17 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 8.3 out of 100
Based on 17 reviews and ratings
160 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 8.5 out of 100
Based on 160 reviews and ratings
Attribute Ratings
- Consul, by HashiCorp is rated higher in 1 area: Support Rating
- Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated higher in 1 area: Likelihood to Recommend
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
Consul
86%
5 Ratings

9.6
Ansible
96%
29 Ratings
Usability
10.0
Consul
100%
1 Rating

Ansible
N/A
0 Ratings
Performance
Consul
N/A
0 Ratings

8.7
Ansible
87%
10 Ratings
Support Rating
8.8
Consul
88%
4 Ratings

7.8
Ansible
78%
4 Ratings
Likelihood to Recommend
Consul
Consul can provide a light-weight, lightning-fast and robust solution for the following:
- Network mesh
- Service DNS
- Global key-value store (values can be complex objects as well)
- Utility for blue-green deployments
- Service health checking
DevOps Team Leader
CognyteInformation Technology & Services, 1001-5000 employees
Ansible
That is a big task for all the functionality now in Ansible Collections - Ethernet Networking, Fibre Channel Networking, Wireless networking, LB/ADC configuration & changes. Storage config and changes, VMware provisioning and changes, Windows Desktop provision when paired w/ a tool like Zuul, Workflow integration w/ ServiceNow (SNOW), Testing framework such as Molecule really all you to ensure what you have in your playbooks is solid...prior to deployment not when released to your consumers; Critical. Consistent runbooks instead of managing tons of scripts allows for cross-team training and functionality in a true disaster scenario. Additionally, conversion tools from other IT automation offerings Puppet and Chef, integration into Cloud environments. The list grows daily so jump in the water is just right!

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Information Technology and Services Company, 501-1000 employeesPros
Consul
- Key-Value database management.
- Service discovery.
- Centralized configuration database with native high availability.
Senior Devops Engineer
SOTIComputer & Network Security, 1001-5000 employees
Ansible
- Agentless. For our implementation, this is the single biggest factor. If we have to touch the machine and install an agent before we can start managing it, that's already too much effort and slows us down.
- Re-entrant. This is not unique to Ansible, but certainly a huge improvement over custom scripts and such. Because it's such a huge effort to make scripts re-entrant, most of our scripts did not allow an elegant way to recover on failure. Manually cleaning up the half-attempt and re-trying is still too cumbersome, and being able to just re-run Ansible is a great improvement!
- Infrastructure as code. This is new to Ansible, and there are still a few minor bugs with their AWS modules, but it's been a huge help being able to define our infrastructure in an Ansible playbook, commit it to source control, and use one tool for all our DevOps tasks.
DevOps Engineer
AviziaHospital & Health Care, 51-200 employees
Cons
Consul
- The GUI: The GUI interface for Consul has gotten a lot better over the years. Since Consul is so easy to interact with via API, this isn't a showstopper, but for those that are less command line inclined it's always nice to be able to refer them to an easy to use and understand web interface
- It's chatty: Consul is extremely chatty. Sometimes it's particularly chatty at 2am with no indication as to why and eats up quite a bit of resources. Just be sure to provision your systems that typically take a heavy load with a little extra for Consul

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Information Services Company, 501-1000 employeesAnsible
- Ansible Tower is a paid service, which can be annoying at times. But that is understandable, as it requires an additional level of support from the Ansible team to develop.
- There is a decently large learning curve for someone not familiar with setting up Unix environments. However, there is a very large support community with tons of documentation, so it's not a dealbreaker.
DevOps Engineer
CBREReal Estate, 10,001+ employees
Pricing Details
Consul
General
Free Trial
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Entry-level set up fee?
No
Starting Price
$0.027 per month
Consul Editions & Modules
Edition
Open Source (self-managed) | $01 |
---|---|
Cloud (managed Consul) | starting at $.0272 |
Enterprise | Self-Managed Custom Deployments |
- always free
- Per Hour
- none
Additional Pricing Details
—Ansible
General
Free Trial
—Free/Freemium Version
—Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—Entry-level set up fee?
No
Starting Price
$5,000 per year
Ansible Editions & Modules
Edition
Basic Tower | $5,0001 |
---|---|
Enterprise Tower | $10,0001 |
Premium Tower | $14,0001 |
- per year
Additional Pricing Details
—Usability
Consul
Consul 10.0
Based on 1 answer
Consul's API is extremely user friendly. While their web interface isn't quite as "mature", it's still pretty easily navigated for the average person. Together they make a pretty easy to pick up and use tool.

