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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Spinnaker comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 7, 2025

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

Red Hat Ansible Automation ...
Ranking in Release Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (1st), Network Automation (1st)
Spinnaker
Ranking in Release Automation
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Release Automation category, the mindshare of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is 5.3%, up from 5.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spinnaker is 1.1%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Release Automation
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Anurag Bandyopadhyay - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful to create custom pipelines
Regarding areas for improvement, one significant issue is the lack of maker-checker flows to ensure that newly created pipelines are accurate and tested. We currently use an in-house abstraction over Spinnaker to verify pipeline specs, environment variables, etc. It would be beneficial if Spinnaker could offer this functionality within their product.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"The most valuable features of the solution are automation and patching."
"The playbooks and the code the solution uses are quite useful."
"It has an easy-to-use interface. It is REST API driven, and it integrates with Active Directory. It provides the ability to grant permissions to other users who would not necessarily have those permissions via the GUI so that they could run other people's jobs. For example, you could have the Oracle team grant permissions to the Linux team so that they can use each of those playbooks or each other's code. It is called shift-left."
"It has made our infrastructure more testable. We are able to build our infrastructure in CI, then are more confident in what we are deploying will work, not breaking everything."
"Installing it is a PIP command. So, it's pretty easy. It is a one liner."
"We can automate a few host configurations using the product."
"Ansible Tower offers use a UI where we can see all the pushes that have gone into the server."
"The most valuable feature of Spinnaker is the rollback."
"Spinnaker is used for automating a variety of deployment tasks, infrastructure, provisioning tasks, and all kinds of things."
"There is a good community around the product that makes troubleshooting possible."
"The tool's most valuable feature is its intuitive interface for converting existing Kubernetes specs into working pipelines. It's easy for anyone to deploy anything on any environment when they need to test or deploy for a specific merchant or use case. Instead of going into the specs and changing different variables, they can do it through the UI, which is very useful."
 

Cons

"The support could be better."
"When you set up Playbooks, I may have one version of the Playbook, but another member of the team may have a different vision, and we will not know which version is correct. We want to have one central repository for managing the different versions of Playbooks, so we can have better collaboration among team members. This is our use case for using Git version control."
"For Ansible Tower, there are three tiers with ten nodes. I would like them to expand those ten nodes to 20, because ten nodes is not enough to test on."
"It needs better documentation."
"I have seen indications that the documentation needs improvement. They are providing a "How to Improve Your Documentation" presentation at this conference."
"There is always room for improvement in features or customer support."
"It would be good to make the solution more user-friendly,"
"What we need is model-driven, declarative software infrastructure management. However, things tend to break with new versions, requiring a lot of work to fix…The focus should be on improving the support for Ansible in the area of AI coding."
"Spinnaker's configuration setup is too complicated and should be made easy."
"Log-wise, we need to understand why something has failed so that we can understand and try to fix it the moment the issue is reported. The solution could use more robust monitoring."
"Regarding areas for improvement, one significant issue is the lack of maker-checker flows to ensure that newly created pipelines are accurate and tested. We currently use an in-house abstraction over Spinnaker to verify pipeline specs, environment variables, etc. It would be beneficial if Spinnaker could offer this functionality within their product."
"Every time it goes to run a pipeline, it just generates a lot of data, and its database is not exactly tuned out of the box, meaning it is not tuned for high scalability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Red Hat's open source approach was a factor when choosing Ansible, since the solution is free as of right now."
"You don't need to buy agents on servers or deploy expense management when using the solution, which affected our decision to go with it."
"Everything is generally fair. No one ever likes to pay a lot of money, but we are getting the value. We also get support with it. It has been fair and worthwhile."
"Ansible Tower is pretty expensive."
"We went with product because we have a subscription for Red Hat."
"The pricing is pretty standard."
"I don't see the pricing or licensing features, but from what I understand, it is fairly reasonable."
"It’s an open-source tool."
"Spinnaker is a free-to-use, open-source solution."
"Spinnaker is an open-source product. The tool is completely free for users."
"The solution is open-source."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
31%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
20%
Retailer
13%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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.
What do you like most about Spinnaker?
The most valuable feature of Spinnaker is the rollback.
What needs improvement with Spinnaker?
Regarding areas for improvement, one significant issue is the lack of maker-checker flows to ensure that newly created pipelines are accurate and tested. We currently use an in-house abstraction ov...
 

Also Known As

Ansible
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

HootSuite Media, Inc., Cloud Physics, Narrative, BinckBank
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs. Spinnaker and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
846,617 professionals have used our research since 2012.