Docker vs Salt: What are the differences?

Docker: Enterprise Container Platform for High-Velocity Innovation. The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere; 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..

Docker and Salt are primarily classified as "Virtual Machine Platforms & Containers" and "Server Configuration and Automation" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Docker are:

• Integrated developer tools
• open, portable images
• shareable, reusable apps

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.

"Rapid integration and build up" is the primary reason why developers consider Docker over the competitors, whereas "Flexible" was stated as the key factor in picking Salt.

Docker and Salt are both open source tools. Docker with 54K GitHub stars and 15.6K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Salt with 10.1K GitHub stars and 4.59K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Docker has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3525 company stacks & 3445 developers stacks; compared to Salt, which is listed in 110 company stacks and 20 developer stacks.