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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs UrbanCode Deploy 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
68
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (1st), Network Automation (1st)
UrbanCode Deploy
Ranking in Release Automation
9th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Release Automation category, the mindshare of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is 5.1%, down from 5.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of UrbanCode Deploy is 4.6%, up from 3.9% 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.
it_user587571 - PeerSpot reviewer
It offers OOTB plugins for middleware.
By standardizing the automated deployment application process, reducing the amount of errors due to manual steps and by providing visibility into the release cycles of various teams/applications, we've improved our global efficiency by at least 25% and still counting, since we've only used the product for a short period of time.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don’t need an agent for it to work."
"Ansible Tower provides a GUI, which is an enhancement, and a well-liked feature by operation teams."
"It allows control over thousands of servers, whether virtual or physical."
"The automation is the most valuable feature."
"It has improved our organization through provisioning and security hardening. When we do get a new VM, we have been able to bring on a provisioned machine in less than a day. This morning alone, I provisioned two machines within an hour. I am talking about hardening, installing antivirus software on it, and creating user accounts because the Playbooks were predesigned. From the time we got the servers to the actual hand-off, it takes less than an hour. We are talking about having the servers actually authenticate Red Hat Satellites and run the yum updates. All of that can be done within an hour."
"The automation manager is very good."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its configuration management, drift management, workflow templates with the visual UI, and graphical workflow representation."
"The solution is very simple to use."
"It is very easy to make a software release. It used to take us at least a couple of hours to make a release, now we went to production with a new one last night. This new release took me five minutes."
"The most valuable functionality is the ability to define the deployment process, schedule the deployment and automatically execute the deployments to different environments."
"The most valuable feature is the snapshot functionality, which allows us to access previous versions of the artifacts."
"The stability is good. I haven't experienced any issues."
"The solution handles complex deployments very efficiently."
"Stable solution that's good for automating the CI/CD pipeline: from development to production."
 

Cons

"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."
"It can use some more credential types. I've found that when I go looking for a certain credential type, such as private keys, they're not really there."
"It is a little slow on the network side because every time you call a module, it's initiating an SSH or an API call to a network device, and it just slows things down."
"Ansible is great, but there are not many modules. You can do about 80% to 90% of things by using commands, but more modules should be added. We cannot do some of the things in Ansible. In Red Hat, we have the YUM package manager, and there are certain options that we can pass through YUM. To install the Docker Community Edition, I'll write the yum install docker-ce command, but because the Docker Community Edition is not compatible with RHEL 8, I will have to use the nobest option, such as yum install docker-ce --nobest. The nobest option installs the most stable version that can be installed on a particular system. In Ansible, the nobest option is not there. So, it needs some improvements in terms of options. There should be more options, keywords, and modules."
"The communication on it is not probably where it could be. We could use some real life examples where we could point customers to them and say, "This is what you are trying to do. If you follow these steps, it would at least get you started a bit quicker.""
"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."
"The scalability of the solution has some shortcomings."
"What I'm trying to figure out, personally, is, when doing mass updates, how I can parallelize that a little bit better. It seems right now - and maybe, it's a shortcoming on my end - that I run through one set of servers, and then another set of servers, ad then another set of servers, but it seems like I could throw a lot of these checks out. Different types of servers, like web servers and DB servers, if I could parallelize that a little bit to make everything run a little bit more efficiently, that would help."
"The technical support of the solution could definitely be improved as PMRs take long to resolve."
"I would like to see more reporting for container architecture."
"I certainly would like to have a better way to pass information between deployment steps using UrbanCode Deploy because that's really difficult to do."
"The interface allows access in a number of ways but that can be confusing."
"I would like to have the agent up and running at all times, as opposed to only while it is in the DevOps pipeline."
"The scalability of this application needs improvement. Changes and variations in the application become bottlenecks as they need to be more seamless and comfortable."
 

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."
"If you only need to use Ansible, it's free for any end-user, but when you require Ansible Tower, you need to pay per Ansible Tower server."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is an expensive solution. There may be additional fees to use advanced features."
"The pricing is okay."
"We use the open-source version of the solution."
"The cost of the solution is high but it offers great ROI."
"Considering COVID-19, the price is too high."
"The licensing fees for this solution are based on the number of servers that are being deployed and the number of agents that you have."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
33%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Educational Organization
65%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Insurance Company
5%
Computer Software Company
3%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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.
Ask a question
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Also Known As

Ansible
uDeploy
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

HootSuite Media, Inc., Cloud Physics, Narrative, BinckBank
As policy, IBM does not release customer names on non-IBM web sites.  However, public DevOps and UrbanCode Deploy case studies can be found here. IBM's UrbanCode Deploy customers span Small-Medium Businesses to Fortune 500 companies across all industries worldwide.
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs. UrbanCode Deploy and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
839,422 professionals have used our research since 2012.