Receptive.io (discontinued) vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

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.

Incentivized

For automating the configuration of a multi-node, multi-domain (Storage, VM, Container) cluster, Ansible is still the best choice; however, it is not an easy task to achieve. Creating the infrastructure layer, i.e., creating network nodes, VMs, and K8s clusters, still can't be achieved via Ansible. Additionally, error handling remains complex to resolve.

Incentivized

• Captures feature requests from customers
• Organize feature requests
• Communicate progress updates to customers

Incentivized

• Debugging is easy, as it tells you exactly within your job where the job failed, even when jumping around several playbooks.
• Ansible seems to integrate with everything, and the community is big enough that if you are unsure how to approach converting a process into a playbook, you can usually find something similar to what you are trying to do.
• Security in AAP seems to be pretty straightforward. Easy to organize and identify who has what permissions or can only see the content based on the organization they belong to.

Incentivized

• Filtering in general is not easy
• I would like to be able to create a leadership priority dashboard
• I would like to know easily when something has been linked to Jira

Incentivized

• I can't think of any right now because I've heard about the Lightspeed and I'm really excited about that. Ansible has been really solid for us. We haven't had any issues. Maybe the upgrade process, but other than that, as coming from a user, it's awesome.
• Give out Lightspeed for free.

Incentivized

Even is if it's a great tool, we are looking to renew our licence for our production servers only. The product is very expensive to use, so we might look for a cheaper solution for our non-production servers. One of the solution we are looking, is AWX, free, and similar to AAP. This is be perfect for our non-production servers.

Incentivized

It's overall pretty easy to use foe all the applications I've mentioned before: configuring hosts, installing packages through tools like apt, applying yaml, making changes across wide groups of hosts, etc. Its not a 10 because of the inconveinience of the yaml setup, and the time to write is not worth it for something applied one time to only a few hosts

Incentivized

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

I have not had a lot of contact with support, but when I do it's quick and accurate info.

Incentivized

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

I spoke on this topic today!

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

• 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.

Incentivized

• POSITIVE: currently used by the IT department and some others, but we want others to use it.
• NEGATIVE: We need less technical output for the non-technical. It should be controllable or a setting within playbooks. We also need more graphical responses (non-technical).
• POSITIVE: Always being updated and expanded (CaC, EDA, Policy as Code, execution environments, AI, etc..)

Incentivized