Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Jenkins VS Ansible

Compare Jenkins VS Ansible and see what are their differences

Jenkins logo Jenkins

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

Ansible logo Ansible

Radically simple configuration-management, application deployment, task-execution, and multi-node orchestration engine
  • Jenkins Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-15
  • Ansible Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-05

Jenkins features and specs

  • Open Source
    Jenkins is an open-source tool, which means users can modify, share, and use it without licensing fees.
  • Large Plugin Ecosystem
    Jenkins has a robust plugin ecosystem with over 1,500 plugins, allowing extensive customization and functionality to fit various DevOps needs.
  • Active Community
    The active and large community of Jenkins users and developers provides extensive support, documentation, and shared solutions.
  • Platform Independent
    Jenkins can run on various platforms including Windows, macOS, and various Unix-like systems, providing flexibility in deployment.
  • CI/CD Capabilities
    Jenkins is well-suited for implementing Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, facilitating automated build, test, and deployment processes.
  • Scalability
    It supports distributed builds using Master-Slave architecture, enabling you to scale your build and deployment processes across multiple machines.
  • Extensible
    Thanks to its plugin architecture, Jenkins can be extended to integrate with a variety of tools and services, making it highly adaptable.

Possible disadvantages of Jenkins

  • Complex Setup
    Initial setup and configuration of Jenkins can be complicated, especially for new users or large-scale environments.
  • Resource Intensive
    Jenkins can be resource-intensive, requiring significant memory and CPU, particularly for large projects or high-frequency builds.
  • Maintenance Overhead
    Due to its extensive plugin usage, keeping Jenkins and its plugins updated can be time-consuming and sometimes problematic.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    Learning to use Jenkins effectively can have a steep learning curve, particularly due to the need to understand its various plugins and configuration options.
  • User Interface
    The user interface of Jenkins is sometimes considered outdated and not as intuitive or user-friendly as some of its modern counterparts.
  • Security Vulnerabilities
    As with many open-source tools, Jenkins can have security vulnerabilities that need to be regularly addressed to ensure a secure environment.
  • Poor Plugin Compatibility
    Not all plugins are maintained equally, leading to potential compatibility issues or bugs when using multiple plugins together.

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

Jenkins videos

Mick Jenkins - The Circus Album Review | DEHH

More videos:

  • Review - Mick Jenkins - The Water[s] ALBUM REVIEW
  • Review - Mick Jenkins - THE WATERS First REACTION/REVIEW

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 Jenkins and Ansible)
DevOps Tools
64 64%
36% 36
Continuous Integration
82 82%
18% 18
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 Jenkins and Ansible

Jenkins Reviews

The Best Alternatives to Jenkins for Developers
Jenkins X, a new kind of Jenkins made for cloud environments and modern development practices, tries to make setting up and handling CI/CD pipelines easier. It uses Kubernetes along with GitOps ideas in order to offer teams working on cloud-native apps an automated way that is less complex when it comes to managing their project’s lifecycle.
Source: morninglif.com
Top 5 Jenkins Alternatives in 2024: Automation of IT Infrastructure Written by Uzair Ghalib on the 02nd Jan 2024
If you have searched about Jenkins alternatives and you are reading this article, then there must be one of the three reasons you are here. You are already using Jenkins and are fed up with facing different issues and looking for a change. Or maybe you haven’t faced any issues yet but have heard the stories about Jenkins issues and looking to avoid them by choosing an...
Source: attuneops.io
What Are The Best Alternatives To Ansible? | Attune, Jenkins &, etc.
Jenkin is a popular tool for performing continuous integration of software projects in the market. Plus, it continues the delivery of projects regardless of the platform you’re working on. And it is also responsible for handling any build or continuous integration with various testing and development technologies. As a product, Jenkins is more developer-centric and...
Best 8 Ansible Alternatives & equivalent in 2022
Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration tool. It is written using the Java programming language. It facilitates real-time testing and reporting on isolated changes in a larger code base. This software similar to Ansible helps developers to quickly find and solve defects in their code base & automate testing of their builds.
Source: www.guru99.com
Top 10 Most Popular Jenkins Alternatives for DevOps in 2024
Jenkins may be a de-facto tool for CI/CD, but it’s no longer a shiny newcomer borne directly out of modern DevOps best practices. Although Jenkins is still relevant, newer tools can offer improved ergonomics and expanded functionality. These can be better suited to contemporary software delivery methods.
Source: spacelift.io

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

Ansible might be a bit more popular than Jenkins. We know about 9 links to it since March 2021 and only 7 links to Jenkins. 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.

Jenkins mentions (7)

  • CircleCI vs. Jenkins
    Jenkins is an open-source automation server used for software continuous integration and delivery. It automates various tasks, such as building, testing, and deploying applications.  It is easily extendable due to its vast ecosystem of plugins, making it easy to integrate into version control systems like Git, build tools like Maven/Gradle, and deployment platforms like AWS and Docker. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Automated delivery React / Vue app for each Pull Request.
    It will give you a possibility to find and solve problems faster, release more stable and higher quality products. Here we will use CircleCI, but you can use whatever you need (Jenkins, Travis CI, GitLab CI). - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Is Jenkins dead? v2
    CloudBees Jenkins Platform is a commercial offering from CloudBees, it is not the Jenkins project itself (which is open source). Jenkins is alive and well. See https://jenkins.io. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • ELI5 what is Jenkins?
    Ok. I'm talking about this: https://jenkins.io/. Source: over 2 years ago
  • I wanted a self hosted alternative to Atlassian status page so I build my own application !
    Currently supported : Datadog, Jenkins, DNS, HTTP. Source: over 2 years ago
View more

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 / almost 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

What are some alternatives?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Bamboo - Bamboo is a continuous integration and deployment tool that ties automated builds, tests and releases together in a single workflow.