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Automic Automation vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Automic Automation
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
101
Ranking in other categories
Workload Automation (3rd)
Red Hat Ansible Automation ...
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
68
Ranking in other categories
Release Automation (3rd), Configuration Management (1st), Network Automation (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

Automic Automation and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Automic Automation is designed for Workload Automation and holds a mindshare of 7.4%, up 6.0% compared to last year.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, on the other hand, focuses on Configuration Management, holds 16.0% mindshare, down 16.3% since last year.
Workload Automation
Configuration Management
 

Featured Reviews

Peter Grundler - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps to move away from manual tasks and offers wide platform support and web-based interface
Customers want to move away from manual monitoring and checking processes. Automating these processes helps in time-saving and reduces human error. When you automate business processes, it reduces mistakes. It eliminates the risk of manual errors such as typos. There is a 20% to 30% reduction in human error. It fulfills all the needs when it comes to visibility and control across various operating platforms. It is the perfect product for managing processes that span multiple operating platforms. Automic Automation has the widest platform support compared to other products, such as Control-M, Tivoli from IBM, or Stonebranch. It definitely helps with compliance processes. We have had a lot of customers for two years with a focus on compliance, and it works. They were successful. Due to the fact that our customers can automate a lot of things, it reduces operating costs. It is hard to give a number because the savings are different for each customer. If a customer never had any automation, there could be about 80% savings after implementing Automic Automation, whereas for a customer who already has automated tasks, the difference will be less by adding Automic Automation. They might see 5% to 10% more savings. Automic Automation helps improve our ability to meet SLAs. In the recent versions, SLA management has been integrated, which previously was an external component. Because a lot of customers used it and asked Broadcom to implement SLA management into the workload engine, Broadcom included it. We see more and more customers running their SLA management via the Automic Automation product.
Surya Chapagain - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to manage and simple to learn
We use Red Hat a lot. I open tickets for the Red Hat cases, however, with Ansible, I haven't opened any cases. My manager worked with them a bit. If we have a problem with some file and we need to get Red Hat to analyze the issue and the file is 100GBs, we'll have an issue since we need to provide a log file for them to analyze. If it is around 12GB or 13GB, we can easily upload it to the Red Hat portal. With more than 100GBs, it will fail. I heard it should cover up to 250GB for an upload, however, I find it fails. Therefore, Red Hat needs to provide a way to handle this.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It's super easy—drag and drop to manage complex workloads."
"We have two nodes that are highly available. You can add new nodes if you need that. You can take a node, a total node, down and still be operating fine. It has a lot of scaling to it."
"It's very hard to transfer the feeling when you have a platform that came to handle infrastructure issues, but at the end of the day, they are making real changes and impacting our business level, which is amazing, because it's very uncommon. That's it, basicalSly."
"The Zero Upgrade feature is the most valuable."
"As far as our schedules, if we have problems, we can create our own process in the automation, which is good."
"They just talked about adding support for hundreds of thousands of agents, and I know it goes up to about a thousand clients per engine, so you can do a lot with that. It's a very scalable solution."
"The ability the system has to dynamically create groups, schedules, and workflows is crucial to us. In a fast-paced, agile environment, our teams are very lean. Monitoring and maintaining of all the approximately 2,000,000 executions of Automic jobs are managed by only three employees. The system has been designed to be as dynamic and versatile as the business processes and teams that own them."
"The ease of use is valuable. It is very intuitive."
"The capacity to install products on the operating system is very valuable."
"Since it is in YAML, if I have to explain it to somebody else, they can easily understand it."
"Managing our inventory is a big pain point. Right now, we have Satellite, but we can tie it in with Satellite, so we can actually manage things and automate the entire deployment stack, instead of trying to grab things from tickets, then generating Kickstart, and using that to get things in Satellite. That doesn't work well. We can do the whole deployment stack using the inventory share between Tower and Satellite."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is quite stable. If you set it up correctly with the right configurations and there are no hiccups during installation and deployment, it will be stable. I'd give stability a rating of eight out of ten."
"One of the most valuable features is that Ansible is agentless. It does not have dependencies, other than Python, which is very generic in terms of dependencies for all systems and for any environment. Being agentless, Ansible is very convenient for everything."
"Ansible Tower provides a GUI, which is an enhancement, and a well-liked feature by operation teams."
"I like Ansible's ease of use. If you have Linux skills, you can create a reusable template for the dependencies and other configurations. I can store the templates in a repository and share them with my customers or other developers. It's a popular solution, so there is a large user base that can share templates."
"On the network side, I already have a lot of our firewall related processes automated. If it's not automated all the way from the ticket system, our network team members, our tier-one guys in India, can just go into the Tower web interface and fill in a couple of survey questions."
 

