10 Best Configuration Management Tools List
Here's my pick of the 10 best software from the 20 tools reviewed.
Our one-on-one guidance will help you find the perfect fit.
With so many different configuration management tools available, figuring out which is right for you is tough. You know you want to ensure that all your systems are in a known, stable, and reliable state but need to figure out which tool is best. I've got you! In this post I'll help make your choice easy, sharing my personal experiences using dozens of different configuration management software with various systems, with my picks of the best configuration management tools.
What Are Configuration Management Tools?
Configuration management tools are software that automate the process of tracking and controlling changes in software, hardware, and network configurations. They manage the setup, operation, and changes to systems and services, ensuring consistency across IT environments. These tools are essential in maintaining the stability and reliability of IT infrastructure, particularly in complex or rapidly changing environments.
The benefits and uses of configuration management tools include maintaining consistency across systems, enhancing operational efficiency, and reducing errors caused by manual configurations. They provide a systematic approach to managing changes, thereby reducing risks associated with system failures or security vulnerabilities. These tools also offer improved documentation and compliance capabilities, essential for auditing and regulatory purposes. By automating repetitive tasks, they free up IT personnel to focus on more strategic activities, supporting scalability and improved decision-making in IT management.
Overviews Of The Top 10 Configuration Management Tools
These are the software configuration management tools we want to introduce you to in this article. These CM tools are the items that made our final top 10 list.
New Relic is a comprehensive observability platform that provides real-time insights into the performance of applications, infrastructure, and entire digital ecosystems. It offers a wide range of monitoring tools, including application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring, and synthetic monitoring.
One of the ways New Relic supports configuration management is through its change tracking feature. This tool allows teams to monitor and track changes made to their software environments in real time, including updates to applications, infrastructure configurations, and code deployments. By correlating these changes with performance data, New Relic helps teams identify the impact of specific configuration changes on system performance and stability.
Additionally, New Relic's monitoring and alerting capabilities play a vital role in configuration management by providing continuous visibility into the state of your systems. When configurations are altered, New Relic can detect anomalies or performance degradations that may result from these changes.
Integrations include AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Docker, Jenkins, PagerDuty, Slack, Terraform, Atlassian Jira, GitHub, GitLab, and CircleCI.
Salesforce Service Cloud is a customer service software solution that equips businesses with a variety of tools to manage customer support interactions across multiple channels. It is particularly designed to support businesses in delivering personalized customer service and managing complex service requests.
Salesforce Service Cloud provides a platform where businesses can customize and automate their customer service processes. The tool allows for the creation of workflows, approval processes, and custom applications tailored to specific business needs. It also enables the management of service operations with configurable templates, role-based views, and the ability to define and track service levels.
Salesforce Service Cloud integrates with platforms such as Trello, Mailchimp, HubSpot CRM, Smartsheet, Freshdesk, Guru, Boomi, CloudTalk, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, TalkDesk, Yonyx, and Twilio.
Pricing for Salesforce Service Cloud starts from $25/user/month (billed annually) and includes a 14-day free trial.
Freshservice by Freshworks is a cloud-based IT service management (ITSM) solution designed for businesses of all sizes. It offers a comprehensive suite of tools to manage incidents, service requests, problems, changes, and IT assets, ensuring efficient and effective IT service delivery.
As a configuration management tool, Freshservice excels with its configuration management database (CMDB), which provides a detailed view of IT assets and their interrelationships. This feature allows organizations to maintain an accurate and up-to-date record of their IT environment, facilitating better change management and reducing the risk of service disruptions.
Additionally, Freshservice's automation capabilities, such as automated discovery of assets and integration with change management processes, further enhance its effectiveness in maintaining configuration data.
Notable integrations include Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Google Workspace, Office 365, Zapier, AWS, Azure, Okta, and Salesforce.
Best for managing and tracking from a single console
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is the full-stack ITSM solution from ManageEngine, the enterprise IT management division of Zoho Corporation. The CMDB in ServiceDesk Plus enables enterprises to manage and track all aspects of their IT infrastructure from a single console. With the CMDB, organizations can get a central view of all critical business services, along with their relationship maps and associated CIs, with custom business views.
Use predefined CI relationship types or add custom ones based on their business needs. You’ll also be able to reduce the risk involved in incidents and changes by integrating with other ITSM processes, such as incident and change management, and building a visual map of all the dependencies and relationships between various assets in the CMDB. Plus, the tool lets you fetch CIs into the application using CSVs and import CI relationship maps using CMDB APIs.
ServiceDesk Plus also offers ITAM and other capabilities in the Professional and Enterprise editions. ServiceDesk Plus is available as a subscription service or an on-premises solution, and organizations can buy a monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, or annual plan based on their budget.
ServiceDesk Plus costs from $58/technician/month. They also offer a free edition for up to 5 technicians, a 30-day free trial, and an online demo.
Comindware is a low-code workflow software solution with configuration management functionality as well as change management, incident management, knowledge management, SLA management, and other ITSM solutions. Comindware’s low-code solution boasts drag-and-drop workflow creation and form configuration, configurable user interfaces, and mobile platform availability.
Comindware is an all-in-one workflow software that includes configuration management as one of many, many features. This makes them a great choice for teams who need a range of business technology services and would appreciate the ease of accessing everything through one seamless platform.
Comindware’s web services-based API makes it possible to integrate with any third-party system like MS Outlook, MS Active Directory, Salesforce, SurveyGizmo, to name a few.
