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GoCD VS Ansible

Compare GoCD VS Ansible and see what are their differences

GoCD logo GoCD

Open source continuous delivery tool allows for advanced workflow modeling and dependencies management.

Ansible logo Ansible

Radically simple configuration-management, application deployment, task-execution, and multi-node orchestration engine
  • GoCD Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-07-25
  • Ansible Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-05

GoCD features and specs

  • Open Source
    GoCD is completely open source, which means there are no licensing fees, and the source code is publicly available for contributions or modifications.
  • Pipeline as Code
    Allows the use of code to define and manage pipelines, making it easy to version control and collaborate on pipeline configurations.
  • Value Stream Mapping
    Includes built-in features for mapping the entire value stream, helping teams visualize and optimize their workflow from code commit to deployment.
  • Plugin Ecosystem
    Supports a rich ecosystem of plugins for various tasks, including SCM, test reporting, and notifications, allowing extensive customization.
  • Environment Management
    Provides robust environment management features, allowing you to define environments and specify which pipelines should run in which environments.
  • Dependency Management
    Has strong capabilities for managing dependencies between pipelines, making it easier to coordinate complex workflows.
  • Docker Support
    Comes with comprehensive Docker support for building and deploying applications, which enhances compatibility and scalability.

Possible disadvantages of GoCD

  • Complex Setup
    Initial setup and configuration can be complex and time-consuming, especially for teams new to CI/CD concepts.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    Requires a good understanding of its concepts and best practices, which can pose a challenge for new users.
  • Performance Issues
    Some users have reported performance issues when scaling to larger numbers of pipelines and jobs.
  • UI/UX
    The user interface may not be as intuitive or modern as some of its competitors, which can affect the user experience.
  • Limited Cloud-Native Integrations
    Has fewer out-of-the-box integrations with popular cloud-native services compared to some other CI/CD tools.
  • Community Support
    While the community is active, it is not as large as those behind some other CI/CD tools, which can limit the availability of community-driven resources and extensions.

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.

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

GoCD videos

No GoCD videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Ansible videos

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

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to GoCD and Ansible)
Continuous Integration
45 45%
55% 55
DevOps Tools
20 20%
80% 80
Continuous Deployment
100 100%
0% 0
IT Automation
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

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

GoCD Reviews

Top 5 Jenkins Alternatives in 2024: Automation of IT Infrastructure Written by Uzair Ghalib on the 02nd Jan 2024
GoCD is another open-source Continuous Integration server. One of the great features of GoCD is its value stream map, which shows your complete path to production in a single view. You can visualize complex workflows easily with GoCD. Popular environments like Docker and Kubernetes can be easily integrated with GoCD.
Source: attuneops.io
15 Best Jenkins Alternatives (Open Source & Paid) in 2021
GoCD is an Open source Continuous Integration server. It is one of the best alternatives to Jenkins used to model and visualize complex workflows with ease. This CI tool allows continuous delivery and provides an intuitive interface for building CD pipelines.
Source: www.guru99.com
The Best Alternatives to Jenkins for Developers
GoCD comes as a continuous open-source integration and continuous delivery server with an end-to-end map showing the path to production in a single view. You can integrate it with popular environments like Kubernetes, Docker, and many more. It has advanced features of traceability wherein you can easily debug a broken pipeline.

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,...
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.
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
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...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Ansible seems to be more popular. 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.

GoCD mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of GoCD yet. Tracking of GoCD recommendations started around Mar 2021.

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
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What are some alternatives?

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

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

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

Travis CI - Simple, flexible, trustworthy CI/CD tools. Join hundreds of thousands who define tests and deployments in minutes, then scale up simply with parallel or multi-environment builds using Travis CI’s precision syntax—all with the developer in mind.

CircleCI - CircleCI gives web developers powerful Continuous Integration and Deployment with easy setup and maintenance.

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

Codeship - Codeship is a fast and secure hosted Continuous Delivery platform that scales with your needs.