Ansible Tower (Licensed) vs Ansible AWX (Open Source)

Ansible Tower offers a graphical user interface with role-based access control method for the end users.  Tower enables to use ansible engine‘s rich features to everyone including non-technical people.  Ansible admin is still required to write the playbook and configure as a template to make it available for everyone and carefully delegate the work to others.

Ansible AWX is an upstream project of ansible Tower. This is similar to Fedora project which drives innovation and later integrated into to Red Hat Linux. which means,  AWX have all the features as Ansible tower along with the new functionality.  AWX project code is dynamic and it will be committed by the community members very frequently.

How to choose the Ansible product between  AWX and Tower? 

If your project can’t afford any cost, start using the AWX. If the project is ready to fund for ansible Tower, then go for it.  Do you need a justification to go with Ansible Tower?

Ansible AWX :

• Open Source  – Free to use.
• No Node Limitations
• Only available in the container format. (Docker)
• Frequent updates from the community.
• Codes are not hardened
• Not made for enterprise use.
• Very short lifecycle.

Ansible Tower: 

• Red Hat Licensed.
• License costs 10k USD / Per 100 Nodes.
• High Availability supported.
• Packages are hardened  as per security standards
• 24×7 – Red Hat Supported.
• Stable updates.
• Longer lifecycle than AWX.

Based on the above notes,  you could decide that what you need in your environment. Share it! Comment it !! Be Sociable !!!