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GoCD vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 1, 2026

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

GoCD
Ranking in Release Automation
13th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (18th), Build Automation (17th)
Red Hat Ansible Automation ...
Ranking in Release Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
72
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (1st), Network Automation (1st), AWS Pro Service Providers (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Release Automation category, the mindshare of GoCD is 1.8%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is 4.2%, down from 5.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Release Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform4.2%
GoCD1.8%
Other94.0%
Release Automation
 

Featured Reviews

RajeshReddy - PeerSpot reviewer
Dev Ops Engineer at Infosys
The UI is colorful, but the user experience must be improved
We can see all the pipelines with a simple search. The UI is colorful. The user experience is very rich. The product is very easy to learn if we know a bit of the basics. If we have someone to show us how to use it, it is very easy.
Manas Kashyap - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Engineer at Elevenxcapital
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

"Permission separations mean that we can grant limited permissions for each team or team member."
"In terms of value added it has more than achieved everything we wanted from it and more."
"It has a user-friendly interface, which for free and open-source tools, the UI is really amazing and simple."
"The most notable aspect is its user interface, which we find to be user-friendly and straightforward for deploying and comprehending pipelines. We have the ability to create multiple pipelines, and in addition to that, the resource consumption is impressive."
"The UI is colorful."
"After we switched to GO, each team can set-up their own delivery pipeline and run it themselves."
"GoCD's open-source nature is valuable."
"Role-based access control and agentless architecture are the main features which may attract users."
"Ansible automation has benefited our organization."
"We used to have 120 employees, and now we have just 25 for the same amount of activities."
"Feature-wise, the solution is a good open-source software offering broad support. Also, it's reliable."
"The automation manager is very good."
"We can now go to a customer and deploy all software in a few minutes instead of hours."
"There is a return on investment as a technical person; it has saved time and effort in maintaining the deployment environment, so on the technical side, it's saved lots of time and effort on the configuration."
"The Organizations feature, where I can give clear silos and hand them over to different teams, that's amazing; everybody says that it's their own Tower."
 

Cons

"The documentation really should be improved by including real examples and more setup cases."
"It is difficult to assign different access levels because it relies on separate keys for developer and admin access, which could be simplified."
"GO doesn't come with a lot of out of the box features like other tools, don't expect that you can get it to work by clicking the NEXT button."
"User management, Documentation, Advanced GUI functionality."
"The documentation really should be improved by including real examples and more setup cases."
"The tool must be more user-friendly."
"The aspect that requires attention is the user management component. When integrating with BitLabs and authenticating through GitLab, there are specific features we desire. One important feature is the ability to import users directly from GitLab, along with their respective designations, and assign appropriate privileges based on that information. Allocating different privileges to users is a time-consuming process for us."
"In Community, there's a lot of effort towards testing, standardizing, and testing for module development to role development, which is why Molecule is now becoming real. Same thing with Zuul, which we are starting to implement. Zulu tests out modules from third-party sources, like ourselves, and verifies that the modules work before they are committed to the code. Currently, Ansible can't do this with all the modules out there."
"They should think of this product as an end-to-end solution and begin to develop it that way."
"There should be consistency. I know that it is always changing, but when we are trying to get some users to do something in basic Ansible that they are not really interested in doing but their job requires them to do it, they start finding inconsistencies."
"On the Dashboard, when you view a template run, it shows all the output. There is a search filter, but it would be nice to able to select one server in that run and then see all that output from just that one server, instead of having to do the search on that one server and find the results."
"Performance has been an issue on larger environments, but it has gotten a lot better over the past two years."
"It would be good to make the solution more user-friendly,"
"It is a little slow on the network side because every time you call a module, it's initiating an SSH or an API call to a network device, and it just slows things down."
"It could be easier to integrate Ansible with other solutions. No single tool can do everything. For example, we use Terraform for infrastructure and other solutions for configuration management and VMs."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's an open-source and free tool."
"This is an open-source solution and it is inexpensive."
"It’s an open-source tool."
"You don't need to buy agents on servers or deploy expense management when using the solution, which affected our decision to go with it."
"We use the open-source version of the solution."
"Everything is generally fair. No one ever likes to pay a lot of money, but we are getting the value. We also get support with it. It has been fair and worthwhile."
"We have to be mindful of how we use Ansible because of the licensing model. I am not saying that it is unfair or we do not find value in it. Because we are trying to automate so many different things, we have to be mindful of what we are doing and how we are doing it because we are trying to stay in compliance with it."
"The pricing is okay."
"The solution is inexpensive compared to other products."
"I am using the community edition of the solution which is free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
9%
University
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Retailer
9%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise48
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with GoCD?
One area of product improvement is the access control system. It is difficult to assign different access levels because it relies on separate keys for developer and admin access, which could be sim...
What is your primary use case for GoCD?
The solution helps us deploy microservices across multiple environments.
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

Adaptive ALM, Thoughtworks Go
Ansible, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Subscription on AWS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Ancestry.com, Barclay Card, AutoTrader, BT Financial Group, Gamesys, Nike, Vodafone, Haufe Lexware, Medidata, Hoovers
HootSuite Media, Inc., Cloud Physics, Narrative, BinckBank
Find out what your peers are saying about GoCD vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,264 professionals have used our research since 2012.