Bitnami Stacksmith vs Packer: What are the differences?

Bitnami Stacksmith: Create custom container images in minutes. Pick your favorite development environments ready-to-run including: Python, Java, PHP, Go, Ruby and Node. Layer on the web frameworks you need to kick-start your project including: Symfony, Express, Rails, and Django; Packer: Create identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. 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.

Bitnami Stacksmith belongs to "Container Tools" category of the tech stack, while Packer can be primarily classified under "Infrastructure Build Tools".

Some of the features offered by Bitnami Stacksmith are:

• Creates custom container images in minutes, then lets you share them using a simple URL
• Sends notifications of security issues and out-of-date components straight to your inbox
• Makes it easy to package your web application or service in a unique container image

On the other hand, Packer provides the following key features:

• Super fast infrastructure deployment. Packer images allow you to launch completely provisioned and configured machines in seconds, rather than several minutes or hours.
• Multi-provider portability. Because Packer creates identical images for multiple platforms, you can run production in AWS, staging/QA in a private cloud like OpenStack, and development in desktop virtualization solutions such as VMware or VirtualBox.
• Improved stability. Packer installs and configures all the software for a machine at the time the image is built. If there are bugs in these scripts, they'll be caught early, rather than several minutes after a machine is launched.

Packer is an open source tool with 9.03K GitHub stars and 2.46K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Packer's open source repository on GitHub.