CFEngine vs. Salt Project

CFEngine

CFEngine

3 Reviews and Ratings

Salt Project

Salt Project

35 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
CFEngine	Score 9.0 out of 10	N/A	CFEngine is an open source configuration management system.	N/A
Salt	Score 6.2 out of 10	N/A	Built 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

CFEngine

Salt Project

Editions & Modules

No answers on this topic

No answers on this topic

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
CFEngine	Salt
Free Trial
No	No
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	CFEngine	Salt Project
Considered Both Products	CFEngine No answer on this topic	Salt Verified User Anonymous 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 Helpful? Verified User Anonymous 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 Helpful? Valentin Höbel Cloud Architect 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 Helpful? Jeremy McMillan Systems Administrator, Deployment Specialist Consultant 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 Helpful? WC William Cannon Infrastructure Architect Chose Salt I have used the following: CFEngine Puppet Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous 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 Helpful? Steven Marshall, RHCSA Director of IT 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 Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Salt Ansible and Salt have emerged around the same time, and are pretty close. Ansible pros: Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous 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 Helpful? Ilya Trushchenko DevOps Engineer, Team Lead 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 Helpful?

Best Alternatives
	CFEngine	Salt Project
Small Businesses	HashiCorp Terraform Score 8.5 out of 10	HashiCorp Terraform Score 8.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Ansible Score 9.2 out of 10	Ansible Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises	Ansible Score 9.2 out of 10	Ansible Score 9.2 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	CFEngine	Salt Project
Likelihood to Recommend	- (0 ratings)	8.0 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	- (0 ratings)	8.2 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	CFEngine	Salt Project
Likelihood to Recommend	No answers on this topic	Managing heterogeneous environments of large numbers of nodes, especially nodes which may need sudden changes (security updates, for instance), or frequent replacement, is a strength for Saltstack. Simplicity is not a strength for Saltstack. In a homogenous environment (all CentOS 7, for example, with no Debian or Windows) I might recommend using Ansible instead - it is less flexible and granular, but simpler to configure. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Pros	No answers on this topic	A superb remote execution framework! SaltStack allows us to easily program numerous functions on top of it. For example, we developed a fast parallel asynchronous deployment tool that handles all software deployment, including interdependent service management. Configuration management is now easy. We take advantage of this to automate (in tandem with AWS tools) the stand-up of all servers and services. It is also relatively easy to create new configuration management states for software not yet supported by the community (e.g. Grafana). Flexibility. Numerous small utilities have been built which simply wrap around SaltStack to allow tedious tasks to become easy. Incentivized WC William Cannon Infrastructure Architect Read full review
Cons	No answers on this topic	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 Valentin Höbel Cloud Architect Read full review
Support Rating	No answers on this topic	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. Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Alternatives Considered	No answers on this topic	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 team to share responsibility for configuration code. Needing to use additional tools to do orchestration for cross-host/agent dependency relationships made me look for more. SaltStack, while not as mature when I first tried it, impressed me with its speed and elegant design Incentivized Jeremy McMillan Systems Administrator, Deployment Specialist Consultant Read full review
Return on Investment	No answers on this topic	SaltStack has reduced the time it takes to deploy new machines for us 10-fold. It is much easier for us to maintain compliance with industry standards with SaltStack. No negative impacts! Incentivized Steven Marshall, RHCSA Director of IT Read full review
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