Chef vs SaltStack

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 third party sources out there for beginners to pick up. Not only that, there are also many plugins and configuration recipes made by the community.

Chef is cross-platform. Offering support for the biggest platforms out there: Linux, Windows and *nix.

Chef has an impressive list of companies using it's automation service. Among them is Facebook, Etsy, Ancestry.com, PharmMD and Yahoo.

Chef is centered around Git for it's configuration and deployments. Because of this, Chef also has great version control capabilities through Git.

Chef was released in 2009, which is relatively a long time ago for software. Since then it has been through several versions and many bug fixes and tests. All of this can make Chef more appealing to teams who are looking for stability and maturity, which are things that Chef brings on the table.

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.

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.

Salt can run agentless just like ansible, allowing it to manage devices that you can't run an agent on (routers/switches, etc).

Salt can communicate with clients through agents called minions, or through SSH.

With Salt you can have multiple layers of masters which result in an arrangement which distributes load and increases redundancy. Upstream masters can then control downstream masters and their minions.

Salt has support for Windows, Linux and Unix. Though it's fair to say that it's easier to use and it's more useful in Unix and Linux systems.

Salt works around a Salt master which has multiple agents (Salt minions) that have a persistent connection to the master. Because of this persistent connection, commands to the master are fast to reach the minions. Furthermore, the minions also save various data to the cache in order to make execution faster.

When compared against other tools to run the same actions, Salt almost always completes the actions in significantly less time.