StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Build Automation
  4. Infrastructure Build Tools
  5. Ansible vs Scalr

Ansible vs Scalr

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Scalr
Scalr
Stacks51
Followers34
Votes26
Ansible
Ansible
Stacks19.5K
Followers15.6K
Votes1.3K
GitHub Stars66.9K
Forks24.1K

Ansible vs Scalr: What are the differences?

# Introduction
This comparison will highlight the key differences between Ansible and Scalr in terms of their features and functionality.

1. **Configuration Management**: Ansible is more focused on configuration management by using YAML files to define tasks and playbooks, while Scalr is a cloud management platform that provides governance and policies for multi-cloud environments.
2. **Agentless vs Agent-based**: Ansible is agentless, relying on SSH for communication with remote servers, whereas Scalr uses agents for deployment and management of resources on different cloud providers.
3. **Open Source vs Enterprise Solution**: Ansible is an open-source tool maintained by the community, providing flexibility and customization options, while Scalr is an enterprise solution that offers enterprise-grade support and features for managing cloud infrastructure.
4. **Orchestration vs Governance**: Ansible focuses on orchestration and automation of tasks across servers and cloud instances, while Scalr focuses on governance, compliance, and cost management in multi-cloud environments.
5. **Community Support vs Enterprise Support**: Ansible has a large community of users and contributors who provide support and resources, whereas Scalr offers dedicated enterprise support and assistance for its customers.
6. **Scalability and Flexibility**: Ansible can be easily scaled and integrated with various tools and technologies, providing flexibility in managing infrastructure, whereas Scalr offers scalability by providing a centralized platform for managing resources across multiple cloud environments.

In Summary, Ansible is more focused on configuration management and automation, while Scalr is designed for governance and policy enforcement in multi-cloud environments, catering to different needs in managing cloud infrastructure.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Scalr, Ansible

Anonymous
Anonymous

Sep 17, 2019

Needs advice

I'm just getting started using Vagrant to help automate setting up local VMs to set up a Kubernetes cluster (development and experimentation only). (Yes, I do know about minikube)

I'm looking for a tool to help install software packages, setup users, etc..., on these VMs. I'm also fairly new to Ansible, Chef, and Puppet. What's a good one to start with to learn? I might decide to try all 3 at some point for my own curiosity.

The most important factors for me are simplicity, ease of use, shortest learning curve.

329k views329k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Scalr
Scalr
Ansible
Ansible

Scalr is a remote state & operations backend for Terraform with access controls, policy as code, and many quality of life features.

Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.

Shared State File Storage & Locking; Run Triggers; Terraform CLI Integration;Version Control Integration;Identity And Access Management;Policy As Code With Open Policy Agent;Modules;Template Registry;Webhooks;Cost Estimation
Ansible's natural automation language allows sysadmins, developers, and IT managers to complete automation projects in hours, not weeks.;Ansible uses SSH by default instead of requiring agents everywhere. Avoid extra open ports, improve security, eliminate "managing the management", and reclaim CPU cycles.;Ansible automates app deployment, configuration management, workflow orchestration, and even cloud provisioning all from one system.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
66.9K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
24.1K
Stacks
51
Stacks
19.5K
Followers
34
Followers
15.6K
Votes
26
Votes
1.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 5
    Image Builder
  • 3
    Open Source
  • 3
    Auto Scaling
  • 2
    Chef Integration
  • 2
    User Friendly
Pros
  • 284
    Agentless
  • 210
    Great configuration
  • 199
    Simple
  • 176
    Powerful
  • 155
    Easy to learn
Cons
  • 8
    Dangerous
  • 5
    Hard to install
  • 3
    Backward compatibility
  • 3
    Bloated
  • 3
    Doesn't Run on Windows
Integrations
Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps
Terraform
Terraform
Bitbucket
Bitbucket
GitHub
GitHub
GitLab
GitLab
Nexmo
Nexmo
Stackdriver
Stackdriver
VMware vSphere
VMware vSphere
Docker
Docker
OpenStack
OpenStack
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
New Relic
New Relic
PagerDuty
PagerDuty

What are some alternatives to Scalr, Ansible?

Chef

Chef

Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.

Terraform

Terraform

With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.

Capistrano

Capistrano

Capistrano is a remote server automation tool. It supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks, and includes a set of sane-default deployment workflows.

Puppet Labs

Puppet Labs

Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.

Salt

Salt

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.

AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation

You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application. You don’t need to figure out the order in which AWS services need to be provisioned or the subtleties of how to make those dependencies work.

Fabric

Fabric

Fabric is a Python (2.5-2.7) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting execution.

AWS OpsWorks

AWS OpsWorks

Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component

Packer

Packer

Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image. It embraces modern configuration management by encouraging you to use automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images.

Pulumi

Pulumi

Pulumi is a cloud development platform that makes creating cloud programs easy and productive. Skip the YAML and just write code. Pulumi is multi-language, multi-cloud and fully extensible in both its engine and ecosystem of packages.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana