TrustRadius

Open Source Puppet vs. VMware Salt

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Open Source Puppet
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Open source Puppet provides tools to automate the configuration and management of IT infrastructure. It is supported by a community of users and contributors. Users can get involved by fixing bugs, influencing new feature direction, publishing modules, and engage with the community to share knowledge and expertise.N/A
Salt
Score 6.2 out of 10
N/A
VMware Salt is an Infrastructure Automation & Configuration Management platform that provisions, configures, deploys, and manages infrastructure components at scale. The solution utilizes an event-driven automation engine to enforce compliant software states across virtual machines, servers, containers, and network devices. The VMware Salt solution is comprised of software components from both VMware and the open-source Salt Project While the Salt Masters and Salt Minions are a part of the open…N/A
Pricing
Open Source PuppetVMware Salt
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Open Source PuppetSalt
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Open Source PuppetVMware Salt
Considered Both Products
Open Source Puppet

No answer on this topic

Salt
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose Salt
Puppet was working fine for our needs. We decided to make the switch after our operating system vendor decided to stop official support for SaltStack.
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose Salt
SaltStack is a newer product, so it learned some of the mistakes that Puppet made. It truly is a system that can respond to events as well as configure systems.
Valentin Höbel | TrustRadius Reviewer
Valentin Höbel
Cloud Architect
Chose Salt
SaltStack beats all of the tools above since it is a "6-in-one" solution: Config Management, Orchestration, Automation, parallel sys administration, remote execution and cloud management.

The other solutions only solve one or two problems.
Jeremy McMillan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Jeremy McMillan
Systems Administrator, Deployment Specialist Consultant
Chose Salt
I've used shell scripts over ssh, custom in-house deployment tools, Chef, and SaltStack. I've evaluated Ansible, but I was never happy with performance over SSH. Chef's loose configuration data model and lack of philosophy and conventions around use makes it difficult for a …
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose Salt
Chef and Puppet both require writing code, which I view as excessively involved for the task at hand. I have only needed to write pure python for a handful of Saltstack use cases - everything else has been configuration files.

Ansible, while elegant and simple, simply does not …
Chose Salt
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.
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose Salt
Ansible and Salt have emerged around the same time, and are pretty close.

Ansible pros:
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose Salt
I looked at Chef and Ansible but it was a long time ago and I don't remember the pros and cons compared to SaltStack.
When I arrived at my company, Saltstack was already used in production so there has been no discussion about other deployment and automation solutions
Ilya Trushchenko | TrustRadius Reviewer
Ilya Trushchenko
DevOps Engineer, Team Lead
Chose Salt
  • Puppet - ugly and heavy, ruby-based, although has the best set of production-ready modules and can be a good choice for big enterprise.
  • Chef - outdated, ruby-based.
  • Ansible - slow due to ssh transport, but is the best alternative for SaltStack.
Best Alternatives
Open Source PuppetVMware Salt
Small Businesses
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Score 8.8 out of 10
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Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Ansible
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Score 9.1 out of 10
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Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
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All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Open Source PuppetVMware Salt
Likelihood to Recommend
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Open Source PuppetVMware Salt
Likelihood to Recommend
No answers on this topic
Managing heterogeneous environments of large numbers of nodes, especially nodes which may need sudden changes (security updates, for instance), or frequent replacement, is a strength for Saltstack. Simplicity is not a strength for Saltstack. In a homogenous environment (all CentOS 7, for example, with no Debian or Windows) I might recommend using Ansible instead - it is less flexible and granular, but simpler to configure.
Verified User
Anonymous
Read full review
Pros
No answers on this topic
  • A superb remote execution framework! SaltStack allows us to easily program numerous functions on top of it. For example, we developed a fast parallel asynchronous deployment tool that handles all software deployment, including interdependent service management.
  • Configuration management is now easy. We take advantage of this to automate (in tandem with AWS tools) the stand-up of all servers and services. It is also relatively easy to create new configuration management states for software not yet supported by the community (e.g. Grafana).
  • Flexibility. Numerous small utilities have been built which simply wrap around SaltStack to allow tedious tasks to become easy.
WC
William Cannon
Infrastructure Architect
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Cons
No answers on this topic
  • 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
Valentin Höbel | TrustRadius Reviewer
Valentin Höbel
Cloud Architect
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Support Rating
No answers on this topic
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.
Verified User
Anonymous
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
No answers on this topic
I've used shell scripts over ssh, custom in-house deployment tools, Chef, and SaltStack. I've evaluated Ansible, but I was never happy with performance over SSH. Chef's loose configuration data model and lack of philosophy and conventions around use makes it difficult for a team to share responsibility for configuration code. Needing to use additional tools to do orchestration for cross-host/agent dependency relationships made me look for more. SaltStack, while not as mature when I first tried it, impressed me with its speed and elegant design
Jeremy McMillan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Jeremy McMillan
Systems Administrator, Deployment Specialist Consultant
Read full review
Return on Investment
No answers on this topic
  • SaltStack has reduced the time it takes to deploy new machines for us 10-fold.
  • It is much easier for us to maintain compliance with industry standards with SaltStack.
  • No negative impacts!
Steven Marshall, RHCSA | TrustRadius Reviewer
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ScreenShots