What is the best alternative to Puppet ?
Pro Continuous configuration - dedicated to production
Rudder checks every rule that has been set up to keep it compliant over time. It is a tool made to be used in production. It's not a dev tool where there is no continuity constraint.
Pro Web UI + CLI + API
There is 3 ways to use Rudder. The biggest surprise is that everything that can be done with code is also possible with the web interface, without knowing anything about development or automation, generally speaking.
Pro Light agent developed in C - up to 10 000 nodes
The agent has nearly no impact concerning resources and that is the reason why Rudder is able to manage thousands of servers without any performance issues.
Con Community growing but not very big at this day
There is more and more people getting involved in the Rudder community, but it's nothing compared to Puppet community so far.
Con Not a one-shot deployment tool
Rudder is overkill if the goal is only to push one-time actions. Thankully, a plugin is available to connect Rudder with Ansible and enhance its capability.
Pro Friendly and open community
Salt has an impressive welcoming and active community of users. There are user groups all over the world (Stockhom, Silicon Valley, Paris, and lots more), and an active live chat.
Pro Easy to read output
Salt's configuration files and setups are organized into YAML files. This makes them very easy to read and understand since YAML is considered very readable.
Pro Agentless via SSH is an option
Salt can run agentless just like ansible, allowing it to manage devices that you can't run an agent on (routers/switches, etc).
Pro Agentless
Ansible does not use agents. Instead, all master-agent communications are handled via SSH commands or through the Paramiko module which provides a Python interface to SSH.
Pro Gentle learning curve
Ansible is agentless, making it quick and painless to setup. Ansible has clear and detailed documentation and provides plenty of built-in modules. Its DSL is obtained using YAML and a familiar template system.
Pro Support for major cloud providers
Ansible supports managing major cloud devices (AWS, RackSpace, Digital Ocean, OpenStack) through a collection of modules which are available.
Con Somewhat weak documentation
Ansible is still relatively new, as far as server automation tools go. This is the reason that many users have found it's documentation lacking in some parts. Although this is mitigated by the fact that it's very easy to learn to use.
Con No Python API available, despite the fact that Ansible is written in Python
Despite being written and taking good advantage of the python environment, Ansible offers no python api for programming, and does not make it possible to follow best practices for writing custom Ansible modules.
Con Slow
Compared to other tools, Ansible requires more time to complete the same actions.
Pro Cross-platform
Chef is cross-platform. Offering support for the biggest platforms out there: Linux, Windows and *nix.
Pro Popular choice among large companies
Chef has an impressive list of companies using it's automation service. Among them is Facebook, Etsy, Ancestry.com, PharmMD and Yahoo.
Pro Large community
Chef has a relatively large community. One of the reasons for it is the fact that it's a pretty old and mature tool. Chef, originally released in 2009, is a more mature product. Being popular and with a large and dedicated community means that Chef has lots and lots of resources and guides from...
Con Ties you to Ruby
Chef is written in Ruby and its CLI uses a Ruby-based DSL. In order to fully use and customize it you need to use Ruby as Chef does not give users any other choice when it comes to languages to use to configure it.
Con Steep learning curve
Chef has a steeper learning curve than many of its competitors, making it a more difficult tool for the non-devs of a team (such as sysadmins) to work with. For some teams, the added cost of teaching Chef to the team may outweigh the benefits.
Pro Fast
The cfengine agent is written in C and has some of the fastest execution times around.
Pro Scaleable
The decentralized architecture and innate speed allow cfengine to easily scale to thousands of nodes.
Pro Helpful community
Although the community is not as big as puppets its very friendly and helpful to get thing's fixed or to point you in the right direction.
Con Lacking ready to use modules like puppet
Because there is no ECOsystem like the puppetforge to share code you have to figure things out for yourself, which is good if you want to learn things but bad when you need to get things done.
Con Steep learning curve
It takes time and lots of practice to learn. Documentation is a bit lacking and if there are no examples to look to, it's that much more difficult to work with.
Pro Free and open source
GitLab is a free and open source project licensed under MIT. Source code for Enterprise Edition can be found here and Community Edition here.
Pro At feature parity with GitHub
Gitlab is very close to Github in use and feel, written in Ruby on Rails, open source and hosted on Github as well as on GitLab.com
Pro Good web UI
GitLab's UI is clean and intuitive. Each view is designed to not fill the screen with useless information. It displays the activity in a feed-type way in the most prominent part of the view. On top of that, there's a toolbar with buttons which can filter this feed by pushes, merge events...
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