Salt

Ansible

ansible/ansible

Popular

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

cloud-init

canonical/cloud-init

Popular

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

Packer

hashicorp/packer

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

Nix

NixOS/nix

Rising

Purely functional package manager and build system for reproducible environments; powers NixOS.

pyinfra

pyinfra-dev/pyinfra

Agentless infrastructure automation where deploys are plain Python code; fast Ansible alternative.

Puppet

puppetlabs/puppet

Legacy

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

OpenVox

OpenVoxProject/openvox

New

Community fork of Puppet by Vox Pupuli, created after Perforce restricted open-source Puppet builds.

Chef

chef/chef

Legacy

Ruby-based config management (Chef Infra) owned by Progress; mostly found in established estates.