Puppet Enteprise is an IT automation and configuration management solution that enables users to manage and automate infrastructure and complex workflows. The vendor states Puppet Enterprise combines both model‑based and task-based capabilities in a way that enables organizations to scale their multi-cloud infrastructure as their automation footprint grows, with more flexibility from both agent-based and agentless capabilities.
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Receptive.io (discontinued)
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Pendo Feedback (or Receptive / Receptive.io, acquired by Pendo in 2019) was a SaaS product demand intelligence platform used to collect product feedback and feature requests from customers as well as internal teams. Some years after the acquisition, the product was discontinued.
Puppet is good enough to get the job done, you can use it to automate deployments and maintain files and configurations, if this is all you're looking for it's great. If you're looking for more control over your systems as a whole without having to write your own scripts or install multiple configuration management systems then Puppet is not what you're looking for.
Receptive is very effective for multiple internal teams/department of a single product who need to scale their product feedback management effectively. We've been leveraging it for one of our products and it was so successful, that we implemented it with a second product. The main issue we ran into situationally with that was managing 2+ modules (products) in Receptive; it was a bit more difficult to present Receptive to two different customer bases/users (we couldn't change the appearance) and slightly confusing to do within the app (lots of filtering needed). I have heard that support of multiple modules is something that Receptive will likely be working on in the near future, so that's good news.
The setup of Puppet is a nightmare compared to ansible. Anyone watching a youtube video can easily set up ansible with minimal IT knowledge. All one needs is the source IP addresses and we are good to go. Setting up Puppet is a more hands-on task and pushing the puppet agents to all the boxes is another issue. If the installation and setup were simplified like ansible that would attract a lot of people to this platform
The syntax of the code for Puppet is not as easy as ansible. Ansible simply follows a YAML format and it's like typing in normal English. Even complicated tasks can be written by just understanding YAML syntax. Perhaps Puppet needs to revisit the lanugage used and try to come up with a much simpler lanugage for writing code. This will make day-to-day usage easier.
Puppet has top class support. You can simply mail them with their query and they will respond to your query in a timely manner. We do have enterprise license for puppet. Also there is a vibrant community for puppet out there. So even if you dont purchase a premium support option you can simply google your queries and get answers
HPSA is a licensed product and incurs significant upfront investment costs due to COTS licensing. Puppet Data Center Automation has a significantly lower upfront investment and product documentation is more readily available. Chef is a very similar offering, however, at the time our decision was considered, the adoption of Chef vs. Puppet was significantly less in the community.
We had UserVoice prior to Receptive but it was just too clunky and extensive for our needs. It was less about automation and still very manual work to process feedback. It also didn't provide collaboration levels that we needed for our internal teams to work together. ProdPad was a very clean tool but also didn't enable us to automate the process like Receptive does.
We were managing these enhancements in our support ticketing system, using spreadsheets, and it was TERRIBLE. Being able to tell a user "Great idea! Submit it to Feedback!" has saved my support team hundreds of hours.
We have reduced incoming support requests when the request is really an enhancement - the ability to have a "Suggest Features" widget in our software sends users straight to Feedback.
Because we can make some fields required, we can cut down on the need to reach back out to our users for clarification.