How does Puppet compare to available commercial products?
The primary commercial vendors are BladeLogic and OpsWare. While they both have useful product lines, Puppet surpasses them by re-framing the entire server automation problem — while the commercial vendors are writing GUI applications for you, Puppet Labs is providing a development platform with all the features of a great language, like library development, code sharing, and the ability to version control your configurations. Trying to express a complex network configuration entirely through a GUI is an exercise in frustration that no one should suffer, but expressing the abstraction necessary to share those GUI configurations goes beyond frustrating. Of course, another great difference between Puppet and the commercial products is that Puppet is open sourced under the GNU Public License. You can download the product, try it out, peruse the source, and make whatever modifications you want. You have to have more than 100 servers just to get a demo from the commercial vendors, but Puppe
