Consul vs Salt: What are the differences?

What is Consul? A tool for service discovery, monitoring and configuration. Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable.

What is Salt? Fast, scalable and flexible software for data center automation. 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..

Consul belongs to "Open Source Service Discovery" category of the tech stack, while Salt can be primarily classified under "Server Configuration and Automation".

Some of the features offered by Consul are:

• Service Discovery - Consul makes it simple for services to register themselves and to discover other services via a DNS or HTTP interface. External services such as SaaS providers can be registered as well.
• Health Checking - Health Checking enables Consul to quickly alert operators about any issues in a cluster. The integration with service discovery prevents routing traffic to unhealthy hosts and enables service level circuit breakers.
• Key/Value Storage - A flexible key/value store enables storing dynamic configuration, feature flagging, coordination, leader election and more. The simple HTTP API makes it easy to use anywhere.

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

• Remote execution is the core function of Salt. Running pre-defined or arbitrary commands on remote hosts.
• Salt modules are the core of remote execution. They provide functionality such as installing packages, restarting a service, running a remote command, transferring files, and infinitely more
• Building on the remote execution core is a robust and flexible configuration management framework. Execution happens on the minions allowing effortless, simultaneous configuration of tens of thousands of hosts.

"Great service discovery infrastructure" is the top reason why over 49 developers like Consul, while over 41 developers mention "Flexible" as the leading cause for choosing Salt.

Consul and Salt are both open source tools. It seems that Consul with 16.2K GitHub stars and 2.82K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Salt with 10K GitHub stars and 4.58K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Consul has a broader approval, being mentioned in 131 company stacks & 52 developers stacks; compared to Salt, which is listed in 108 company stacks and 19 developer stacks.