Jenkins vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Product | Rating | Most Used By | Product Summary | Starting Price |
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Jenkins | N/A | Jenkins is an open source automation server. Jenkins provides hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any project. As an extensible automation server, Jenkins can be used as a simple CI server or turned into a continuous delivery hub for any project. | N/A | |
Ansible | N/A | The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (acquired by Red Hat in 2015) is a foundation for building and operating automation across an organization. The platform includes tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation, and can automate resource provisioning, and IT environments and configuration of systems and devices. It can be used in a CI/CD process to provision the target environment and to then deploy the application on it. | $5,000 per year |
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Editions & Modules | No answers on this topic |
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Entry-level Setup Fee | No setup fee | No setup fee | ||||||||||||||
Additional Details | — | — | ||||||||||||||
More Pricing Information |
Jenkins | Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform | |
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Considered Both Products | Jenkins | Ansible |
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Jenkins | Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform | |
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Highlights |
Research Team Insight Published Jenkins is an open source automation server present in many CI/CD pipelines. Ansible, or more recently the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, is an IT automation platform, available as a free open source program or as a paid program with Ansible Tower supported directly by Red Hat. Ansible’s use cases include IT configuration management, application deployment, release orchestration, and continuous delivery (CD). Jenkins is a CI/CD leader, and is deployed across companies of all sizes, and large enterprises. Ansible is a multifarious platform but is generally used to provision and configure complex networks and server setups, and therefore is more commonly used in larger companies than in small ones. The tools are often used together in a CI/CD pipeline. Red Hat offers instructions on how to use Ansible roles and playbooks with Jenkins. FeaturesAnsible and Jenkins present distinct advantages over alternatives for use in a CI / CD pipeline. As an automation server Jenkins brings flexibility, extensibility, and configurability via a mother lode of plugins and integrations, and it is able to work with nearly any DevOps tool (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, JFrog Artifactory, Puppet, Ansible). Jenkins is free and open source, but unlike some open source tools it has an excellent support ecosystem because of its large and very active community of developers participating in forums, providing guides or blogs, and who are directly recruitable to help with projects. Beyond automated builds, users can rely on Jenkins to automate tests and debugging. To complement Jenkins or any other build automation or CI tools, Ansible is a worthy CD solution for setting up and deploying to target environments. It is lightweight and agentless and thus fast and easy to deploy, and, as it’s agentless, it is especially useful for cloud servers and infrastructure. It is doubly easy to use with human-friendly YAML playbooks that allow users to set up servers quickly, with minimal handling. Ansible also gives the user fine control over servers with infrastructure as code, allowing segments of infrastructure to be defined in Ansible Playbooks, which are quick to develop and reusable with templates. LimitationsWhile Jenkins and Ansible are popular options, there are a few reasons one might choose to exclude these options from their Continuous Delivery pipeline. Jenkins lacks certain conveniences for collaborating teams: there is no standard Jenkins deployment so implementations can be idiosyncratic. It also has a UI that is hard to understand and can easily overwhelm users who are managing many projects; this worsens when there is more than one person attempting to contribute. The price of Jenkins being supported by an open-source community, rather than dedicated support, and having nearly infinitely flexible and configurable is that troubleshooting can be hard, with well-meaning community members being unable to help any particular developer with his potentially quite unusual Jenkins setup. While Ansible’s agentlessness is good for many reasons, it relies on SSH to achieve this, and users sometimes express annoyance at relying on an SSH connection which may not meet all particular users’ security needs. Ansible’s paid service (Ansible Tower, formerly AWX) is required for job scheduling, but it is less well reviewed than other Ansible features, and paid support strikes some as not worth the (high) cost. Using Ansible with Windows servers may not be up to par with vs.using it with Linux or Unix-like systems. PricingJenkins is released under the MIT license and is totally free and open source. Services for Jenkins, may pose a cost, such as CloudBees CI, a governance and team management system for Jenkins that addresses its weaknesses. Ansible is also open source and free to use as an IT automation tool and configuration management tool. The paid version of the Ansible Automation Platform, with Ansible Tower, is available on Standard and Premium plans, with the primary difference being that Premium presents 24×7 support, vs business hour support on the Standard plan. Pricing is based on the number of nodes (systems, hosts, instances, VMs, containers or devices) and is acquired on an annual license. Pricing is not published though sources show licensing costs from roughly $5000 per year for up to 500 nodes, to $20,000 per year for up to 1000 nodes, and Premium support. |
Jenkins | Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform | |
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Small Businesses | GitLab Score 8.9 out of 10 | HashiCorp Terraform Score 8.5 out of 10 |
Medium-sized Companies | GitLab Score 8.9 out of 10 | AWS CloudFormation Score 8.7 out of 10 |
Enterprises | GitLab Score 8.9 out of 10 | AWS CloudFormation Score 8.7 out of 10 |
All Alternatives | View all alternatives | View all alternatives |
Jenkins | Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform | |
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Likelihood to Recommend | 8.2 (69 ratings) | 9.0 (63 ratings) |
Likelihood to Renew | - (0 ratings) | 8.6 (2 ratings) |
Usability | 5.0 (3 ratings) | 7.3 (1 ratings) |
Performance | 8.9 (6 ratings) | 8.7 (5 ratings) |
Support Rating | 6.6 (6 ratings) | 7.3 (3 ratings) |
Implementation Rating | - (0 ratings) | 8.2 (1 ratings) |
Ease of integration | - (0 ratings) | 8.6 (5 ratings) |
Jenkins | Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform | |
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Likelihood to Recommend | Open Source | Red Hat |
Pros | Open Source | Red Hat |
Cons | Open Source | Red Hat |
Likelihood to Renew | Open Source No answers on this topic | Red Hat |
Usability | Open Source | Red Hat |
Performance | Open Source | Red Hat |
Support Rating | Open Source | Red Hat |
Implementation Rating | Open Source No answers on this topic | Red Hat |
Alternatives Considered | Open Source | Red Hat |
Return on Investment | Open Source | Red Hat |
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