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Ansible VS Workflow Engine

Compare Ansible VS Workflow Engine and see what are their differences

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Ansible logo Ansible

Radically simple configuration-management, application deployment, task-execution, and multi-node orchestration engine

Workflow Engine logo Workflow Engine

.NET & .NET Core workflow engine, and a standalone workflow server that enable you to add custom executable workflows of any complexity to your app.
  • Ansible Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-05
  • Workflow Engine Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-30

Ansible features and specs

  • Agentless
    Ansible is agentless, meaning it doesn't require any software to be installed on the remote nodes. This simplifies management and reduces overhead.
  • Ease of Use
    Ansible uses a simple, easy-to-read YAML syntax for its playbooks, reducing the learning curve and making it accessible to those without extensive programming experience.
  • Scalability
    Ansible is designed to handle large-scale deployments, making it suitable for managing numerous machines or services efficiently.
  • Extensive Modules
    Ansible has a rich library of modules that support a wide variety of system tasks, cloud providers, and application deployments, offering great versatility.
  • Strong Community
    There is a large and active Ansible community that contributes to its development and provides support, which can be valuable for troubleshooting and learning best practices.
  • Idempotency
    Tasks in Ansible are idempotent, meaning they can be run multiple times without changing the system beyond the intended final state, ensuring reliable deployments.

Possible disadvantages of Ansible

  • Performance Overhead
    Being agentless, Ansible relies on SSH for communication with nodes, which can add performance overhead, especially when managing a large number of hosts.
  • Limited Windows Support
    Ansible's core is primarily designed for Unix-like systems, and while there is support for Windows, it's not as robust or as seamless as it is for Unix/Linux systems.
  • Lack of Built-in Error Handling
    Ansible's error handling is somewhat rudimentary out-of-the-box. Complex error handling scenarios often require custom solutions, which can complicate playbooks.
  • Learning Curve for Complex Scenarios
    While simple tasks are easy to set up, more complex configurations can become challenging quickly and may require a deep understanding of Ansible's modules and templating.
  • Reliance on YAML
    The use of YAML, while human-readable, can be prone to syntax errors such as incorrect indentation, which can potentially lead to hard-to-track-down bugs.
  • Dependency on Python
    Ansible requires Python to be installed on managed nodes. This could be an issue in environments where it's not feasible or desired to have Python installed.

Workflow Engine features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Workflow Engine offers a user-friendly interface that allows users to design, execute, and manage workflows without needing extensive technical knowledge.
  • Flexibility
    The engine supports custom workflow processes and can be integrated with a variety of platforms and applications, making it versatile for different business needs.
  • Scalability
    It can handle varying levels of demand, suitable for both small and large enterprises, due to its robust architecture and efficient resource management.
  • Comprehensive Features
    Offers a wide range of features, including process automation, tracking, and analytics, providing a complete solution for workflow management.
  • Support and Documentation
    Provides extensive documentation and customer support, helping users to implement and troubleshoot their workflow solutions effectively.

Possible disadvantages of Workflow Engine

  • Cost
    Can be expensive for small businesses or startups, especially if advanced features or high-level support is required.
  • Complexity for Advanced Customization
    While it is user-friendly for basic tasks, complex custom workflows may require significant technical expertise and time to implement.
  • Integration Challenges
    Some users might face challenges in integrating the engine with certain legacy systems or proprietary applications, necessitating additional resources or custom development.
  • Learning Curve
    Despite its intuitive interface, there is still a learning curve involved, particularly for users unfamiliar with workflow automation concepts.
  • Performance Issues
    In some cases, performance might degrade with extremely large and complex workflows, which can affect processing times and system efficiency.

Analysis of Ansible

Overall verdict

  • Ansible is a powerful and versatile tool for automation, suited to a variety of use cases, from configuration management to application deployment. Its simplicity, flexibility, and broad community support make it a popular choice among DevOps professionals.

Why this product is good

  • Ansible is considered good because it is an open-source automation tool that is simple to set up and use. It uses a straightforward language (YAML) for its playbooks, which makes it accessible to both developers and IT operations. Ansible is agentless, meaning it connects to nodes using SSH, which simplifies management and enhances security. It also has strong community support and thorough documentation.

