We performed a comparison between SaltStack and VMware Aria Automation based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat, Microsoft, HCLTech and others in Configuration Management."It's normally able to meet 100% expectations of our customers."
"Autopilot is a great feature. Most users are looking for a zero-touch deployment."
"The performance of Microsoft Intune is good."
"It is a stable solution."
"Great for software update needs, operating system version updates, and security policy enforcement."
"It has helped with compliance. It has helped to ensure that devices comply with the organization's policy. If they are not compliant and secure, they cannot access the resources."
"The initial setup is not overly complex or difficult."
"I like the fact that it's integrated with the rest of the Microsoft products, so customers can manage it from their Office 365 portal or Azure portal."
"The automation functionality has been most valuable. With a click of a button, we are able to automate provisioning, the build of new hardware and apply patches. These are all extremely important and differentiated tasks that can be automated in SaltStack."
"It is a highly stable solution."
"The ability to programmatically describe the desired state of a single, or an entire fleet of servers, on-premises, and in a cloud environment."
"SaltStack has given us the ability to deal with systems at scale and rectify issues at scale."
"We monitor the configurations against CIS standards. We run CIS benchmarks and maintain configurations with higher CIS values for each server."
"I want to build automation that is intelligent, part of the fabric of our environment, and is somewhat self-sustaining. I think SaltStack can help me do this."
"The product’s most valuable feature is its ability to provide environmental security."
"If you do a deployment for a proof of concept, it is simple."
"The automation of the redundant tasks and the implementation of ServiceNow are huge for us..."
"Using the VMware vRealize self-service portal, we can better manage the lifecycle."
"The extensibility of the solution when it comes to writing your own ABX actions is a valuable feature. You can write it in PowerShell, JavaScript, or Python, which is great."
"We have faster delivery times through its automation."
"Instead of deploying a VM from a template and going through the process of configuring that VM, with vRA we're able to click once and it does everything: grabs an IP, joins it to the domain, loads whatever configuration agents are needed. It does all of that without manual intervention."
"The solution has helped us to increase infrastructure agility, mostly because, in addition to it being able to do its thing on its own, it has tie-ins to other parts of our CICD pipeline. We use Jenkins for our build process which, of course, vRA has plugins for, to be able to integrate with it. We use Chef and there is the Chef build as part of our image that we standardized to deploy, and that can tie in with our section of the pipeline that it does for applications."
"We needed vRA to easily integrate with our hypervisor, orchestration, security (tenant segmentation, PCI), workflows, custom code, and internal monitoring/management tools. Since we didn’t have time to develop our own web front-end during the development sprints, vRA saved considerable time and resource cycles. Its ability to easily integrate with all of the VMware cloud products as well as public cloud providers, like AWS and Azure, out-of-the-box, makes it an even more powerful tool."
"There are items that require improvements. One is the controls from iOS."
"I'd suggest adding more features for macOS in Intune. There should be more functionality for managing macOS. There should be a better capability for pushing things down on macOS. Currently, Intune is not capable of managing macOS at the same level as Windows."
"It needs incorporation of Knox, ZeroTouch, etc."
"The configuration could be better by consolidating options and making it simpler."
"The solution could improve by having better integration with Apple."
"Onboarding of endpoint devices is not straightforward. The onboarding process was a little heavier than I thought it would be. That's the key improvement area. Obviously, the more control you have over the devices, the better it is."
"It would be great if Intune offered better data protection controls for BYOD Windows PCs."
"Reporting could be improved. It needs to be more expensive and robust."
"SaltStack's features are minimal."
"It is difficult to set up."
"This solution could be integrated with more hardware for an improved offering."
"Web UI."
"Its configuration process could be better."
"A hardened set of tests would be much appreciated."
"There is a little bit of pain when it comes to libraries and what is needed to run the product."
"It would be better if VMware would provide API documentation for developers and customers on the Internet."
"My impression of its stability is "middle of the road." We've had some issues where it seems to be a little bit sensitive, where deployments fail and we don't really know a specific reason why. We'll dig through logs and try and figure out what's going on, but it's not always apparent as to why it failed. And you can kick it off again and it'll succeed. So stability could be better."
"The solution could be lighter. As an administrator, I would like to simplify the number of services I need to deploy. They took a significant step in that direction by removing all the Windows dependencies that we had in the past, but there are still a lot of services consuming resources."
"I have not found this solution to be user-friendly. It's really complicated. The demo shows that you can automate anything but they only show basic scenarios. If you want to do anything more complicated than that, it becomes very complicated to set up."
"VMware Aria Automation could improve reporting of the policies. They are difficult to customize. We have many policies but they are not able to be modified to what we want."
"The initial setup was complex from beginning to delivery. The current version is a bit more complex than version 7 to deploy."
"The stability is okay, but could be improved. We sometimes receive strange errors, which can only be solved with specialists."
"I don't think it's intuitive or user-friendly. I think it's a good tool. Any automation tool, these days, the learning curve is kind of high. You're teaching sysadmins who never developed stuff. Maybe they modified a little bit of code and now you tell them, "Hey, here's the tool, use it." But you have to know a little bit of DevOps. So you have to train them how to do the scripting."
SaltStack is ranked 14th in Configuration Management with 33 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 133 reviews. SaltStack is rated 8.2, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of SaltStack writes "Orchestration tool that powers automation of processes with the click of a button". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Automation writes "Allows for a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment to suit our customers". SaltStack is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, HashiCorp Terraform, Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and ServiceNow, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director, Morpheus and OpenNebula.
We monitor all Configuration Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
