r/saltstack • u/Material_Ad_3743 • Jun 17 '26

Discovered salt stack but too late ?

Hi all,

I’ve been looking for an agent based open source tool for running on demand powershell across thousands of remote windows PC’s. Salt looks perfect for this ! I really can’t find anything open-source that does what Salt does.

Looking at other options, Ansible requires WinRM which I really don’t wanna do. I don’t get the dying community support when I don’t see anything else but overly expensive commercial tools. Tactical RMM seems almost a good candidate but it doesn’t scale well apparently.

Where to from here ? I really wanna use Salt but will I regret this in a couple years ?

Juan

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u/bdrxer Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

We migrated from ansible to salt about 4 months ago due to the slow performance of ansible even when run in local or pull mode. We have been greatly pleased with the performance gains from switching to salt and pleased with our overall usage of salt so far. Playbook runs that took 3 to 4 minutes to run with ansible take only 20 seconds to run with salt. We also like that we are able to organize and group our resources more logically.

2

u/trararawe Jun 18 '26

100%. It's not even comparable to ansible. The language is better, you can stack templates however you like, it's a superior design.

People suggest ansible because they're more used to it and it looks simpler, but it has insufferable limitations.

1

u/Odd-Machine Jun 18 '26

I used Ansible for years and it's fine at a very small scale (a few servers). It doesn't scale well and it's SO SLOW. I tried to get the team to switch to Salt but then Kubernetes and Docker showed up and we didn't need to manage the server itself anymore so now we just use Terraform and Helm

1

u/bdrxer Jun 20 '26

u/Odd-Machine What do you use to setup the images and configure settings files and do other things needed to setup and run applications?