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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Salt

    Score6.2 out of 10
    N/ABuilt on Python, Salt is an event-driven automation tool and framework to deploy, configure, and manage complex IT systems. Salt is used to automate common infrastructure administration tasks and ensure that all the components of infrastructure are operating in a consistent desired state.N/A
    Pricing
    Salt
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Salt
    Free Trial
    No
    Free/Freemium Version
    No
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    No
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup fee
    Additional Details—
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Salt
    Considered Both Products
    Open Source
    Chose Salt
    Puppet was working fine for our needs. We decided to make the switch after our operating system vendor decided to stop official support for SaltStack.
    Incentivized
    Chose Salt
    SaltStack is a newer product, so it learned some of the mistakes that Puppet made. It truly is a system that can respond to events as well as configure systems.
    Incentivized
    Chose Salt
    SaltStack beats all of the tools above since it is a "6-in-one" solution: Config Management, Orchestration, Automation, parallel sys administration, remote execution and cloud management.

    The other solutions only solve one or two problems.
    Incentivized
    Chose Salt
    I've used shell scripts over ssh, custom in-house deployment tools, Chef, and SaltStack. I've evaluated Ansible, but I was never happy with performance over SSH. Chef's loose configuration data model and lack of philosophy and conventions around use makes it difficult for a …
    Incentivized
    Chose Salt
    I have used the following:
    CFEngine
    Puppet
    Incentivized
    Chose Salt
    Chef and Puppet both require writing code, which I view as excessively involved for the task at hand. I have only needed to write pure python for a handful of Saltstack use cases - everything else has been configuration files.

    Ansible, while elegant and simple, simply does not …
    Incentivized
    Chose Salt
    We moved to SaltStack from Puppet about 3 years ago. Puppet just has too much of a learning curve and we inherited it from an old IT regime. We wanted something we could start fresh with. Our team has never looked back. SaltStack is so much easier for us to use and maintain.
    Incentivized
    Chose Salt
    Ansible and Salt have emerged around the same time, and are pretty close.

    Ansible pros:
    Incentivized
    Chose Salt
    I looked at Chef and Ansible but it was a long time ago and I don't remember the pros and cons compared to SaltStack.
    When I arrived at my company, Saltstack was already used in production so there has been no discussion about other deployment and automation solutions
    Incentivized
    Chose Salt
    • Puppet - ugly and heavy, ruby-based, although has the best set of production-ready modules and can be a good choice for big enterprise.
    • Chef - outdated, ruby-based.
    • Ansible - slow due to ssh transport, but is the best alternative for SaltStack.
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    Best Alternatives
    Salt
    Small Businesses
    HashiCorp Vagrant
    Score10 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Perforce Puppet
    Score8.9 out of 10
    Enterprises
    AWS Config
    Score7 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Salt
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.0
    (10 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Salt
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Open Source
    SaltStack is a very well architected toolset and framework for reliably managing distributed systems' complexity at varied scale. If the diversity of kind or number of assets is low, or the dependencies are bounded and simple, it might be overkill. Realization that you need SaltStack might come in the form of other tools, scripts, or jobs whose code has become difficult, unreliable, or unmaintainable. Rather than a native from-scratch SaltStack design, be aware that SaltStack can be added on to tools like Docker or Chef and optionally factor those tools out or other tools into the mix.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Open Source
    • Targeting is easy and yet extremely granular - I can target machines by name, role, operating system, init system, distro, regex, or any combination of the above.
    • Abstraction of OS, package manager and package details is far advanced beyond any other CRM I have seen. The ability to set one configuration for a package across multiple distros, and have it apply correctly no matter the distrospecific naming convention or package installation procedure, is amazing.
    • Abstraction of environments is similarly valuable - I can set a firewall rule to allow ssh from "management", and have that be defined as a specific IP range per dev, test, and prod.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Open Source
    • Managing network hardware should be more native and easy
    • SaltStack should buffer jobs and, when a client returns, make sure it is executed proberly
    • SaltStack should provide basic pillar and states structures to help get newbies started
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Open Source
    We haven't had to spend a lot of time talking to support, and we've only had one issue, which, when dealing with other vendors is actually not that bad of an experience.
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Open Source
    We moved to SaltStack from Puppet about 3 years ago. Puppet just has too much of a learning curve and we inherited it from an old IT regime. We wanted something we could start fresh with. Our team has never looked back. SaltStack is so much easier for us to use and maintain.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Open Source
    • We manage two complex highly available self-healing (all infrastructure and systems) environments using SaltStack. Only one person is needed to run SaltStack. That is a HUGE return on investment.
    • Building tooling on top of SaltStack has allowed us to share administrative abilities by role - e.g. employee X can deploy software Y. No need to call a sysadmin and etc.
    • Recovery from problems, or time to stand-up new systems is now counted in minutes (usually under eight) rather than hours. This is a strategic advantage for rolling out new services.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
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