HashiCorp Terraform vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

HashiCorp Terraform

HashiCorp Terraform

122 Reviews and Ratings

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

258 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
HashiCorp Terraform	Score 8.5 out of 10	N/A	Terraform from HashiCorp is a cloud infrastructure automation tool that enables users to create, change, and improve production infrastructure, and it allows infrastructure to be expressed as code. It codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned. It is available Open Source, and via Cloud and Self-Hosted editions.	$0
Ansible	Score 8.9 out of 10	N/A	The 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

HashiCorp Terraform

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Editions & Modules

Open Source: $0
Team & Governance: $20/user
per user/per month
Enterprise: Contact sales team

Basic Tower: 5,000
per year
Enterprise Tower: 10,000
per year
Premium Tower: 14,000
per year

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
HashiCorp Terraform	Ansible
Free Trial
No	No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	HashiCorp Terraform	Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Considered Both Products	HashiCorp Terraform Guillermo Buritica Tobon Consultant - Site Reliability Engineering Manager (SRE) - Managed Services Chose HashiCorp Terraform Actually both products work very well. We use Terraform for speed and Ansible for configuration management both products work really well together Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose HashiCorp Terraform Terraform was more preferred over Ansible as it is considerably more intutive. Helpful? Verified User Manager Chose HashiCorp Terraform We have used Vagrant to develop our application in a virtual box environment and prepare it to be packed with Packer. The image created from these two tools will be deployed by Terraform. We are using Consul for service discovery and as a job locking so we don't have two jobs or … Helpful? Verified User Professional Chose HashiCorp Terraform AWS CloudFormation is better if you just want to stick with AWS because it's integration with AWS is better, provides auto-rollback in case of failures, and has GUI to manage and view the stacks built. Terraform is better when we want to stay cloud-agnostic. Terraform is better … Incentivized Helpful? KM Kulbhushan Mayer Senior Solution Architect Chose HashiCorp Terraform SIngle tools for both tools, no need to remember two different syntaxes. Incentivized Helpful? Jeffrey Severance Senior Solutions Engineer Chose HashiCorp Terraform Terraform is the solid leader in the space. It allows you to do more then just provisioning within a pre-existing servers. It is more extensible and has more providers available than it competitors. It is also open source and more adopted by the community then some of the other … Incentivized Helpful? Aiman Najjar DevOps Engineer Chose HashiCorp Terraform - Terraform syntax is much easier to read and learn than Cloud Formation. - Terraform already supports AWS as well as several other cloud providers. - Terraform is backed by a great and supportive open-source community. Incentivized Helpful?	Ansible Verified User Engineer Chose Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform AAP doesn't truly stack up against any of the products mentioned except for Aria Automation. But, it is extensible and open and has a lower cost to entry. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform It is a great way to standup servers in the cloud which we can finish configs with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Incentivized Helpful? WF William Finley Consultant Chose Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Ansible and Terraform are similar; however, Ansible is great with deployment with or without the use of a tower. Incentivized Helpful? JR James Russell Cloud Architect Chose Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Red Hat automation platform was selected after using Ansible core for several years. we write playbooks for windows and RHEL systems and needed a supported solution vs using AWX. Incentivized Helpful? Kulbhushan Mayer Co-Founder & Technical Architect Chose Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Push Based Approach Easy to right Code Fast Setup & Upgrade Incentivized Helpful? Aiman Najjar DevOps Consultant Chose Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 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 Helpful?
Top Pros	Pro Cloud providers Pro Open source Pro Infrastructure as code	Pro Configuration management Pro Fast deployment Pro Excellent documentation
Top Cons	Minus Learning curve Minus Version control Minus Major upgrades	Minus Red hat Minus Windows support Minus Package manager

