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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Jenkins

    Score8.1 out of 10
    N/AJenkins 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

    Score9 out of 10
    N/AThe 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

    Pricing
    JenkinsAnsible
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Basic Tower
    5,000
    per year
    Enterprise Tower
    10,000
    per year
    Premium Tower
    14,000
    per year
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    JenkinsAnsible
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    JenkinsAnsible
    Considered Both Products
    Open Source
    Chose Jenkins
    Both Jenkins and TeamCity do a good job of automating CI/CD. Jenkins runs much leaner than TeamCity - it only needs about a Gig of free memory, whereas TeamCity needs a fat 4 Gig free. Many tasks in Jenkins yml config can be very cumbersome, especially running local and …
    Incentivized
    Chose Jenkins
    Jenkins is very easy to use, open source tool. Its better for simple build and deployments.
    Incentivized
    Chose Jenkins
    Jenkins is the only tool I would consider using for CTCI deployment. Its plugins make it easy to customize to any environment you can conjure up and will always be custom fit to your needs as a DevOps engineer. Other tools have better support but lack the customizability and …
    Incentivized
    Chose Jenkins
    Microsoft Azure includes Azure Pipelines as part of its suite of tools. It is an adequate tool but tends to be overly complicated. I find that Jenkins is a much simpler tool to use.
    Incentivized
    Chose Jenkins
    Jenkins has been my favorite continuous integration tool I've used. It's easy to setup, intuitive to use, and very powerful. The software allows for building complex workflows, then having them run without thinking about it. This leads to savings in time and resources, and to …
    Incentivized
    Chose Jenkins
    Travis CI and AppVeyor are good services that provide rudimentary support for builds, but they focus on Linux/OSX and Windows respectively, meaning that cross-platform builds will need to use both services. They are free for open source projects on GitHub, so they are seen …
    Incentivized
    Chose Jenkins
    Jenkins does a much better job of working with interpreted languages, and has a much larger plugin base.
    Incentivized
    Red Hat
    Chose Ansible
    I used puppet prior to moving to open source Ansible and eventually to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. I appreciate the agentless approach of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and feel that its deterministic approach to applying code is superior to puppet
    Incentivized
    Chose Ansible
    • Ansible is much simpler to get up and running with than Chef, as it requires no infrastructure or agent process or any configuration on the target machine. All you need is SSH access! However, you lose the capabilities that Chef server offers such as data bags (centralized data …
    Incentivized
    Chose Ansible
    All three of these competitors are agent based. I did not want an additional service that needed to run absolutely everywhere. I also did not want to maintain a load balanced cluster of master servers that grows in resource requirements as your infrastructure scales.
    Incentivized
    Chose Ansible
    I've said this before, but Ansible is a great declarative orchestrator. One thing that is both good and bad about it is that it has no store about the state of the gear it manages. With dynamic inventory, I either have to realize facts for my entire fleet or rely on prior runs …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    87%
    Would buy again
    26 Answers
    99%
    Would buy again
    265 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    27 Answers
    96%
    Delivers good value for the price
    210 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    87%
    Happy with the feature set
    26 Answers
    98%
    Happy with the feature set
    263 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    93%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    13 Answers
    97%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    166 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    96%
    Implementation went as expected
    22 Answers
    89%
    Implementation went as expected
    201 Answers
    TrustRadius Insights
    JenkinsAnsible
    Highlights

    TrustRadius
    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.

    Features

    Ansible 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.

    Limitations

    While 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.

    Pricing

    Jenkins 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.

