AWX vs Tower

Overview

Tower

Stacks214

Followers360

Votes80

AWX

Stacks138

Followers259

Votes1

GitHub Stars15.0K

Forks3.6K

AWX vs Tower: What are the differences?

AWX and Tower are both powerful automation platforms that allow users to manage and control their IT infrastructure. While they share many similarities, there are several key differences between the two.

Open Source vs Commercial: AWX is an open-source project, which means it is freely available for anyone to use and modify. Tower, on the other hand, is the commercial version of AWX and offers additional features and support through a subscription.
User Interface: Tower provides a polished and user-friendly web-based interface for managing and monitoring automation tasks. AWX, being an open-source project, has a more basic and utilitarian interface.
Support and Maintenance: Tower offers professional support and regular maintenance updates through a subscription plan, ensuring stability and reliability. AWX, as an open-source project, relies on community support and updates may not be as frequent or comprehensive.
Advanced Features: Tower includes advanced features such as multi-tenancy, role-based access control, and job scheduling, which are not available in AWX. These features make it more suitable for large-scale enterprise environments.
Integration: While both AWX and Tower integrate well with various IT automation technologies, Tower provides official support and certified integrations with a wide range of tools and systems. AWX relies on community-developed integrations, which may not be as extensive or reliable.
Security: Tower includes additional security features such as enhanced logging, centralized user authentication, and secure credential storage. AWX, being open-source, may have a higher risk of security vulnerabilities if not properly configured and maintained.

In summary, while AWX offers a free and open-source automation platform, Tower provides a more feature-rich and supported solution for organizations that require professional support and advanced features.

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Detailed Comparison

Tower	AWX
Use all of Git's powerful feature set - in a GUI that makes you more productive.	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.
Clone & create repos with a click - Manage your GitHub, Bitbucket & Beanstalk accounts from within Tower;Open repos quickly - Tower's "Quick Open" dialog finds and opens repositories in no time;Automate the boring stuff - Fetching and stashing are automatically done for you, if you wish;Clone in the background- Downloading large projects happens in the background, while you work;Multiple windows - Have multiple projects open side-by-side	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 15.0K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 3.6K
Stacks 214	Stacks 138
Followers 360	Followers 259
Votes 80	Votes 1
Pros & Cons
Pros 19 Git 16 Just works 10 Version control 6 Awesome 6 Simple layout Cons 5 Expensive 4 Subscription based 1 No side by side diff 0 Merge conflict resolution impossible/unclear	Pros 1 Open source
Integrations
Bitbucket TextMate Visual Studio GitHub GitLab Git Xcode Gerrit Code Review Beanstalk	Ansible

What are some alternatives to Tower, AWX?

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.

SourceTree

Use the full capability of Git and Mercurial in the SourceTree desktop app. Manage all your repositories, hosted or local, through SourceTree's simple interface.

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

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.

GitKraken

The downright luxurious Git client for Windows, Mac and Linux. Cross-platform, 100% standalone, and free.

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 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 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.

Fork

Manage your repositories without leaving the application. Organize the repositores into categories. Fork's Diff Viewer provides a clear view to spot the changes in your source code quickly.

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.

Related Comparisons

AWX vs Tower: What are the differences?

Open Source vs Commercial: AWX is an open-source project, which means it is freely available for anyone to use and modify. Tower, on the other hand, is the commercial version of AWX and offers additional features and support through a subscription.
User Interface: Tower provides a polished and user-friendly web-based interface for managing and monitoring automation tasks. AWX, being an open-source project, has a more basic and utilitarian interface.
Support and Maintenance: Tower offers professional support and regular maintenance updates through a subscription plan, ensuring stability and reliability. AWX, as an open-source project, relies on community support and updates may not be as frequent or comprehensive.
Advanced Features: Tower includes advanced features such as multi-tenancy, role-based access control, and job scheduling, which are not available in AWX. These features make it more suitable for large-scale enterprise environments.
Integration: While both AWX and Tower integrate well with various IT automation technologies, Tower provides official support and certified integrations with a wide range of tools and systems. AWX relies on community-developed integrations, which may not be as extensive or reliable.
Security: Tower includes additional security features such as enhanced logging, centralized user authentication, and secure credential storage. AWX, being open-source, may have a higher risk of security vulnerabilities if not properly configured and maintained.

AWX vs Tower

Overview