Salt

I tried out Salt, Puppet, and Ansible. Salt made a lot more sense to set up for me. It can do state management style like Puppet and task management style like Ansible and easily combine the two styles. After using it for a year, and now really trying hard to like Puppet and/or Ansible after the Broadcom purchase, I can't get over how much better Salt is... in pretty much every way. It's easier, lighter, scales better, as much if not more configuration capabilities... I think I could go on and on.

Easier to get started than Ansible, more scalable than Puppet. Since it uses pub-sub messaging to run tasks, offline systems will be brought up to date as soon as they are online unlike Ansible, but doesn't need to run an unnecessary scheduled task over and over like Puppet. Salt combines the best them all and then some. I'm so glad I gave it a shot. I'm using it to manage Linux servers and Windows desktops/laptops mostly.