Compare tools side by side · TechInTrends

Event-driven remote execution and config management, now owned by Broadcom via VMware.

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	Salt	Ansible	cloud-init	Packer
Stars	15.8k	71.3k	3.8k	15.8k
Weekly downloads	33k	2M	n/a	n/a
Download growth	+29%	+11%	n/a	n/a
Popularity score	65/100	82/100	65/100	77/100
Forks	5.6k	24.4k	1.2k	3.4k
Open issues	623	880	613	317
Last commit	4d ago	1d ago	2w ago	3d ago
Latest version	3008.5Oct 26, 2026	14.6.0Nov 4, 2026	n/a	n/a
License	Apache-2.0	GPL-3.0	n/a	n/a
First released	2011	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): cloud-init, Packer.

Salt
Ansible