, you eliminate tool sprawl, cut licensing costs, and reduce complexity.