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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Spinnaker comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 7, 2025

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

Red Hat Ansible Automation ...
Ranking in Release Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (1st), Network Automation (1st)
Spinnaker
Ranking in Release Automation
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Release Automation category, the mindshare of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is 5.0%, up from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spinnaker is 1.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Release Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform5.0%
Spinnaker1.8%
Other93.2%
Release Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Sudhir Kumar Tiwari - PeerSpot reviewer
Have managed thousands of servers with streamlined configuration processes
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is very helpful due to passwordless integration and the ability to interact with multiple servers at once, which is especially advantageous when dealing with thousands of servers. The integration aspect of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has optimized my IT ecosystem significantly by consolidating multiple tools, such as a CI/CD pipeline with Jenkins, where we validate everything, including testing and SonarQube code quality. The agentless architecture of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, using the SSH key, makes it passwordless and allows us to push configurations with one click, creating a major advantage. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform's main benefit is that it allows us to push configurations to multiple servers without manually visiting each one, maintaining efficiency.
Anurag Bandyopadhyay - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful to create custom pipelines
Regarding areas for improvement, one significant issue is the lack of maker-checker flows to ensure that newly created pipelines are accurate and tested. We currently use an in-house abstraction over Spinnaker to verify pipeline specs, environment variables, etc. It would be beneficial if Spinnaker could offer this functionality within their product.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It increases our company's efficiency, automating all the simple tasks which used to take hours of somebody's time."
"I like the fact that Ansible is agentless."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is quite stable. If you set it up correctly with the right configurations and there are no hiccups during installation and deployment, it will be stable. I'd give stability a rating of eight out of ten."
"One of the most valuable features is that Ansible is agentless. It does not have dependencies, other than Python, which is very generic in terms of dependencies for all systems and for any environment. Being agentless, Ansible is very convenient for everything."
"It enabled me to take the old build manifest and automated everything. So when it came time to spin everything up, it was quick and simple. I could spin it up and test it out. And then, when it came time to roll production, it was a done deal. When we expanded to multiple data centers, it was same thing: Change a few IP addresses, change some names, and off we went."
"It has made our infrastructure more testable. We are able to build our infrastructure in CI, then are more confident in what we are deploying will work, not breaking everything."
"The ease of being able to use the modules and collections to define what our business processes are is valuable. We are able to give non-technical people the ability to look at a process and say, "We need a step here. Someone do something and put it right here.""
"There is a good community around the product that makes troubleshooting possible."
"Spinnaker is used for automating a variety of deployment tasks, infrastructure, provisioning tasks, and all kinds of things."
"The tool's most valuable feature is its intuitive interface for converting existing Kubernetes specs into working pipelines. It's easy for anyone to deploy anything on any environment when they need to test or deploy for a specific merchant or use case. Instead of going into the specs and changing different variables, they can do it through the UI, which is very useful."
"The most valuable feature of Spinnaker is the rollback."
 

Cons

"It would be good to make the solution more user-friendly,"
"It needs better documentation."
"For Ansible Tower, there are three tiers with ten nodes. I would like them to expand those ten nodes to 20, because ten nodes is not enough to test on."
"It would be helpful to have templates for common configurations. It would make it much easier and faster rather than creating a whole script. The templates would decrease the learning curve as well."
"In modern infrastructure, there are more than just servers. The initial server-centric approach in Ansible is a bit strange."
"There needs to be improvement in the orchestration."
"The technical support is not adequate. The Ansible sales and technical support services need significant improvement."
"The solution should add a nice self-service portal."
"Regarding areas for improvement, one significant issue is the lack of maker-checker flows to ensure that newly created pipelines are accurate and tested. We currently use an in-house abstraction over Spinnaker to verify pipeline specs, environment variables, etc. It would be beneficial if Spinnaker could offer this functionality within their product."
"Log-wise, we need to understand why something has failed so that we can understand and try to fix it the moment the issue is reported. The solution could use more robust monitoring."
"Spinnaker's configuration setup is too complicated and should be made easy."
"Every time it goes to run a pipeline, it just generates a lot of data, and its database is not exactly tuned out of the box, meaning it is not tuned for high scalability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It is a little pricey but it is affordable. It is not that bad."
"Ansible Tower is pretty expensive."
"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."
"We're charged between $8 to $13 a month per license."
"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."
"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."
"Ansible Tower is free. Until they lower the cost, we are holding off on purchasing the product."
"Spinnaker is a free-to-use, open-source solution."
"Spinnaker is an open-source product. The tool is completely free for users."
"The solution is open-source."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise48
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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 do you like most about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform?
The most valuable features of the solution are automation and patching.
What needs improvement with Spinnaker?
Regarding areas for improvement, one significant issue is the lack of maker-checker flows to ensure that newly created pipelines are accurate and tested. We currently use an in-house abstraction ov...
What is your primary use case for Spinnaker?
Spinnaker's main use case is deployment. We use it to create custom pipelines instead of manually deploying our HAN files. This allows us to deploy different services for staging, production, and o...
 

Also Known As

Ansible
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

HootSuite Media, Inc., Cloud Physics, Narrative, BinckBank
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs. Spinnaker and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.