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. Continuous Deployment
  4. Server Configuration And Automation
  5. AWS OpsWorks vs AWX

AWS OpsWorks vs AWX

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

AWS OpsWorks
AWS OpsWorks
Stacks196
Followers222
Votes51
AWX
AWX
Stacks138
Followers259
Votes1
GitHub Stars15.0K
Forks3.6K

AWS OpsWorks vs AWX: What are the differences?

Introduction:
AWS OpsWorks and AWX are both popular configuration management tools used in the industry. However, they have key differences that set them apart.

1. **Architecture**:
AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service provided by Amazon Web Services, allowing users to automatically deploy and scale applications based on Chef recipes. On the other hand, AWX is an open-source tool built on top of Ansible, providing orchestration, job scheduling, and user interface for Ansible.

2. **Scalability**:
AWS OpsWorks is a fully managed service by AWS, allowing users to easily scale their infrastructure as needed. In contrast, AWX requires user-managed infrastructure and scalability planning, making it more suitable for organizations with established DevOps practices.

3. **Integration with AWS**:
AWS OpsWorks seamlessly integrates with other AWS services such as EC2, S3, and RDS, providing a comprehensive cloud-based solution. AWX, being open-source, can be integrated with a wide range of services and platforms beyond AWS, giving users more flexibility in their setup.

4. **Pricing**:
AWS OpsWorks follows the pay-as-you-go model typical of AWS services, where users are billed based on their usage. AWX, being open-source, is free to use without any licensing costs, making it ideal for organizations looking to reduce their infrastructure expenses.

5. **Community Support**:
AWX benefits from a vibrant open-source community actively contributing to its development and providing support through forums and documentation. While AWS OpsWorks has strong official support from Amazon, it may have limited community-driven resources compared to an open-source tool like AWX.

6. **Customization and Flexibility**:
Since AWS OpsWorks is a managed service, users have limited customization options compared to AWX, where users have greater control over their configurations, workflows, and integrations. This makes AWX more suitable for organizations with unique or complex requirements.

In Summary, AWS OpsWorks is a fully managed service by AWS with seamless integration with other AWS services, while AWX is an open-source tool providing flexibility, customization, and scalability advantages at no additional cost.

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

Detailed Comparison

AWS OpsWorks
AWS OpsWorks
AWX
AWX

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

AWX provides a web-based user interface, REST API, and task engine built on top of Ansible. It is the upstream project for Tower, a commercial derivative of AWX. Ansible Towers powers enterprise automation by adding control, security and delegation capabilities to Ansible environments.

AWS OpsWorks lets you model the different components of your application as layers in a stack, and maps your logical architecture to a physical architecture. You can see all resources associated with your application, and their status, in one place.;AWS OpsWorks provides an event-driven configuration system with rich deployment tools that allow you to efficiently manage your applications over their lifetime, including support for customizable deployments, rollback, partial deployments, patch management, automatic instance scaling, and auto healing.;AWS OpsWorks lets you define template configurations for your entire environment in a format that you can maintain and version just like your application source code.;AWS OpsWorks supports any software that has a scripted installation. Because OpsWorks uses the Chef framework, you can bring your own recipes or leverage hundreds of community-built configurations.
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
15.0K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
3.6K
Stacks
196
Stacks
138
Followers
222
Followers
259
Votes
51
Votes
1
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 32
    Devops
  • 19
    Cloud management
Pros
  • 1
    Open source
Integrations
No integrations available
Ansible
Ansible

What are some alternatives to AWS OpsWorks, AWX?

Ansible

Ansible

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.

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.

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.

cPanel

cPanel

It is an industry leading hosting platform with world-class support. It is globally empowering hosting providers through fully-automated point-and-click hosting platform by hosting-centric professionals

Webmin

Webmin

It is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. It removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files.

Mina

Mina

Mina works really fast because it's a deploy Bash script generator. It generates an entire procedure as a Bash script and runs it remotely in the server. Compare this to the likes of Vlad or Capistrano, where each command is run separately on their own SSH sessions. Mina only creates one SSH session per deploy, minimizing the SSH connection overhead.

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