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Cisco Crosswork Network Automation vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform comparison

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Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Crosswork Network Aut...
Ranking in Network Automation
8th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Red Hat Ansible Automation ...
Ranking in Network Automation
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
72
Ranking in other categories
Release Automation (3rd), Configuration Management (2nd)
 

Featured Reviews

Thu Al-Faqar Salah - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at V2X
Automation has simplified multi-vendor VPN provisioning and protects changes with safe rollback
I have performed automation for Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPN services provisioning during routing changes. In the data center, I completed provisioning tasks for Cisco switches using scripting in the YANG model and APIs. I deployed configuration remotely for approximately 400 to 500 switches, implementing automation instead of configuring devices individually. I also use Cisco Crosswork Network Automation Health Insights and change for streaming telemetry and KPI monitoring. The features have significantly helped decrease the complexity of using CLI commands. Using the YANG model and other tools for Cisco monitoring has been invaluable. Closed-loop automation and Health Insights have provided tremendous value through multi-vendor abstractions, including network elements and NEDs on YANG and NETCONF models. This has benefited my Layer 3 VPN configuration, and for the underlying commands, whether the target device is running Cisco IOS XR, Junos, or another platform, there are no restrictions between IOS types. Transactional rollback and multi-vendor support with closed-loop telemetry have been critical features. If a mass change fails on one device, the system cleanly reverses everything, ensuring I never end up with a half-configured device. This is an important capability in networking.
Manas Kashyap - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Dev Ops Engineer at 11 East Capital
Automation has transformed server patching and has reduced months of work to minutes
The best features that Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform offers is that it does not require any additional resources inside the servers. Python is the only requirement, and since Python is already present inside the servers, we can run it from our location and it automatically deploys things and does the work for us. The minimal requirements and easy deployment have definitely impacted my daily work and my team's efficiency. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is one of the best features that we depend on. We have evaluated other options, but Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform was the best choice because it has saved us a tremendous amount of time. We do not need to manually intervene in the servers or install third-party software to maintain these things. It is very easy to write playbooks for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Ansible Galaxy contains many playbooks that are readily available and ready to be used. It is highly configurable with Jinja templating, making it easy to maintain. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has positively impacted my organization. Previously, we needed to go into the servers and maintain them manually, which used to take a lot of time. For 200 to 300 servers, the maintenance took about one to two months. New patches would arrive and we would have to repeat the process. Now, it is a one-night work or a 10 to 15 minutes task. We write a playbook, maintain an inventory, and roll out the updates and it starts working for us. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform uses conditional clauses and has rollback options, functioning like a standard coding language that is simple to use. There is definitely a reduction in errors with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform because we have playbooks written with all the necessary clauses and rollback options. Manual work automatically creates more errors, whereas in automation, we have written sets that we do not forget every time we run it. We have protected written sets that we execute consistently.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Cisco Crosswork Network Automation has structurally lowered my organization's OPEX by basically eliminating manual traffic re-routing tasks, and has reduced maintenance windows roughly by half."
"Scalability is an exceptional strength of Cisco Crosswork Network Automation, as it is built for service provider scale, easily handles tens of thousands of devices, and uses a layered services architecture with microservices clusters and distributed data gateways to push thousands of concurrent changes without bottlenecks, which is incredibly impressive."
"Cisco Crosswork Network Automation positively impacts my organization by simplifying deployment complexity, providing stable scalability, and managing thousands of network devices without performance bottlenecks."
"It has improved our organization through provisioning and security hardening."
"Since it is in YAML, if I have to explain it to somebody else, they can easily understand it."
"To me, a great thing about Ansible is that it can do everything: cloud, on-prem, Windows, Linux, networking, and I've not seen any other orchestration tool able to do that as easily."
"Role-based access control and agentless architecture are the main features which may attract users."
"It has made our infrastructure more testable, as we are able to build our infrastructure in CI and are more confident that what we are deploying will work without breaking everything."
"I like Ansible's ease of use. If you have Linux skills, you can create a reusable template for the dependencies and other configurations. I can store the templates in a repository and share them with my customers or other developers. It's a popular solution, so there is a large user base that can share templates."
"It saves time; it cut our configuration time; it is very easy to use, and there is less room for error."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is valuable due to the simplicity of the YAML language."
 

Cons

"However, there are some areas that could benefit from improvement."
"Cisco Crosswork Network Automation needs improved API documentation, an expense integration guide, and code samples to simplify custom script development for DevOps and NetOps teams."
"I think the biggest improvement needed for Cisco Crosswork Network Automation is its multi-vendor support, which needs to be more robust."
"Some of the modules in Ansible could be a bit more mature. There is still a little room for further development. Some performance aspects could be improved, perhaps in the form of parallelism within Ansible."
"The solution is slightly expensive, and its pricing could be improved."
"What I'm trying to figure out, personally, is, when doing mass updates, how I can parallelize that a little bit better. It seems right now - and maybe, it's a shortcoming on my end - that I run through one set of servers, and then another set of servers, ad then another set of servers, but it seems like I could throw a lot of these checks out. Different types of servers, like web servers and DB servers, if I could parallelize that a little bit to make everything run a little bit more efficiently, that would help."
"Networking needs to be improved."
"The scalability of the solution has some shortcomings."
"In modern infrastructure, there are more than just servers. The initial server-centric approach in Ansible is a bit strange."
"There are challenges in using the graphical interface, particularly in open-source versions."
"It would be good to make the solution more user-friendly,"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"I am using the community edition of the solution which is free."
"Ansible is a lot more competitive than any of the others. Its setup was also straightforward. In fact, we just implemented Ansible on OpenShift, so that is how we are running the Ansible Automation Platform now."
"It is a little pricey but it is affordable. It is not that bad."
"Red Hat's open source approach was a factor when choosing Ansible, since the solution is free as of right now."
"The cost is determined by the number of endpoints."
"The pricing for us is huge because we use twenty thousand nodes, so that is a huge infrastructure, but if someone is using a small infrastructure, then the pricing is not so much."
"The cost is high, but it still works well."
"Customers need to pay yearly for the license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise52
 

Questions from the Community

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What is the difference between Red Hat Satellite and Ansible?
Red Hat Satellite has proven to be a worthwhile investment for me. Both its patch management and license management have been outstanding. If you have a large environment, patching systems is much ...
How does Ansible compare to Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (SCCM)?
Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager takes knowledge and research to properly configure. The length of time that the set up will take depends on the kind of technical architecture that your org...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform was very simple. There is no pricing and no licensing required, as Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Ansible, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Subscription on AWS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
HootSuite Media, Inc., Cloud Physics, Narrative, BinckBank
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat, Cisco, Broadcom and others in Network Automation. Updated: September 2026.
915,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.