Comindware costs from $29.99/user/month and offers a 30-day free trial.
ServiceNow is a software company based in the USA that helps companies manage their workflows via a cloud computing platform. ServiceNow’s tool allows IT teams to manage their incoming requests and sort accordingly, removing the need for email communication. The user who submits the ticket is able to set priority levels and attach screenshots in addition to recording specific details of each job.ServiceNow provides a clean and attractive user interface, making it easy for you to organize your job tickets and assign tasks. The tool also provides both mobile agents, allowing you to triage and manage jobs on the go. ServiceNow also offers an Agent Workspace, allowing you a single workspace to facilitate solutions, which increases efficiency of agents.ServiceNow integrates with platforms such as Jira, Trello, and Slack. ServiceNow offers customized pricing upon request.
Best full-stack ITSM with configuration management
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is a fully featured IT service management platform designed for digital enterprises.
ServiceDesk Plus offers various ITSM features including a helpdesk, release management, and a lot more, but here, let look at the configuration management database (CMDB) in particular.
ServiceDesk Plus comes with integrated asset management and a CMDB, which includes features for IT asset discovery and the ability to create custom Configuration Items (CIs) and relationship types. You can configure these relationships in a visual builder with a drag-and-drop interface that can display statuses, impacts, relationship types, and other information you'll need to manage incidents, assets, and changes.
ManageEngine offers three flexible plans: Standard, Professional and Enterprise. The Standard package provides the IT helpdesk software, the Professional plan adds the asset management component to the helpdesk software and the Enterprise option delivers a full-stack service management platform.
Pointel is an online tool that provides you and your team with visibility of changes made within the configuration management environment. The tool offers ways to improve your customers’ satisfaction by means of contact center solutions and features.Pointel offers features such as Genesys Cloud Implementation, which allows you to build omnichannel customer experience and actionable cradle-to-grave reports. The tool also provides a Voice Self Service feature and the ability to carry out data warehousing and analytics.Pointel offers integrations with various chat apps such as Slack and Google Hangouts.Pointel offers customized pricing upon request.
Octopus Deploy is a sleek, modern solution for managing releases, automating deployments, and automating the runbooks. Octopus is used by over 25,000 companies and counting, including Microsoft, NASA, Xero, and Disney. Octopus connects your software development team, release managers, and operations folks to break down departmental information silos.
Octopus empowers developers, release managers, and operations folks to bring all automations into a single platform. This is unique, as most CI/CD tools and runbook automation are handled separately. Octopus provides over 400 step templates for quick-start deployments no matter the complexity of the project.
Octopus Deploy integrates with Slack, Azure, Akamai, Amazon Chime, ApexSQL DevOps Toolkit, ASP.NET Core, AWS, Chocolatey, EdgeCast, Jasper, ClickOnce, Docker, F5, Gitlab, Hipchat, JIRA, Kubernetes, MariaDB, and others.
Octopus Deploy is free to use for up to 10 deployment targets. Paid plans cost from $9/target/month.
Ansible is a free, open source IT automation platform with tools for application deployment, managing systems, collaboration between departments, and sharing problem/solution information with everyone using the platform. Their configuration management solution is minimalistic, secure, consistent, and reliable and works with a simple password or SSH key—no agent software required.
An Ansible subscription also gives you a ton of quality-of-life features via their award-winning customer portal, including product documentation, helpful videos, and community discussions. Their free trial is twice the length of most at 60 days, which is beneficial to anyone looking to test the product’s ease of use themselves before committing to a purchase.
Ansible integrates with VMware, Red Hat Virtualization (RHV), Xenserver, Vagrant, ServiceNow, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, Github, Atlassian Bitbucket Pipelines, Jenkins, Travis CI, Teamcity, Splunk, AppDynamics, Dynatrace, LogicMonitor, InfluxDB, and dozens of other apps as well.
Ansible is free to use. Paid plans start at $5000/year and come with a 60-day free trial.
The Top 10 Configuration Management Tools Summary
Tools | Price | |
---|---|---|
New Relic | From $25/user/month (billed annually) | Website |
Salesforce Service Cloud | From $25/user/month (billed annually) | Website |
Freshservice | From $19/user/month (billed annually) | Website |
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus | From $12/user/month (billed annually) | Website |
Comindware Tracker | $29.99/user/month | Website |
ServiceNow | Pricing upon request | Website |
ManageEngine Service Desk Plus | Pricing upon request | Website |
Pointel CMS | Customized pricing upon request | Website |
Octopus | $9/target/month | Website |
Ansible | From $10,000/year (billed annually) | Website |
Compare Software Specs Side by Side
Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.
Compare SoftwareOther Config Software Options
Here’s a few more that didn’t make the top list. If you need additional suggestions for handy configuration management tools, check these out.
Looking for more QA tools? Check out these resources:
- Test Management Tools
- Defect Tracking Tools
- Android Emulators For PCs
- Server Monitoring Tools
- SQL Editors
Configuration Management FAQ
What is configuration management?
Why is configuration management important?
What is configuration management software? And what is SCM software?
Who are the primary users of an SCM system?
What Do You Think About These Configuration Management Tools?
I still need to elaborate upon and research this list—so please let me know: Have you tried out any tools listed above?
What configuration controls do you look for in configuring software?
If you have a go-to favourite config tool that you swear by, let us know in the comments below!
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