Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.

The best open source alternative to Puppet is Ansible. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 25 alternatives to Puppet and many of them is open source so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting open source alternatives to Puppet are Salt, Chef, Foreman and Rudder.
Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.

Salt is a powerful remote execution manager that can be used to administer and provision servers in a fast and efficient way.


Chef is an open source systems integration framework built to bring the benefits of configuration management to your entire infrastructure. You write source code to describe how you want each part of your infrastructure to be built, then apply those descriptions to your servers.
Foreman is an open source project that helps system administrators manage servers throughout their lifecycle, from provisioning and configuration to orchestration and monitoring. Using Puppet or Chef and Foreman's smart proxy architecture, you can easily automate repetitive...



Rudder is a solution for automating your IT infrastructure to ensure security, reliability and compliance of your systems, whatever the OS. Gain instant visibility of IT compliance and benefit from continuous remediation to ensure an environment well configured and secured.




CFEngine is a configuration management and automation framework that lets you securely manage your mission critical IT infrastructure.
Juju is an enterprise Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) that provides model-driven application management and next-generation infrastructure-as-code.
Bcfg2 helps system administrators produce a consistent, reproducible, and verifiable description of their environment, and offers visualization and reporting tools to aid in day-to-day administrative tasks.
I can hardly say that Puppet and Ansible should be in the same DCIM category.