What is Salt?
Salt is an open-source automation framework used by teams to manage thousands of systems from a single control plane.
Salt pricing
We don't have Salt's full plan breakdown yet (its pricing page resisted automated reading). Here's what we could confirm. Always check live pricing for exact numbers.
What Salt does
The capabilities that matter for configuration management tools, normalised so it lines up with every alternative. “-” means we haven't confirmed it, not that it's missing.
- Architecture
- Agent-based
- Push / pull model
- -
- Config language
- -
- Masterless mode
- -
- Hosting
- Self-hosted only
- Idempotent
- -
- Desired-state declarative
- ✓
- Content registry
- -
- Windows support
- ✓
- Cloud provisioning
- -
- Policy / compliance
- -
- Enterprise edition
- -
- Open-source core
- ✓
Platform & deployment
Independently observed- Self-hosted
Salt alternatives
Other configuration management tools we track, ranked by the same independent score.
- pyinfraagentless infrastructure automation, in plain Pythonlow · 31%
- NixOS / NixDeclarative builds and deploymentslow · 22%
- HabitatOpen source automation solution for defining, packaging, and delivering applications to any environmentlow · 41%
- OpenVoxThe modern open source implementation of the world's most capable configuration management platformlow · 22%
- Puppet Boltlow · 16%
- Rexthe friendly automation frameworklow · 31%
The Vioscale score: one lens on the evidence
Not user reviews and not a paid placement: a confidence-weighted blend of the independent signals below (adoption, activity, security posture, and more), which you can sort and re-weight yourself. Vendors can correct their listing but can never move their rank, and stars are weighted low as a vanity metric. It is one way to read the evidence for Salt, not the verdict.
| Signal | Score | Weight | Contribution | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Package Downloads | 57 | 0.20 | 11.4 | ✓ |
| Release Cadence | 94 | 0.08 | 7.2 | ✓ |
| Capabilities | 58 | 0.12 | 7.1 | ✓ |
| Github Activity | 37 | 0.14 | 5.1 | ✓ |
| Github Stars | 79 | 0.04 | 3.0 | ✓ |
| Integrations | 0 | 0.06 | 0.0 | - |
| Security Posture | 0 | 0.10 | 0.0 | - |
| Stackoverflow Activity | 0 | 0.09 | 0.0 | - |
Computed . Re-weight it by intent, or see the full method.
All data & sourcesshow ↓
Every value we hold, with its source, retrieval date, and confidence. This is the evidence behind the score: don't trust it, verify it.
Activity
| Attribute | Value | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Commits last 30d | 14 | mediumsource · 2026-08-01 · 65% |
Adoption
Features
| Attribute | Value | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Capabilities | {"hosting":"self","architecture":"agent","desired_state":true,"windows_support":true,"open_source_core":true} | mediumsource · 2026-08-05 · 60% |
Language
| Attribute | Value | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Primary | Python | highsource · 2026-08-01 · 98% |
License
| Attribute | Value | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Spdx | Apache-2.0 | mediumsource · 2026-08-01 · 67% |
Pricing
Release
| Attribute | Value | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Cadence days | 11 | mediumsource · 2026-08-01 · 70% |
Reliability
| Attribute | Value | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Status page | Yes | mediumsource · 2026-08-05 · 60% |