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

The best free alternative to Ansible is Puppet, which is also Open Source. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 50 alternatives to Ansible and many of them is free so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting free alternatives to 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.


pyinfra automates infrastructure super fast at massive scale. It can be used for ad-hoc command execution, service deployment, configuration management and more.

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.


OpenTofu is an OSS tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. OpenTofu can manage existing and popular service providers as well as custom in-house solutions.


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.



Uyuni is a solution for organizations that require absolute control over maintenance and package deployment on their servers. It lets you manage large sets of Linux systems and keep them upto date, with automated software management, asset management, and system provisioning.
Saltstack is stateful and supports features allowing to manage thousands of systems simulataneously