Octopus Deploy vs. Salt Project

Octopus Deploy is well suited for our requirements of deploying across multiple environments with one consistent release. We are saving a lot of time by not having to package and move release files around. Our release process is more efficient and consistent with automation. There are some parts that we could probably perform with existing tools such as DevOps and there are one or two features we have to workaround to fit for our setup such as the step templates to install websites. These are minor in our opinion.

Incentivized

SaltStack is a very well architected toolset and framework for reliably managing distributed systems' complexity at varied scale. If the diversity of kind or number of assets is low, or the dependencies are bounded and simple, it might be overkill. Realization that you need SaltStack might come in the form of other tools, scripts, or jobs whose code has become difficult, unreliable, or unmaintainable. Rather than a native from-scratch SaltStack design, be aware that SaltStack can be added on to tools like Docker or Chef and optionally factor those tools out or other tools into the mix.

Incentivized

• Octopus integrates nicely with TeamCity, our build server.
• Octopus uses the same deployment packages across environments and makes it easy to track their progress across those environments.
• Octopus makes it easy to handle configuration across environments which is usually a particularly difficult task.

Incentivized

• Targeting is easy and yet extremely granular - I can target machines by name, role, operating system, init system, distro, regex, or any combination of the above.
• Abstraction of OS, package manager and package details is far advanced beyond any other CRM I have seen. The ability to set one configuration for a package across multiple distros, and have it apply correctly no matter the distrospecific naming convention or package installation procedure, is amazing.
• Abstraction of environments is similarly valuable - I can set a firewall rule to allow ssh from "management", and have that be defined as a specific IP range per dev, test, and prod.

Incentivized

• In the past has been somewhat .net focused but that has been changing in recent times
• Would be great if community licenses for NFP organizations were perpetual - but in saying that I appreciate that Octopus does provide my organization with a community [license]. Not all organisations do
• I can’t think of any other

Incentivized

• Managing network hardware should be more native and easy
• SaltStack should buffer jobs and, when a client returns, make sure it is executed proberly
• SaltStack should provide basic pillar and states structures to help get newbies started

Incentivized

Would be a 10 except for the retirement of the free Community Edition.

Incentivized

Octopus Deploy has greatly helped us to improve our reliability and frequency of our deployments and given us the confidence to deploy much more often, with a direct benefit to customers. Cross-platform support and release to Cloud require more focus on the product side.

Incentivized

Octopus Deploy is a software that runs very effectively, is easy to use, does not require such a high learning curve, provides the necessary tools to carry out the functions it offers, making it a very flexible software, it also allows that can be configured according to the needs of the user and provides integrations with other very advantageous tools since they are carried out in a very favorable way.

Incentivized

Octopus Deploy support has always been there for us, even when using the free tier, we get responsive hands-on help. We haven't needed to use that level of support since the documentation is clearly written, and help is readily available within the interface itself. Using Octopus Deploy is a truly joyful experience.

Incentivized

We haven't had to spend a lot of time talking to support, and we've only had one issue, which, when dealing with other vendors is actually not that bad of an experience.

There aren't really any competitors in the land of ASP.NET. Deployment is too ad-hoc. Other tools exist that have massive downsides, like Web Deploy. Most aren't even supported anymore. You could argue that containers (Docker) are a competitor, but containers cannot be used for everything and solve a somewhat different problem. Octopus Deploy is even able to help with containers. To us, Octopus Deploy was really the only really polished solution.

Incentivized

We moved to SaltStack from Puppet about 3 years ago. Puppet just has too much of a learning curve and we inherited it from an old IT regime. We wanted something we could start fresh with. Our team has never looked back. SaltStack is so much easier for us to use and maintain.

Incentivized

Great support from professional services.

Incentivized

• Allows us to deploy to our fleet quickly and without interruption to service
• Can roll back to previous releases quickly, allowing us to back out of breaking changes in the worst-case scenarios.
• Integration with several targets has allowed us to explore new platforms for our products, such as Docker in AWS ECS.

Incentivized

• We manage two complex highly available self-healing (all infrastructure and systems) environments using SaltStack. Only one person is needed to run SaltStack. That is a HUGE return on investment.
• Building tooling on top of SaltStack has allowed us to share administrative abilities by role - e.g. employee X can deploy software Y. No need to call a sysadmin and etc.
• Recovery from problems, or time to stand-up new systems is now counted in minutes (usually under eight) rather than hours. This is a strategic advantage for rolling out new services.

Incentivized