Compare tools side by side · TechInTrends

Agent-based declarative config management; Perforce moved official builds behind a commercial EULA in 2025.

Agentless automation over SSH with YAML playbooks; the most widely used configuration management tool.

Industry-standard first-boot initialization for cloud VMs: users, packages, files and scripts.

Builds identical machine images (AMIs, VM templates, containers) for many platforms from one template.

Head to head

Metric	Puppet	Ansible	cloud-init	Packer
Stars	8k	71.3k	3.8k	15.8k
Weekly downloads	n/a	2M	n/a	n/a
Download growth	n/a	+11%	n/a	n/a
Popularity score	71/100	82/100	65/100	77/100
Forks	2.2k	24.4k	1.2k	3.4k
Open issues	92	880	613	317
Last commit	3mo ago	1d ago	2w ago	3d ago
Latest version	n/a	14.6.0Nov 4, 2026	n/a	n/a
License	Apache-2.0	GPL-3.0	n/a	n/a
First released	2010	2012	2014	2013
Signals	Legacy	Popular	Popular	None
Listed in	DevOps & Cloud › Configuration management & provisioning	DevOps & Cloud › Configuration management & provisioning	DevOps & Cloud › Configuration management & provisioning	DevOps & Cloud › Configuration management & provisioning

Weekly downloads over time

Hover for exact values; switch to log scale for tools of very different sizes. Not shown (no comparable download data): Puppet, cloud-init, Packer.