Recommended for

  • System administrators seeking to automate configuration management
  • DevOps teams looking to streamline application deployment processes
  • Organizations aiming to implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
  • IT professionals who prefer an agentless approach to automation
  • Teams interested in a tool with strong community support and extensive integrations

Ansible videos

+ Add

What Is Ansible? | How Ansible Works? | Ansible Tutorial For Beginners | DevOps Tools | Simplilearn

More videos:

  • Review - Automation with Ansible Playbooks | Review on Ansible Architecture
  • Review - Book Review : Mastering Ansible (Jesse Keating) by Zareef Ahmed

Workflow Engine videos

+ Add

Creating a simple workflow | Workflow Engine

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Ansible and Workflow Engine)

Ansible

Workflow Engine

DevOps Tools
100 100%
DevOps Tools
0% 0
BPM
0 0%
BPM
100% 100
Continuous Integration
100 100%
Continuous Integration
0% 0
Automation
0 0%
Automation
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Ansible and Workflow Engine. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Ansible and Workflow Engine

Ansible Reviews

What Are The Best Alternatives To Ansible? | Attune, Jenkins &, etc.
To put it simply, Ansible automates a wide range of IT aspects that includes configuration management, application deployment, cloud provisioning, etc. Plus, while using Ansible, you can patch your application, automate deployments, and run compliances and governance on your application. You can easily manage it by using a web interface known as Ansible Tower. Furthermore,...
Source: www.apzomedia.com
Best 8 Ansible Alternatives & equivalent in 2022
Ansible is a simple IT automation tool that is easy to deploy. It connects to your nodes and pushes out small programs called “Ansible modules” to those nodes. Then it executes these models over SSH and removes them when finished. The library of modules will reside on any machine, therefore there is no requirement for any servers and databases.
Source: www.guru99.com
Top 5 Ansible Alternatives in 2022: Server Automation Solutions by Alexander Fashakin on the 19th Aug 2021 facebook Linked In Twitter
Your project connects to Ansible through nodes called Ansible Modules. You can use these modules to manage your project. As an agentless architecture, Ansible allows you to run modules on any system or server. It doesn’t require client/server software or an agent to be installed. With Ansible, you can use Python Paramiko modules or SSH protocols.
Source: www.servertribe.com
Ansible vs Chef: What’s the Difference?
For Ansible, Simplilearn presents the Ansible Foundation Training Course. Ansible 2.0, a simple, popular, agent-free tool in the automation domain, helps increase team productivity and improve business outcomes. Learn with
Source: www.simplilearn.com
Chef vs Puppet vs Ansible
Ansible supports considerable ease of learning for the management of configurations due to YAML as the foundation language. YAML (Yet Another Markup Language) is closely similar to English and is human-readable. The server can help in pushing configurations to all the nodes. The applications of Ansible are clearly suitable for real-time execution along with the facility of...
Source: www.whizlabs.com

Workflow Engine Reviews

We have no reviews of Workflow Engine yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Ansible should be more popular than Workflow Engine. It has been mentiond 9 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Ansible mentions (9)

  • Mentorship Group
    We are open to practice using any open-source project, however, we want to set a sharp focus on projects maintained by the Red Hat, and our own projects in the Caravana Cloud organization on github. If there is no reason to do differently, we'll build using technologies such as OpenShift, Quarkus, Ansible and related projects. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • Observability Mythbusters: Yes, Observability-Landscape-as-Code is a Thing
    *Codifying the deployment of the OTel Collector *(to Nomad, Kubernetes, or a VM) using tools such as Terraform, Pulumi, or Ansible. The Collector funnels your OTel data to your Observability back-end. ✅. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • Maintenance mode - vmware.vmware_rest Ansible collection
    Most of what I've learnt today was purley from this blog and only because it's from ansible.com - dated now I guess ... Source: almost 3 years ago
  • Proactive Kubernetes Monitoring with Alerting
    I installed the helm release using Ansible, but you can install with the following helm commands:. - Source: dev.to / about 3 years ago
  • Cannot run a playbook in crontab - Python error
    [root@ansible ~]# pip show ansible Name: ansible Version: 2.9.25 Summary: Radically simple IT automation Home-page: https://ansible.com/ Author: Ansible, Inc. Author-email: info@ansible.com License: GPLv3+ Location: /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packagesRequires: jinja2, PyYAML, cryptography Required-by:. Source: over 3 years ago
View more

Workflow Engine mentions (2)

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Ansible and Workflow Engine, you can also consider the following products

Chef - Automation for all of your technology. Overcome the complexity and rapidly ship your infrastructure and apps anywhere with automation.

Camunda - The Universal Process Orchestrator

Jenkins - Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration server with 300+ plugins to support all kinds of software development

Imixs-Workflow - Imixs Workflow is a BPM Framework with the goal to reduce the complexity of business applications.

Puppet Enterprise - Get started with Puppet Enterprise, or upgrade or expand.

BonitaSoft - Bonita BPM is a BPM-based application platform that is designed to help users build highly...

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