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NetBrain 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

NetBrain
Ranking in Network Automation
7th
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Network Troubleshooting (18th)
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)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Network Automation category, the mindshare of NetBrain is 7.5%, down from 13.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is 14.4%, down from 17.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform14.4%
NetBrain7.5%
Other78.1%
Network Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Deborah Gamelin - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President at Asset Track for Cloud, LLC
Good monitoring and troubleshoot capabilities, improves overall network traffic visibility
In my organization, we had 130,000 network devices that needed to be brought into the solution and mapped. NetBrain can handle the scale but the engineers that manage those devices have to go in and update all of them to allow NetBrain permission to poll them. It can get a little stressful for everybody when you're trying to roll out new stuff when you've got other issues that have to be addressed with other devices. In some cases, our devices had no automation at all. One example is the Cisco 3650. Right now, if you went through the inventory list, you see that we have different versions running. Some are on one version, whereas others are on another version. The problem with upgrading them is that they need to be done overnight because we don't want to disrupt any network traffic during business hours. Consequently, it could take us years to upgrade the versions before we can even get them onto these new tools. This may be an internal issue but it's a big one when you have a lot of devices. Even if you had 10,000 devices, it's still an issue. You have to consider the compatibility of the device against the tool, and being able to use certain commands to upgrade it.
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

"This product has good network monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities."
"NetBrain is very good when it comes to network mapping, as it looks for different assets within the network available, so router, firewall, applications, et cetera, and it gives you the full mapping, asset mapping along with the full range including the firmware software update and all those things."
"Chain management is a good feature. I don't get it on other solutions."
"Enables maps to be drawn out."
"Once it's up and running and you don't have the strange requirements I had, and you just want some basic maps, it'll work."
"Other advice to users considering the solution would be: go with NetBrain."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that you can click once and have a link test, see your network, and get an overall view of your network and its state."
"A reliable, time-saving tool for providing accurate layer 2 and layer 3 network mappings."
"Having the Dashboard from an admin point of view, and seeing how all the projects and all the jobs lay out, is helpful."
"Ansible is agentless. So, we don't need to set up any agent into the computer we are interacting with. The only prerequisite is that the host with which we are going to interact must have the Python interpreter installed on it. We can connect to a host and do our configuration by using Ansible."
"You can literally automate everything."
"The development tools are decent and being able to consistently manage those servers is really the key, which is why we went with Ansible in the first place."
"Managing our inventory is a big pain point. Right now, we have Satellite, but we can tie it in with Satellite, so we can actually manage things and automate the entire deployment stack, instead of trying to grab things from tickets, then generating Kickstart, and using that to get things in Satellite. That doesn't work well. We can do the whole deployment stack using the inventory share between Tower and Satellite."
"With this solution, we're able to cover our client's needs, the automation is very good, the operational automation and DevOps are the most valuable features for us, it's easy to set up, the solution can scale, and it's very stable."
"Being a game-changer in configuration management software is what has made Ansible so popular and widespread. Much of IT is based on SSH direct connectivity with a need for running infrastructure in an agentless way, and that has been a big plus. SSH has become a great security standard for managing servers. The whole thing has really become an out-of-the-box solution for managing a Unix estate."
"It saves time; it cut our configuration time; it is very easy to use, and there is less room for error."
 

Cons

"It's okay on the value, a bit expensive for just maps, but makes it a lot easier to see things visually and take it from there."
"The solution could integrate more automation."
"Support needs to improve for the installed product and some of the reporting could be more flexible to provide more complete cataloging."
"Netbrain must get AWS functionality done."
"When I used the installed product before, I wasn't very satisfied with the support."
"Each device needs to be configured to allow NetBrain to poll for the information it needs, which can be very time-consuming for a large network."
"The IP interface brief isn't consistent."
"It would be nice if the setup was a little simpler. Also, if the solution could provide more training materials for new people coming into our company so they can quickly learn how to use the functionalities."
"It's a young product so there is still room for improvement on the module side."
"There is always room for improvement in features or customer support."
"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."
"I feel if we took this to the customer now and asked the customer to start using the product as it is, we'd be getting a lot of pushback because as an automation platform, it feels as if it is very early in its life cycle and development."
"The user interface on the Ansible Tower product could be better, but it is functional."
"There are challenges in using the graphical interface, particularly in open-source versions."
"There should be better Windows support. We have had to develop a lot of our own roles because of the Windows platform. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux ones existed but not the Windows versions, so I have had to develop a bunch of Windows ones."
"A little slow."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing is based on a per-device basis, which means that it can get very expensive if you have a large number of devices."
"The product is expensive, but less expensive than some of the competition and worth the price."
"I don't see the pricing or licensing features, but from what I understand, it is fairly reasonable."
"The cost is determined by the number of endpoints."
"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're charged between $8 to $13 a month per license."
"Like many Red Hat products, they have a no-cost version of the web application (AWX, formerly Ansible Tower), but you are on your own to install and it is a little more complicated than just installing Ansible."
"It’s an open-source tool."
"Red Hat's open source approach was a factor when choosing Ansible, since the solution is free as of right now."
"We use the open-source version of the solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Construction Company
6%
 

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

Ask a question
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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

CompuCon, TD Ameritrade, Move Inc.
HootSuite Media, Inc., Cloud Physics, Narrative, BinckBank
Find out what your peers are saying about NetBrain vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
909,099 professionals have used our research since 2012.