AWS OpsWorks vs Salt: What are the differences?

AWS OpsWorks: Model and manage your entire application from load balancers to databases using Chef. Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component ; Salt: Fast, scalable and flexible software for data center automation. Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more..

AWS OpsWorks and Salt belong to "Server Configuration and Automation" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by AWS OpsWorks are:

• AWS OpsWorks lets you model the different components of your application as layers in a stack, and maps your logical architecture to a physical architecture. You can see all resources associated with your application, and their status, in one place.
• AWS OpsWorks provides an event-driven configuration system with rich deployment tools that allow you to efficiently manage your applications over their lifetime, including support for customizable deployments, rollback, partial deployments, patch management, automatic instance scaling, and auto healing.
• AWS OpsWorks lets you define template configurations for your entire environment in a format that you can maintain and version just like your application source code.

On the other hand, Salt provides the following key features:

• Remote execution is the core function of Salt. Running pre-defined or arbitrary commands on remote hosts.
• Salt modules are the core of remote execution. They provide functionality such as installing packages, restarting a service, running a remote command, transferring files, and infinitely more
• Building on the remote execution core is a robust and flexible configuration management framework. Execution happens on the minions allowing effortless, simultaneous configuration of tens of thousands of hosts.

"Devops" is the top reason why over 27 developers like AWS OpsWorks, while over 41 developers mention "Flexible" as the leading cause for choosing Salt.

Salt is an open source tool with 10.1K GitHub stars and 4.59K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Salt's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, Salt has a broader approval, being mentioned in 110 company stacks & 20 developers stacks; compared to AWS OpsWorks, which is listed in 73 company stacks and 19 developer stacks.