SaltStack VS Ansible

Compare SaltStack vs Ansible and see what are their differences.

Ansible

Ansible is a radically simple IT automation platform that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy and maintain. Automate everything from code deployment to network configuration to cloud management, in a language that approaches plain English, using SSH, with no agents to install on remote systems. https://docs.ansible.com. (by ansible)
Stream - Scalable APIs for Chat, Feeds, Moderation, & Video.
Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure.
getstream.io
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InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads
InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
www.influxdata.com
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SaltStack Ansible
48 411
14,597 65,576
0.4% 0.6%
9.9 9.8
5 days ago 5 days ago
Python Python
Apache License 2.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 only
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

SaltStack

Posts with mentions or reviews of SaltStack. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-06-17.

Ansible

Posts with mentions or reviews of Ansible. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-05-15.
  • SDK-Driven Development: A Litmus Test for Good Software Design
    3 projects | dev.to | 15 May 2025
    Also for systems administration and DevOps, I first used Ansible to streamline the management of our servers. Writing playbooks is OK, but going beyond that to convert them to roles is a good practice from collaboration perspective. This SDK approach worked quite well for me and my team. Now, I am developing NixOS modules for various services we deploy. In both cases, the goal is to compose well-defined and documented modules (SDK) into a complete system in a few lines of code (application).
  • Getting Started with DevOps
    14 projects | dev.to | 15 Apr 2025
    Ansible,
  • Again self-hosting! on k3s
    4 projects | dev.to | 15 Apr 2025
    You can use GitHub repos as RSS links and received notification about new releases. If you're using miniflux just past https://github.com/ansible/ansible/releases.atom
  • That's a Lot of YAML
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Apr 2025
    That said, I can't readily imagine why you couldn't do exactly what you said because the AnsibleModule[1] contract is JSON over stdin/stdout (and one can write Ansible modules in any programming language[2] - they just default to Python)

    1: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v2.18.4/lib/ansible/...

    2: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible-core/2.18/dev_guide/develop... and https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v2.18.4/test/integra...

  • The Pain That Is GitHub Actions
    39 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Mar 2025
  • Top 17 DevOps AI Tools [2025]
    4 projects | dev.to | 12 Mar 2025
    ​​Ansible provides streamlined automation for IT orchestration and configuration management through its declarative language. Teams can efficiently define and execute automation tasks, ensuring consistent environment management. This tool provides simplicity and effectiveness making it a valuable tool for managing complex IT infrastructures at scale.
  • Let's Build Together: A Local Playground for Apache Polaris
    13 projects | dev.to | 24 Feb 2025
    A key aspect of this starter kit is its comprehensive automation using Ansible. The polaris-forge-setup directory houses Ansible playbooks that:
  • Automating Deployment of Flask and PostgreSQL on KVM with Terraform and Ansible
    5 projects | dev.to | 10 Dec 2024
    Hi, in this post, we will use Libvirt with Terraform to provision 2 KVM locally and after that, we will Deploy Flask App & PostgreSQL using Ansible.
  • Getting Started with Ansible: A Complete Guide to IT Automation
    2 projects | dev.to | 26 Nov 2024
    Ansible GitHub Repository
  • Kubernetes homelab - Learning by doing, Part 6: Automation
    2 projects | dev.to | 9 Nov 2024
    Ansible is an open-source tool that excels in infrastructure configuration. With an agentless architecture (no services need to be installed on the managed machines), it communicates with machines over SSH.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing SaltStack and Ansible you can also consider the following projects:

Rundeck - Enable Self-Service Operations: Give specific users access to your existing tools, services, and scripts

pyinfra - 🔧 pyinfra turns Python code into shell commands and runs them on your servers. Execute ad-hoc commands and write declarative operations. Target SSH servers, local machine and Docker containers. Fast and scales from one server to thousands.

Cloud-Init - unofficial mirror of Ubuntu's cloud-init

kubernetes - Production-Grade Container Scheduling and Management

Fabric - Simple, Pythonic remote execution and deployment.

Stream - Scalable APIs for Chat, Feeds, Moderation, & Video.
Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure.
getstream.io
featured
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads
InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
www.influxdata.com
featured

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