Cons

"The one big issue that we have is around passwords and not being able to update passwords through a different tool. This is not available yet."
"An area for improvement would be SQL performance. While tracing SQL traffic, we noticed a lot of commands that cause contention/locks as well as forced waits. The efficiency of the SQL could be greatly improved (in some cases by simply replacing nested Selects and using NOLOCK hints)."
"The frustration that we have probably had in the past is where CA tools run for a period of time, then they get deprecated, and you have to build a new one."
"I would like to see more stability in the product and have the transition between versions be more seamless."
"We can't migrate the users from one master to another master or product to product. We have to do it manually."
"I hope going forward they will make some changes to the documentation. I hope they will write into the documentation what has changed and what the new names are. For example, some features have a new name. I hope they will make a translation the names in the old version to the names in the newer version."
"I should be able to grant a user access to execute a job without having to directly list every include, prompt set, output scan, script, login, etc. An inherited read for execution purposes would accomplish the same results without making the admin list every single object every time, as well as deny the user the ability to edit."
"The support has declined somewhat over the years due to various takeovers. It's not as personal as it used to be."
"We are not using the Dashboard a lot because we have higher expectations from it. The default Dashboard from Tower doesn't give that much information. We really want to get down into more than if the job succeeded or what was the percentage of success. We want to get down to task-level success. If, in a job, there are ten tasks, we want to see this task was a success, and this was not, and how many were not. That's the kind of granularity we are looking for, that Tower does not give right now."
"More library support for microservices architecture and Kubernetes would be helpful."
"The scalability of the solution has some shortcomings."
"Documentation could be improved. Many times, if I'm looking for something, I have to Google it in a lot of places, then figure out what the best approach will be. There are some best practices documents, but they don't give you the information."
"The governance features could be improved."
"Performance has been an issue on larger environments, but it has gotten a lot better over the past two years."
"The solution should add a nice self-service portal."
"Ansible has just been upgraded, and the only issue that we are seeing at the moment is that the user interface can be slow. We're currently investigating the refresh period with Red Hat when you click a job and run a job. It seems that the buffer no longer runs in real-time. We haven't discovered whether that's partially an issue with our environment, but Red Hat has come back and said that they're working on a couple of bugs in the background. We've upgraded to that version in the last six months, and that's the only issue that we've seen."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing is a big issue for some of them because Broadcom changed the way of calculating the price. People have been their customers for the last five or ten years, but Broadcom decided to change the way of licensing by moving to the number of jobs runs and then they say that clients have to pay three million because they run one million jobs per day. The clients are quite surprised to see that the contract is not the same as before, and then they are afraid of paying more."
"This solution is pretty well-priced."
"The cost of the solution depends on the number of systems that are being orchestrated."
"The cost of arrays is high. If you want to buy an array for an application, and see value from it, you need about half a million dollars. That is too expensive."
"Initially, the pricing was competitive but consistently, year over year, its pricing has become more erratic. It increases to the point where even with the positives, it starts to become a longer-term question about how it will fit into the environment."
"It has helped us reduce costs."
"Do your own proof of concept. Make sure you know what you want. Be clear about what you want the product to do for you. Go out and meet with the vendor, then test it."
"We have increased efficiency with this application."
"We're charged between $8 to $13 a month per license."
"Ansible Tower is free. Until they lower the cost, we are holding off on purchasing the product."
"The cost is determined by the number of endpoints."
"It’s an open-source tool."
"We have to be mindful of how we use Ansible because of the licensing model. I am not saying that it is unfair or we do not find value in it. Because we are trying to automate so many different things, we have to be mindful of what we are doing and how we are doing it because we are trying to stay in compliance with it."
"Like many Red Hat products, they have a no-cost version of the web application (AWX, formerly Ansible Tower), but you are on your own to install and it is a little more complicated than just installing Ansible."
"The pricing for us is huge because we use twenty thousand nodes, so that is a huge infrastructure, but if someone is using a small infrastructure, then the pricing is not so much."
"We went with product because we have a subscription for Red Hat."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
17%
Computer Software Company
12%
Insurance Company
8%
Educational Organization
32%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Automic Workload Automation?
It is easy to manage complex workloads and use electronic workflow automation.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Automic Workload Automation?
The pricing model for Automic has changed from a host-based licensing model to one based on successful execution. I still prefer the earlier licensing model, but I understand that it was likely cha...
What needs improvement with Automic Workload Automation?
There are certain areas in Automic that need improvement, such as the complexity of workflow dependencies. When you have workflows within workflows, it can become complicated. The existing options ...
What is the difference between Red Hat Satellite and Ansible?
Red Hat Satellite has proven to be a worthwhile investment for me. Both its patch management and license management have been outstanding. If you have a large environment, patching systems is much ...
How does Ansible compare to Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (SCCM)?
Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager takes knowledge and research to properly configure. The length of time that the set up will take depends on the kind of technical architecture that your org...
What do you like most about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform?
The most valuable features of the solution are automation and patching.
 

Also Known As

Automic Dollar Universe
Ansible
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Adidas, 84.51, ESB
HootSuite Media, Inc., Cloud Physics, Narrative, BinckBank
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC, Redwood Software, Broadcom and others in Workload Automation. Updated: January 2025.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.