etcd vs Salt: What are the differences?

Developers describe etcd as "A distributed consistent key-value store for shared configuration and service discovery". etcd is a distributed key value store that provides a reliable way to store data across a cluster of machines. It’s open-source and available on GitHub. etcd gracefully handles master elections during network partitions and will tolerate machine failure, including the master. On the other hand, Salt is detailed as "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..

etcd can be classified as a tool in the "Open Source Service Discovery" category, while Salt is grouped under "Server Configuration and Automation".

"Service discovery" is the primary reason why developers consider etcd over the competitors, whereas "Flexible" was stated as the key factor in picking Salt.

etcd and Salt are both open source tools. etcd with 25.8K GitHub stars and 5.25K 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, Salt has a broader approval, being mentioned in 110 company stacks & 20 developers stacks; compared to etcd, which is listed in 27 company stacks and 11 developer stacks.