Salt
Ranked 5 of 5 configuration management tools by recommenders
Free, fast configuration management that people use to run thousands of servers with simple templated configs. Common caveat: it grows heavy and bloated over time.
Free, fast configuration management that people use to run thousands of servers with simple templated configs. Common caveat: it grows heavy and bloated over time.
16 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 9
- criticize it
- 7
- approval share
- 56%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 9 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 1.2 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Scales to thousands of servers
“every one of which was designed to do systems administration at scale”
Comment from 14 Jan 2026 in “Ask HN: How do you safely give LLMs SSH/DB access?” “I have seen salt easily manage 6000+ servers.”
Comment from 1 Dec 2025 in “Finding the grain of sand in a heap of Salt” Simple templated configuration
“With Salt or Ansible, such a scheme with NAT, DNS, DHCP configuration may all be templatized”
Comment from 29 Oct 2026 in “If IPv4 were land” “with a nice simple (detailed) configuration”
Comment from 19 Nov 2025 in “Learning to Boot from PXE”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Heavy and bloated over time
“Salt is astonishingly lightweight (at least before they started vendoring everything and I stopped using it) and extremely fast”
Comment from 8 May 2026 in “PyInfra 3.8.0 Is Out” “salt is heavy: it has client, server, agent.”
Comment from 4 May 2026 in “PyInfra 3.8.0 Is Out”
Other configuration management tools people recommend
The four most recommended other configuration management tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ansible | 120 | 71 | 63% | 12 | — | — |
| PyInfra | 30 | 4 | 88% | 7 | — | Approved |
| Puppet | 16 | 15 | 52% | 10 | — | — |
| Progress Chef | 10 | 11 | 48% | 7 | — | — |
| SaltThis page | 9 | 7 | 56% | 7 | — | — |
What people said
16 of the 17 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Neither Swisscom, nor Sunrise, nor Salt, and of course no reseller.”
“With Salt or Ansible, such a scheme with NAT, DNS, DHCP configuration may all be templatized”
“I don't miss sshing into servers or using puppet, ansible, salt, chef.”
“It's now used in WordPress's Gutenberg project, where it cut test runtime from 35 minutes to 23.”
“this Salt thing is much different and actually tractable”
“Switzerland might be even cheaper with Salt for the fiber”
“Salt is astonishingly lightweight (at least before they started vendoring everything and I stopped using it) and extremely fast”
“salt is heavy: it has client, server, agent.”
“awful DSLs such as Salt, Puppet, Chef, etc.”
“Ansible or salt is an option but that tends to degrade over time”
“every one of which was designed to do systems administration at scale”
“I have seen salt easily manage 6000+ servers.”
“there really is no good argument to be made for the sort of push architecture”
“with a nice simple (detailed) configuration”
“when choosing Salt over Ansible, but that was a complete disaster”
“You're better off managing things with Puppet or Salt”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.