Capistrano vs Salt: What are the differences?

Capistrano: A remote server automation and deployment tool written in Ruby. 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; 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..

Capistrano and Salt belong to "Server Configuration and Automation" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Capistrano are:

• Reliably deploy web application to any number of machines simultaneously, in sequence or as a rolling set
• Automate audits of any number of machines (checking login logs, enumerating uptimes, and/or applying security patches)
• Script arbitrary workflows over SSH

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.

"Automated deployment with several custom recipes" is the top reason why over 122 developers like Capistrano, while over 41 developers mention "Flexible" as the leading cause for choosing Salt.

Capistrano and Salt are both open source tools. Capistrano with 11.1K GitHub stars and 1.71K 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, Capistrano has a broader approval, being mentioned in 293 company stacks & 81 developers stacks; compared to Salt, which is listed in 110 company stacks and 20 developer stacks.