Rundeck vs Salt

Rundeck gives incident response teams a self-service way to run automated workflows for preventing, diagnosing and resolving incidents. Jobs can start automatically when a PagerDuty incident begins or be launched manually from the PagerDuty interface. They can gather logs, service status and performance checks from affected systems, then add actions and results to the incident timeline. Runbook Automation can invoke workflows through a web interface, CLI, APIs or integrated applications. Certified Enterprise Plugins include ServiceNow, Kubernetes, Ansible, Datadog, VMware, GitHub, AWS SNS and SQL Runner. Single sign-on is supported with providers such as LDAP, Active Directory and SAML. Buyers can use the managed product or deploy self-hosted on-premise or in a private cloud; a license is required for self-hosted operation. The hosted Runbook Automation plan costs $125 a month, billed per user plus a platform fee. A free plan and a 14-day full-featured trial with no credit card are listed. Standard Support is listed for weekday business hours, while Platinum Support is 24×7.

Salt is a free, open-source framework for remote execution, configuration management, provisioning and infrastructure orchestration. A single execution can run commands across thousands of systems in seconds. A typical setup has a master managing minions, but Salt also supports agentless operation through salt-ssh or salt-proxy and stand-alone use. Salt states define configurations that can be extended and layered, while orchestration can order work by dependency, such as preparing a load balancer before a web-server cluster. Salt Cloud provisions systems on cloud hosts and hypervisors and can connect new virtual machines to a master. Its documented providers include Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, Azure, OpenStack, DigitalOcean, Linode, VMware and Proxmox. SaltStack Config adds a web interface, role-based access control, multi-master support, reporting and an enterprise API, along with LDAP, SAML, OIDC and Active Directory integrations. Salt uses RSA key authentication and encrypted master-minion communication. It is self-hosted and licensed under Apache 2.0.