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    JenkinsAnsible
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    User Ratings
    JenkinsAnsible
    Likelihood to Recommend
    6.7
    (74 ratings)
    8.8
    (292 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.2
    (8 ratings)
    Usability
    6.4
    (8 ratings)
    8.3
    (184 ratings)
    Performance
    8.9
    (6 ratings)
    8.7
    (5 ratings)
    Support Rating
    6.6
    (6 ratings)
    8.0
    (5 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    6.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.6
    (5 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    JenkinsAnsible
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Open Source
    Jenkins is a highly customizable CI/CD tool with excellent community support. One can use Jenkins to build and deploy monolith services to microservices with ease. It can handle multiple "builds" per agent simultaneously, but the process can be resource hungry, and you need some impressive specs server for that. With Jenkins, you can automate almost any task. Also, as it is an open source, we can save a load of money by not spending on enterprise CI/CD tools.
    Incentivized
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    Red Hat
    I think it's the best defacto orchestrator for automation because it's so easy to integrate in other tools to it (dynatrace, cyberark, terraform, etc). It is a lot for a new or smaller team to use so I wouldn't recommend it to a new team using Ansible, in that case using Ansible navigator is a better start to understanding playbooks/inventories before diving into the complexity of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. EDA also takes a lot of connectivity between Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and target systems to get working which can be difficult in very locked down envs unless you have approval from many other teams like networking and security.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Open Source
    • Automated Builds: Jenkins is configured to monitor the version control system for new pull requests. Once a pull request is created, Jenkins automatically triggers a build process. It checks out the code, compiles it, and performs any necessary build steps specified in the configuration.
    • Unit Testing: Jenkins runs the suite of unit tests defined for the project. These tests verify the functionality of individual components and catch any regressions or errors. If any unit tests fail, Jenkins marks the build as unsuccessful, and the developer is notified to fix the issues.
    • Code Analysis: Jenkins integrates with code analysis tools like SonarQube or Checkstyle. It analyzes the code for quality, adherence to coding standards, and potential bugs or vulnerabilities. The results are reported back to the developer and the product review team for further inspection.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    • Standardize controls and visibility for automation.
    • Provide RBAC and Vault for improved automation security and support.
    • Job Scheduling is much more effective than Cron or other home-grown solutions.
    • The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform API is one of the best features as it makes automation accessible from any other platform.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Open Source
    • The UI could be slightly better, it feels kind of like the 90s, but it works well.
    • An easier way to filter jobs other than views on the dashboard.
    • An easier way to read the console logs when tests do fail.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    • Ansible is still not truly declarative like Terraform.
    • Simple automation is fine, but creating complex, scalable automation scripts is very difficult to learn.
    • For a higher number of nodes, Ansible consumes a lot of resources. It needs the paid version of AAP, which requires a cost.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Open Source
    We have a certain buy-in as we have made a lot of integrations and useful tools around jenkins, so it would cost us quite some time to change to another tool. Besides that, it is very versatile, and once you have things set up, it feels unnecessary to change tool. It is also a plus that it is open source.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    We are extremely happy with the use of AAP. It's better than expected, There is almost no limit when thinking of automation. The only problem is that the day to day is consuming a big part of our time. Patching and checking vulnerabilities are virtually killing us. But we can only improve with AAP.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Open Source
    Jenkins streamlines development and provides end to end automated integration and deployment. It even supports Docker and Kubernetes using which container instances can be managed effectively. It is easy to add documentation and apply role based access to files and services using Jenkins giving full control to the users. Any deviation can be easily tracked using the audit logs.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    Everything has room for improvement, but Ansible is the best tool out there for what it does and what it can do. There are plenty of features and capabilities that can be added, but it's just a matter of time before it happens.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    Open Source
    No, when we integrated this with GitHub, it becomes more easy and smart to manage and control our workforce. Our distributed workforce is now streamlined to a single bucket. All of our codes and production outputs are now automatically synced with all the workers. There are many cases when our in-house team makes changes in the release, our remote workers make another release with other environment variables. So it is better to get all of the work in control.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    Great in almost every way compared to any other configuration management software. The only thing I wish for is python3 support. Other than that, YAML is much improved compared to the Ruby of Chef. The agentless nature is incredibly convenient for managing systems quickly, and if a member of your term has no terminal experience whatsoever they can still use the UI.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Open Source
    As with all open source solutions, the support can be minimal and the information that you can find online can at times be misleading. Support may be one of the only real downsides to the overall software package. The user community can be helpful and is needed as the product is not the most user-friendly thing we have used.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Open Source
    It is worth well the time to setup Jenkins in a docker container. It is also well worth to take the time to move any "Jenkins configuration" into Jenkinsfiles and not take shortcuts.
    Incentivized
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    Red Hat
    I spoke on this topic today!
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Open Source
    Overall, Jenkins is the easiest platform for someone who has no experience to come in and use effectively. We can get a junior engineer into Jenkins, give them access, and point them in the right direction with minimal hand-holding. The competing products I have used (TravisCI/GitLab/Azure) provide other options but can obfuscate the process due to the lack of straightforward simplicity. In other areas (capability, power, customization), Jenkins keeps up with the competition and, in some areas, like customization, exceeds others.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    AAP compares favorably with Terraform and Power Automate. I don't have much experience with Terraform, but I find AAP and Ansible easier to use as well as having more capabilities. Power Platform is also an excellent automation tool that is user friendly but I feel that Ansible has more compatibility with a variety of technologies.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Open Source
    • Faster Time-to-Market: Jenkins automate the build, testing, and deployment process, enabling faster feedback and continuous improvement.
    • Improved Quality: Jenkins automatically run unit tests and integration tests, ensuring that code changes meet the necessary quality standards.
    • Cost Savings: Jenkins is an open-source tool that is free to use
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    • First, it keeps our entire server infrastructure aligned with our standards and reduces the time and effort needed to maintain our systems.
    • Automate routine IT tasks to save time, reduce errors, and ensure every server is configured and updated consistently.
    • Tasks that used to take our teams weeks to complete manually now run automatically and reliably, with full visibility, making our infrastructure management more effective and our compliance tracking much easier.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
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