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Information Services Company, 501-1000 employeesAnsible
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Performance
Consul
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Ansible
Ansible 8.7
Based on 10 answers
Ansible is very friendly to start with. With just a few configurations, you have full management to your servers. You can configure it and implement it in seconds. You can also set up a cron job to make sure it gets implemented. It suits our need perfectly. Support can be a bit hard.

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Insurance Company, 10,001+ employeesSupport Rating
Consul
Consul 8.8
Based on 4 answers
I've never used paid support from HashiCorp, but I consider its support a good one, since they provide a lot of free resources for the community and there are good user groups supporting you on several sorts of issues. Also, HashiCorp is known as a company with a strong relationship with the community, that is easily noticed by the events HashiCorp promotes over the world.
Senior Devops Engineer
SOTIComputer & Network Security, 1001-5000 employees
Ansible
Ansible 7.8
Based on 4 answers
There is a lot of good documentation that Ansible and Red Hat provide which should help get someone started with making Ansible useful. But once you get to more complicated scenarios, you will benefit from learning from others. I have not used Red Hat support for work with Ansible, but many of the online resources are helpful.
Lead System Engineer
Azusa Pacific UniversityHigher Education, 1001-5000 employees
Alternatives Considered
Consul
Consul was easier to configure out of the box than Serf and gave us more initial options. Its easy to use tools and support were by far superior to Serf in many ways. Support alone was one of those areas that Serf could take an example from Consul to keep its customers happy.
Operations/Systems Manager
Crowell SystemsComputer Software, 51-200 employees
Ansible
Ansible is a great product, which we really love as it is compatible running along side and with other DevOps tool. The integration features allows other teams to participate in our shared objective. Ansible is easy to use as many programmers are familiar with Python and RHEL. We selected Ansible because its easy barrier to entry and pricing model for new users with not many nodes to manage. We will continue to develop and on-board teams and monitor the scaling abilities of Ansible.

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Hospital & Health Care Company, 10,001+ employeesReturn on Investment
Consul
- It contains a native web UI, which in contrast to its counterparts, is handy, very intuitive and - most importantly - very informative. It leaves no room for doubt about your services "forest" health. So, for that purpose, the learning curve was almost down to non-existent. Our team managed to work seamlessly with Consul being our services API
- Our management staff had a difficult time understanding what Consul was really all about. For technical staff it is pretty simple to understand the huge value such a tool can pose to our suite of solutions, but once our management staff took the grasp of its valuable handy set of tools, we didn't take long to start using it and keeping track of our Swarm overall health, with was a constant concern for the entire company before.
- For load balancing purposes, we were relying pretty much on guesses before we decided to use Consul. One would check a certain node overall health and decide if we would need to spring a new instance at AWS or Digital Ocean.
Sr. Software Developer
CONSLOG - Construction SoftwareInformation Technology and Services, 1-10 employees
Ansible
- We have been able to deploy solutions to client issues without impacting uptime.
- Most system administration tasks have been automated so I am now free to work on architectural improvements or customer support.
- Our customer support has improved thanks to Ansible as it has allowed me more time away from repetitive system activities so I may assist with customer questions and application testing.
Devops Engineer
SolidifyHRInsurance, 11-50 employees