vs Foreman, MaaS, Cobber, and Ironic
RackN wins through collaboration.  No other bare metal platform focuses first on fundamentally improving operations for our community.  We’re not just about having better technology - we work with our operators to build robust data centers with more automation, less human toil and a higher return on investment.

Deep and Active Support

Unlike the open source projects below, RackN is a licensed software product.  That means we treat customer support for operations and bare metal as a first-class product feature. 

Our revenue comes from our software’s utility, not services or support.

And we win on features.

No other system on the market provides the integrated capabilities of the RackN Digital Rebar Platform (DRP).  Our unique infrastructure as code (IaC) features enable a wide range of advanced use-cases such as multi-site management, dynamic out of band workflows (contexts), manage switches or storage appliances for air-gapped and edge deployments.

We deliver these features because only RackN takes a holistic bare metal management approach. Take us for a free self-service test drive and you’ll find that we are the simplest to use and most flexible data center automation platform available.  In addition to the vast open Digital Rebar catalog, we’ve made 100% of the RackN extensions available to community users running labs up to 20 machines.

reddit.com/r/devops

Reddit - Digital Rebar
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
Orchestration Integrated Triggers YES ✔ no no no no
Webhooks YES ✔ no no no no
Alert Subsystem YES ✔ no no no no
Cluster Lifecycles YES ✔ no no no no
Day 2 Mode YES ✔ no no no no
Modular IaC YES ✔ no no no no
Pipelines One Process, Many Targets 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

Don’t Take Our Word For It!

The Digital Rebar Platform speaks for itself.  We encourage operators to download and test it!