Top 7 Ansible Tower / Automation Controller Alternatives

Ansible Tower is a fully-fledged configuration management orchestration tool for Ansible designed to solve some of the challenges associated with managing your Ansible configurations. It provides a centralized dashboard, role-based access control, job scheduling, and logging to streamline automation workflows.

It provides a UI to understand what is happening with your Ansible playbooks, the ability to schedule jobs, and logging. You can also easily use its API to build different integrations.

Note: As of Ansible Automation Platform 2, Ansible Tower has been rebranded as Ansible Automation Controller, offering the same core functionality with additional improvements.

Ansible Tower is powerful, but it is not always the best option for managing your Ansible workflows.

Here are some common reasons why an alternative makes sense:

• Licensing costs – Ansible Tower is expensive, especially for small and mid-sized businesses.
• Learning curve – Your engineers will need time to get up to speed with it.
• Customization – Ansible Tower is not very flexible, and many alternatives offer higher levels of customization.
• Limited to Ansible – It can only help you with your Ansible workflows.

Here are the best Ansible Tower alternatives:

1. Spacelift
2. AWX
3. Rundeck
4. Jenkins
5. GitHub Actions
6. GitLab CI/CD
7. Semaphore UI

Spacelift is an infrastructure orchestration platform that supports Terraform, OpenTofu, Ansible, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Terragrunt, and Kubernetes. 

It lets you manage all your favorite infrastructure tools under a single platform. You can use it to easily build workflows that accommodate all your provisioning, configuration, and container workflow needs.

Thanks to stack dependencies, you can easily build dependencies between different tools (e.g., Terraform and Ansible), share outputs, and go on as many nested levels as you want, making it simple to keep your configurations small and identify issues fast.

Spacelift offers two views for Ansible (one at the workflow level, and the other one at the account level) so you can understand what is happening with your hosts — which tasks have run, their statuses, and logging information to understand how to overcome the issues.

Website: https://spacelift.io 

Licensing/Pricing: Multiple pricing tiers available, including an always-free tier

Key features:

• Multi-infrastructure tool support (Ansible, OpenTofu, Terraform, Kubernetes, Terragrunt, Pulumi, CloudFormation)
• Policy-as-code engine based on OPA to implement security, governance, and compliance
• Self-service infrastructure to improve developer velocity
• Drift detection and remediation
• Flexibility to integrate with any tools you want

When to use?

Spacelift is useful regardless of your company’s size, and it should be leveraged whenever infrastructure orchestration is needed.

AWX is an open-source version of Ansible Tower that offers almost the same functionality as Tower does, without the licensing fees.

With AWX, you get an easy way to manage your Ansible playbooks, view details of your hosts, implement different levels of access control, and get better overall visibility.

Because it is open-source, it doesn’t offer the enterprise-grade support that Ansible Tower does.

Website: https://ansible.readthedocs.io/projects/awx/en/latest/

Licensing/Pricing: Open Source

Key features:

• Management of your Ansible playbooks
• Observability into your hosts
• Credentials management
• Scheduling

When to use?

AWX should be leveraged in small to midsize projects, as its lack of enterprise support can be a show-stopper for big organizations.

Rundeck is an automation tool that lets you run different commands across multiple nodes with access control. It is different from Ansible Tower because it focuses more on self-service automation than on predefined workflows.

It lets you create and schedule jobs and run ad-hoc commands, and it can help with orchestrating complex workflows. However, it doesn’t have all the specialized tools required for monitoring your Ansible hosts or easily identifying why issues have occurred.

Website: https://www.rundeck.com 

Licensing/Pricing: Open source, enterprise version also available

Key features:

• Pipeline as code using Groovy
• Extensive plugin offering
• Self-hosted

When to use?

Rundeck is useful for teams that want to provide self-service operations while maintaining control.

Jenkins is an open-source generic CI/CD pipeline. It doesn’t offer any specific features for Ansible, but you have a choice of plugins for your Ansible workflows.

Jenkins is typically used for application pipelines, but with some work, you can use it for Ansible as well. However, you will have to build many features to mirror what Ansible Tower offers.

Website: https://www.jenkins.io/

Licensing/Pricing: Open source

Key features:

• Pipeline as code using Groovy
• Extensive plugin offering
• Self-hosted

When to use?

Jenkins is ideal for organizations that need highly customizable CI/CD pipelines, but the need to maintain it makes it more suitable for experienced users.

GitHub Actions is another generic CI/CD pipeline available in GitHub. It integrates natively with your GitHub repository and uses YAML for pipeline definition.

You can easily use pre-existing actions with Ansible or build everything from scratch. If you want to learn more about using GitHub Actions with Ansible, check out our article Automating Playbook Runs with GitHub Actions. 

Website: https://github.com/features/actions 

Licensing/Pricing: Free for public repositories (with a limit), paid for private repositories. For more information, contact their sales department.

Key features:

• Native CI/CD for GitHub repositories
• YAML workflows
• Marketplace integration with Ansible

When to use?

GitHub Actions works best for organizations that manage their repositories in GitHub. Because it is a generic CI/CD it will lack some of the features required for managing configuration management.

GitLab CI/CD is a generic CI/CD available in GitLab. It integrates natively with your GitLab repositories and similar to GitHub Actions, it uses YAML to define your pipelines.

Like GitHub Actions, it presents a simple method for automating your workflows, but being a generic CI/CD it doesn’t have all the specialized features you would require for Ansible.

Website: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/continuous-integration/  

Licensing/Pricing: Free tier available, paid plans for advanced features

Key features:

• Native CI/CD for GitLab repositories
• YAML workflows
• Ansible integration available

When to use?

GitLab CI/CD works best for organizations that manage their repositories in GitLab, but similar to GitHub Actions, it will lack some of the features required for managing configuration management.

Semaphore UI can be installed on any platform and provides a WebUI for managing your Ansible playbooks.

It provides a cost-effective alternative to Ansible Tower while offering enough features for small to mid-sized teams needing centralized Ansible execution.

Website: https://semaphoreui.com 

Licensing/Pricing: Free tier available, paid plans for advanced features

Key features:

• Simple playbook execution
• Inventory management
• Job scheduling

When to use?

Semaphore UI is great for small and midsized teams looking for a simple solution to manage their Ansible Playbooks.

The following table summarizes the tools we’ve mentioned:

Ansible Tower can be a great choice if you can afford the licensing costs and you have time to learn the intricacies of the platform. However, it cannot help you with anything other than your Ansible workflows.

If you are interested in a specialized infrastructure platform useful for IaC, configuration management, and container orchestration, Spacelift is the best choice for you. Would you like to see this in action — or just get a tl;dr? Check out this video showing you Spacelift’s Ansible functionality:

If you want to learn more about using Spacelift with Ansible, check our documentation, read our Ansible guide, or book a demo with one of our engineers.