We performed a comparison between Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and SaltStack based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Network Automation solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"The most valuable feature is the policy CSPs."
"It works pretty well for us."
"In terms of technical support, you will get an immediate response."
"Intune is effective because of the configuration management and endpoint security it provides. The graphical interface makes it easier to configure and deploy devices."
"Intune's most valuable features are the device, compliance, and configuration policies."
"A valuable feature is user enrollment, where users can enroll their devices in their organizations themselves."
"It's easy to manage and easy to configure."
"Intune device restriction policies enable me to enforce limitations on the device, like blocking the mobile camera or restricting the employees from using and inserting USB devices, including thumb drives and flash drives."
"Since it is in YAML, if I have to explain it to somebody else, they can easily understand it."
"I like the fact that Ansible is agentless."
"The user interface is well-built and very easy to navigate around."
"Installing it is a PIP command. So, it's pretty easy. It is a one liner."
"Role-based access control and agentless architecture are the main features which may attract users."
"It was easy to read and learn. It is a YAML-based syntax, which makes it easily understand and pick up."
"I like Ansible's ease of use. If you have Linux skills, you can create a reusable template for the dependencies and other configurations. I can store the templates in a repository and share them with my customers or other developers. It's a popular solution, so there is a large user base that can share templates."
"It has improved our organization through provisioning and security hardening. When we do get a new VM, we have been able to bring on a provisioned machine in less than a day. This morning alone, I provisioned two machines within an hour. I am talking about hardening, installing antivirus software on it, and creating user accounts because the Playbooks were predesigned. From the time we got the servers to the actual hand-off, it takes less than an hour. We are talking about having the servers actually authenticate Red Hat Satellites and run the yum updates. All of that can be done within an hour."
"We monitor the configurations against CIS standards. We run CIS benchmarks and maintain configurations with higher CIS values for each server."
"SaltStack has given us the ability to deal with systems at scale and rectify issues at scale."
"It is a highly stable solution."
"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."
"The ability to programmatically describe the desired state of a single, or an entire fleet of servers, on-premises, and in a cloud environment."
"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."
"The reporting needs to be a bit more interactive."
"The UI also needs improvements because it is complex for end-users. We have had feedback from a few users in our organization who found the UI is not feasible for tracking and analyzing all the processes and monitoring all the devices."
"The product needs to upgrade itself when the server is overloaded."
"More integration with monitoring tools is needed."
"Due to the abundance of features, there's a lot to organize, which makes managing and setting up the solution challenging. The setup is immense, and it would be good to see improvement in this area."
"Regarding mobile devices, Intune is good, but there are other services that I would say are ahead of Intune from an administration and reporting point of view."
"I would like to see the ability to deploy custom packages as a Windows 64-bit package, as opposed to the Windows 32-bit, which is the only one available now."
"The closest Microsoft Intune can be to GPOs, the better. There needs to be more granularity on application deployments. However, they have done better recently with the application deployments."
"If we have a problem with some file and we need to get Red Hat to analyze the issue and the file is 100GBs, we'll have an issue since we need to provide a log file for them to analyze. If it is around 12GB or 13GB, we can easily upload it to the Red Hat portal. With more than 100GBs, it will fail. I heard it should cover up to 250GB for an upload, however, I find it fails. Therefore, Red Hat needs to provide a way to handle this."
"The communication on it is not probably where it could be. We could use some real life examples where we could point customers to them and say, "This is what you are trying to do. If you follow these steps, it would at least get you started a bit quicker.""
"What I'm trying to figure out, personally, is, when doing mass updates, how I can parallelize that a little bit better. It seems right now - and maybe, it's a shortcoming on my end - that I run through one set of servers, and then another set of servers, ad then another set of servers, but it seems like I could throw a lot of these checks out. Different types of servers, like web servers and DB servers, if I could parallelize that a little bit to make everything run a little bit more efficiently, that would help."
"The solution should add a nice self-service portal."
"The area which I feel can be improved is the custom modules. For example, there are something like 106 official modules available in the Ansible library. A year ago, that number was somewhere around 58. While Ansible is improving day by day, this can be improved more. For instance, when you need to configure in the cloud, you need to write up a module for that."
"The documentation for the installation step of deployment, OpenStack, etc., and these things have to be a bit more detailed."
"From Red Hat Insights point of view, the product is not on top as it is not responding as per the demand...Like on cloud platforms, you can see the main parts of Red Hat Insights, along with the inventory of all your apps. So, that is missing in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform."
"For Ansible Tower, there are three tiers with ten nodes. I would like them to expand those ten nodes to 20, because ten nodes is not enough to test on."
"This solution could be integrated with more hardware for an improved offering."
"Its configuration process could be better."
"Web UI."
"SaltStack's features are minimal."
"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 is difficult to set up."
More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 2nd in Network Automation with 58 reviews while SaltStack is ranked 6th in Network Automation with 33 reviews. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6, while SaltStack is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Capable of broad integrations with easy-to-operate infrastructure and user controls". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SaltStack writes "Orchestration tool that powers automation of processes with the click of a button". Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, Microsoft Configuration Manager, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps and BMC TrueSight Server Automation, whereas SaltStack is most compared with VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Configuration Manager, HashiCorp Terraform, Red Hat Satellite and BMC TrueSight Server Automation. See our Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs. SaltStack report.
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We monitor all Network Automation 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.
