Puppet Data Center Automation Solution helps you save time, gain visibility into your server environment, and ensure consistency across your IT infrastructure.
Cost / License
- Freemium
- Open Source
Platforms
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Online

Ansible is described as 'Radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs' and is a popular server management tool in the system & hardware category. There are more than 50 alternatives to Ansible for a variety of platforms, including Linux, Mac, Windows, Web-based and BSD apps. The best Ansible alternative is Puppet, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like Ansible are Salt, Chef, pyinfra and Nix Package Manager.
Puppet Data Center Automation Solution helps you save time, gain visibility into your server environment, and ensure consistency across your IT infrastructure.

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.
Jenkins and the other platforms listed are more build tools rather than a server configuration tool.


It is faster than Ansible and allows you to write configurations more concisely.
I don't need to wait as long for pyinfra as I did for ansible. Furthermore as it is everything python, I can extend its logging if needed. I had logging problems with ansible.
KISS spirit, very powerful and easy to learn.


Nix is a powerful package manager for macOS, Linux and other Unix systems that makes package management reliable and reproducible. It provides atomic upgrades and rollbacks, side-by-side installation of multiple versions of a package, multi-user package management and easy setup...
Solves many of the same problems but with a different philosophy.


Tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. Terraform can manage existing and popular service providers as well as custom in-house solutions.




Terraform is primarilly for creating infrastructure and Ansible is primarilly for configuring machines. Both offer tools in the other's domain and both offerings are disappointing there.
I've been fairly happy using Terraform to create VMs and then trigger Ansible to configure them.
Terraform is for provisioning cloud devices, and Ansible is for bare-metal automation.


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.




Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is an end-to-end automation platform to configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate advanced workflows. It includes resources to create, manage, and scale across the entire enterprise.

Fabric is a Python library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks.
Only requires SSH and if you're familiar to Python and the command line, you know everything to start automation of administrative tasks on remote hosts.


Pulumi is a cloud development platform. Replace YAML and DSLs with pure code. Code, deploy, manage cloud apps to AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, using JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Go.
Describe your MacOS development environment using JSON configurations. Codify will do the rest. Create reproducible, shareable, and consistent environments using Codify, individually and for a team.



Saltstack is stateful and supports features allowing to manage thousands of systems simulataneously