Kestra Alternative to Rundeck

Kestra & Rundeck

DevOps engineers, IT managers, and platform architects can rely on Rundeck to automate operational tasks and Ansible playbooks. Rundeck can be a go-to runbook automation tool, providing a web UI and access control for scripts and tasks. However, as infrastructure and workflows grow in scale and complexity, many teams are looking for a more complete solution to centralize IT automation. Kestra is as a powerful alternative to Rundeck – offering a declarative, cloud-native orchestration platform ideal for automating Ansible workflows and beyond. lets see how Kestra architecture and features make it a strong choice for orchestrating IT automation in multi-cloud and Kubernetes environments.

Overview of Rundeck and Kestra

Rundeck: is an open-source automation tool (now part of PagerDuty) use (mostly) for runbook and infrastructure automation. Rundeck provides self-service access to operations tasks with fine-grained ACLs and a GUI to execute jobs on remote nodes via SSH​. It’s commonly used to run Ansible playbooks, deploy scripts, and handle routine server tasks. Rundeck’s flexibility is a strength, but it also has limitations – it offers around 120+ plugins and its API is not fully RESTful, lacking features like versioned job definitions​. For example, Rundeck cannot natively preserve historical versions of a job; any API call will run the latest job configuration​.

Kestra: is also an open-source, but it's an orchestration platform designed to bring Infrastructure-as-Code practices to automation and any workflow. Kestra takes an API-first approach and lets you define workflows as YAML pipelines, treating automation configuration as code​. It features an event-driven architecture and a highly extensible plugin ecosystem. Kestra was built with scalability in mind – under the hood it uses Apache Kafka and Elasticsearch to handle massive workloads with an “infinitely scalable” design​. With a user-friendly UI (including a code editor and live workflow topology view) and 600+ plugins for integrations​, Kestra is aimed at modern cloud and data-centric automation needs.

Why Choose Kestra Over Rundeck?

• Declarative YAML Pipelines: Kestra uses fully declarative YAML workflows, enabling GitOps and "automation-as-code" practices. Rundeck often relies on imperative scripts and manual configurations, making workflows harder to version and maintain.
• Event-Driven Orchestration: Kestra supports native event-driven triggers (webhooks, message queues, schedules), allowing reactive and asynchronous automation. Rundeck primarily supports scheduled and manual executions with limited event-driven capabilities.
• Ansible Integration: Kestra deeply integrates Ansible into complex, multi-step workflows, allowing for conditional logic, parallel execution, and data passing. Rundeck’s Ansible integration is generally limited to running standalone playbooks.
• Scalability and Performance: Kestra’s Kafka-powered architecture ensures horizontal scalability, handling massive workflows with ease. Rundeck can scale through clustering but faces limitations for very large-scale parallel executions.
• Cloud-Native and Kubernetes Ready: Kestra is designed specifically for Kubernetes and cloud-native environments, enabling effortless scaling and robust multi-cloud deployments. Rundeck, although containerized, lacks native cloud elasticity and dynamic scaling.
• Rich Plugin Ecosystem: Kestra boasts over 600 plugins, seamlessly integrating with cloud services, Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, databases, and more. Rundeck provides fewer plugins, with less native cloud and data service support.
• Multi-Tenancy: Kestra includes native multi-tenant capabilities, enabling platform teams to host multiple isolated environments from a single instance. Rundeck generally requires separate deployments for true isolation.

Ansible Workflow Orchestration: Kestra vs Rundeck

Rundeck with Ansible: Rundeck offers an integration plugin for Ansible that lets you execute Ansible playbooks or modules from a Rundeck job​. Essentially, Rundeck acts as a UI and scheduler on top of Ansible’s CLI. This is great for giving teams self-service access to run playbooks – e.g. an operations team can click a button in Rundeck to run a standardized Ansible playbook across certain hosts, without directly using the ansible command. Rundeck can also import Ansible inventory and facts, aligning with how Ansible organizes hosts​. However, Rundeck does not deeply orchestrate multiple Ansible runs in a single flow; each job run might correspond to one playbook. If you need to run a sequence of playbooks (with conditional logic or data passing between them), you would have to chain Rundeck jobs or script that logic. In summary, Rundeck centralizes Ansible execution with access control and logging, but treats Ansible tasks similarly to shell scripts.

Kestra with Ansible: Kestra takes Ansible integration a step further by making it a part of its workflow engine. With Kestra’s Ansible plugin, you can include an AnsibleCLI task in a YAML flow, specifying the playbook to run and any parameters. This allows Ansible playbook runs to be one step among many in a larger pipeline – for example, you could provision infrastructure with Terraform (another Kestra task), then run an Ansible playbook to configure the new servers, then verify a service is running, and finally send a notification. All these steps would be in one coordinated Kestra workflow, with data passed between steps as needed. Crucially, Kestra can orchestrate these tasks with retries, error handling, and even parallelism. For instance, you could run multiple Ansible playbooks in parallel on different target groups, and then join for a final step. This level of orchestration is beyond Rundeck’s basic sequential job model. Moreover, because Kestra workflows are event-triggerable, your Ansible automation can be fully automated – e.g., trigger an Ansible patching playbook whenever a new host is detected or when an alert fires. Kestra essentially brings Ansible into a larger automation fabric, whereas Rundeck provides a GUI and control layer on top of Ansible.

Feature Comparison Table

Make Your Choice

For teams looking to automate Ansible workflows and centralize their IT automation, Kestra presents a compelling alternative to Rundeck. Rundeck paved the way in runbook automation with its easy UI and ACLs for scripts, but its older architecture can become a bottleneck in an cloud-native, event-driven enviornment. Kestra brings a fresh approach: declarative YAML workflows, an API-first design, massive scalability, multi-tenancy, and a rich plugin ecosystem that spans everything from Terraform to ServiceNow. This means you can coordinate your Ansible tasks, cloud operations, data jobs, and more in one place – with the reliability of a distributed system and the agility of code-as-configuration.

DevOps engineers will appreciate how Kestra integrates with CI/CD and GitOps processes, allowing infrastructure automation to be treated like software development. IT managers benefit from better governance through multi-tenant controls and the ability to standardize automation across the organization without silos. Platform architects can leverage Kestra’s cloud-native foundations to ensure the automation platform itself is scalable and future-proof, ready for multi-cloud and Kubernetes deployments.

In summary, while Rundeck remains a solid tool for certain use cases, Kestra’s advantages in Ansible workflow orchestration, event-driven automation, scalability, and ease of use make it the go-to choice for infrastructure orchestration. By adopting Kestra, organizations can accelerate their automation initiatives – orchestrating everything from simple playbook runs to complex, cross-platform workflows – all on a unified, resilient platform built for the demands of IT and DevOps environments.​