TrustRadius Insights
	HashiCorp Terraform	Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Highlights	Research Team Insight Published April 24, 2020 Ansible and Terraform are both configuration management tools designed to help create and maintain the runtime environment of applications. Both technologies are used by companies of all sizes, particularly those that engage in software development. Terraform is known for robust orchestration features and is popular with organizations that need application runtime environments to be both very particular and very stable. Terraform maintains required resources and dependencies. Ansible is capable of handling both runtime orchestration and configuration management. It has stronger configuration management features, though, so it is most popular with businesses that benefit from its software provisioning and configuration management features. Features Ansible and Terraform both include configuration management features but have a few standout features of their own. Though they compete in the same space, there is not much feature overlap between the two technologies. Ansible has robust configuration management features and flexible orchestration features. As a result, Ansible can be an all-in-one configuration management technology. Ansible also offers strong automation features that can help users save time. Terraform provides advanced orchestration features to ensure a stable runtime environment for application development and testing. Using Terraform, users can install and develop infrastructure easily and quickly. Limitations Though Ansible and Terraform both provide configuration management or orchestration features, they also have a few limitations that are important to consider. Ansible is not as advanced as Terraform when it comes to orchestration features. Additionally, until the highest pricing tier, Ansible doesn’t offer 24×7 support, meaning users may have to rely on community support at times. Weak support can be an issue as Ansible has a complex UI that makes implementation and training difficult. Terraform’s API changes frequently, which can make integrations challenging to implement. Terraform also has limited documentation, which further complicates integrations. The insufficient documentation can also be an issue because Terraform has a high learning curve, making it a challenging technology for new users to grasp. Pricing Ansible offers two packages for businesses, including Ansible’s entire suite of automation products. The standard package includes all essential features as well as 8×5 customer support. The premium package includes 24×7 support. Both packages are priced depending on the business. A free trial is available for users that want to try the technology before purchasing. Terraform provides a free version for individual users, as well as 3 prices for teams and businesses. The teams package costs $20 per user per month and includes basic features along with role and team management. The $70 per user per month package includes a resource estimation tool. Lastly, the enterprise package is priced depending on the business and consists of an on-premises option. Which is Right for you? The most significant difference between Ansible and Terraform is that Terraform offers reliable orchestration tools during runtime, while Ansible offers robust configuration management tools. Businesses that prefer one of those feature sets over the other should make their selection based on that. Ansible does have some orchestration tools, so it may be ideal for organizations that need orchestration and configuration management tools but only want a single solution. Many businesses use both Ansible and Terraform. This solution is ideal for organizations that can benefit from the features of both technologies.

Best Alternatives
	HashiCorp Terraform	Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Small Businesses	HashiCorp Vagrant Score 9.9 out of 10	HashiCorp Vagrant Score 9.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Ansible Score 8.9 out of 10	AWS CloudFormation Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises	Ansible Score 8.9 out of 10	AWS Config Score 7.2 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	HashiCorp Terraform	Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Likelihood to Recommend	6.3 (25 ratings)	9.0 (63 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	- (0 ratings)	8.6 (2 ratings)
Usability	8.0 (1 ratings)	7.3 (1 ratings)
Performance	9.4 (3 ratings)	8.7 (5 ratings)
Support Rating	7.4 (5 ratings)	7.3 (3 ratings)
Implementation Rating	- (0 ratings)	8.2 (1 ratings)
Ease of integration	9.2 (3 ratings)	8.6 (5 ratings)

