Puppet vs Steampipe

Puppet Enterprise provides policy-driven configuration management and infrastructure automation for complex cloud and hybrid environments. It uses policy as code to continuously enforce desired state, helping organizations identify and remediate configuration drift. Both agent-based and agentless management are supported, with a web interface and role-based access control. Puppet Enterprise Advanced adds continuous enforcement of CIS Benchmarks and DISA STIGs, self-service automation, AI features, observability integrations, and advanced patching. It also integrates with third-party vulnerability scanners, including Nessus, for remediation. Listed integrations include GitHub, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, HashiCorp Vault, and ServiceNow. Agents are listed for Linux, Windows, and macOS. Puppet describes the product as suited to medium and large organizations managing complex environments that require security, compliance, and centralized automation. Pricing is custom; a free trial runs on up to 10 nodes with no commitment or time limit. Network and edge device management is optional, and licensing for those devices requires contacting sales.

Steampipe provides open-source, zero-ETL tools for querying live data from APIs and services. Its CLI presents connected resources as relational tables, includes a PostgreSQL database and accepts SQL queries over dynamic information. Plugins implement the interface for each cloud service, file or other resource, so the relevant plugin is required. Steampipe can join live cloud configuration data with internal or external datasets for compliance, security, operations and cost work. Other distributions include PostgreSQL Foreign Data Wrappers, SQLite extensions that translate queries into API calls and standalone export CLIs that extract information without a database. Turbot Pipes offers hosted database instances, shared dashboards and snapshots. The plugin hub lists 157 plugins across public cloud, SaaS, security and software development categories. Installers are available for macOS, Linux and Windows, with API and self-hosted use also listed. Steampipe was founded in 2021; Turbot describes itself as founded in 2014 and bootstrapped. AWS access uses default credentials from a credential file or environment variables.