About Cobbler
Cobbler is one of the oldest and simplest PXE provisioning services. With that age and simplicity comes significant trade offs like lack of commercial support, minimal API, and no active development. These gaps have caused Cobbler to fall far behind the industry.
Cobbler relies on statically defined templates that raise security and admin concerns. And as with many aging technologies, Cobbler lacks the APIs, DHCP, integrations and security features proactively backed into Digital Rebar.
Language: Python
Feature Comparison
A feature-by-feature comparison is great to compare products, but, be warned, it also hides critical insights around simplicity, integration, workflow and composability that a platform like RackN provides.
Please contact us with questions, concerns or corrections.
| Class | Feature | RackN | Cobbler | Foreman | MaaS | Ironic |
| API | Ad Hoc (Pooled) Assignment | YES ✔ | no | no | YES ✔ | YES ✔ |
| Evented (WSS) | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Integrated DHCP | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Intent API | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Secure API | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Active Community | YES ✔ | no | no | no | YES ✔ | |
| Enterprise | Commercial Support | YES ✔ | no | YES ✔ | YES ✔ | YES ✔ |
| Highly Available | YES ✔ | no | no | YES ✔ | no | |
| Multi Tenant | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| RBAC with Views | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| SSO Integration | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Flexible | Field Extensible | YES ✔ | no | YES ✔ | no | no |
| Metal and Cloud | YES ✔ | no | YES ✔ | no | no | |
| In-Field Configuration | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Multi-OS | YES ✔ | Linux | Linux | Linux | YES ✔ | |
| Hardware | Automatic Classification | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no |
| Burnin and Decommission | YES ✔ | no | no | no | YES ✔ | |
| Integrate OOB / IPMI | YES ✔ | no | no | no | YES ✔ | |
| Integrated Inventory | YES ✔ | no | no | YES ✔ | YES ✔ | |
| Multi-Arch / Multi-Protocol | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Switch Integration | YES ✔ | no | no | YES ✔ | YES ✔ | |
| Scale | Scale to 1,000s | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no |
| Advanced Evented UX | YES ✔ | no | no | YES ✔ | no | |
| Multi-Site Management | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Multi-Site Federated Views | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Self-Upgrading | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Small footprint | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Workflow | Change O/S without Reboot | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no |
| Firmware configuration | YES ✔ | no | no | no | YES ✔ | |
| Image deployment | YES ✔ | no | no | YES ✔ | YES ✔ | |
| Integrated Workflow | YES ✔ | no | no | no | YES ✔ | |
| Dynamic Contexts | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Modular IaC | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no |