User Testimonials
	HashiCorp Terraform	Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Likelihood to Recommend	HashiCorp 8 because it's currently best-in-class and is completely essential to use in contrast to not expressing your infrastructure as code. That said, new contenders are nipping at its heels, and I expect stronger tools to emerge in the coming years. Hopefully the Terraform team is able to keep pace. Incentivized Jude Allred Co-Founder & CTA Read full review	Red Hat The thing I mentioned earlier where we're constantly dealing with federal regulations or new agents that they want us to install and deploy and just getting those out in a consistent manner in a canned installation via Playbook is ideal Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Pros	HashiCorp Terraform is cloud agnostic. Just select the suitable provider for the cloud and it will do the job. Templating is possible to make the Terraform templates reusable. Variables can be created to make the templates generic so that it can be reused for different environments or resources. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Red Hat Makes it easy to create and share automation in one central hub. Ansible content collections give me the ability to reuse code, making it rapid to carry out complex IT processes. Event-driven automation allows me to reduce manual tasks: it is rapid to know which action to take and respond automatically by receiving events from external apps automatically. TM Tim McGlynn Principal Systems Engineer Read full review
Cons	HashiCorp The errors generated by the plan and preview commands are pretty cryptic, it can be hard for newcomers to the scripting language to understand how to address problems. Access controls around workspaces is limited which makes it harder to secure reduce the scope of teams ability. Analytics around user usage, applies and plans would be helpful for managemenet. Incentivized Ben Carter Vice President Enterprise Architecture Read full review	Red Hat Workflows should have more flexible paths than just success or failure. The upgrade process can be challenging with differences in security and environment. There is an opportunity to add CICD functionality into the tool. For development, it would be nice to have the option of editing a repo directly from AAP to allow quick tests/reruns. Then, allow it to push the updates back or create a new branch/PR in GitHub. The RBAC is good but could use improvements. One example would be an option that allows admins to assume the access of another user to validate it works as expected. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	HashiCorp No answers on this topic	Red Hat We are deploying Ansible at all levels of the organization Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Usability	HashiCorp I love Terraform and I think it has done some great things for people that are working to automate their provisioning processes and also for those that are in the process of moving to the cloud or managing cloud resources. There are some quirks to HCL that take a little bit of getting used to and give picking up Terraform a little bit of a learning curve, thus the rating Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Red Hat the yaml is easy to write and most people can be taught to write basic playbooks in a few weeks Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Performance	HashiCorp Terraform's performance is quite amazing when it comes to deployment of resources in AWS. Of course, the deployment times depend on various parameters like the number of resources to deploy and different regions to deploy. Terraform cannot control that. The only minor drawback probably shows up when a terraform job is terminated mid way. Then in many cases, time-consuming manual cleanup is required. Incentivized Dhruba Jyoti Nag Associate 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 Dylan Cauwels DevOps Engineer Read full review
Support Rating	HashiCorp I have yet to have an opportunity to reach out directly to HashiCorp for support on Terraform. However, I have spent a great deal of time considering their documentation as I use the tool. This opinion is based solely on that. I find the Terraform documentation to have great breadth but lacking in depth in many areas. I appreciate that all of the tool's resources have an entry in the docs but often the examples are lacking. Often, the examples provided are very basic and prompt additional exploration. Also, the links in the documentation often link back to the same page where one might expect to be linked to a different source with additional information. Incentivized Michael Jenkins Senior Systems Reliability Engineer 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 Chris Saenz Lead System Engineer Read full review
Implementation Rating	HashiCorp No answers on this topic	Red Hat I spoke on this topic today! Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Alternatives Considered	HashiCorp Terraform is the solid leader in the space. It allows you to do more then just provisioning within a pre-existing servers. It is more extensible and has more providers available than it competitors. It is also open source and more adopted by the community then some of the other solutions that are available in the market place. Incentivized Jeffrey Severance Senior Solutions Engineer Read full review	Red Hat AAP doesn't truly stack up against any of the products mentioned except for Aria Automation. But, it is extensible and open and has a lower cost to entry. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Return on Investment	HashiCorp we are able to deploy our infrastructure in a couple of ours in an automated and repeatable way, before this could take weeks if the work was done manually and was a lot of error prone. having the state file, you can see a diff of what things have changed manually out side of Terraform which is a huge plus if state file gets corrupted, it is very hard to debug or restore it without an impact or spending hours .. writing big scale code can be very challenging and hard to be efficient so it's usable by the whole team Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Red Hat Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform offers automation and ML tools that allow me to automate complex IT tasks. Through automation analytics, it is seamless to gain full visibility into automation performance allowing me to make informed decisions. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform allows me to move rapidly from insights to action. Creating and sharing automation content in one place unify a team in one place hence enhancing real-time collaboration. Verified User Anonymous Read full review
ScreenShots	HashiCorp Terraform Screenshots