17 Best DevOps Automation Tools in 2025
Contents
DevOps automation brings together development and operations to streamline the entire software lifecycle—from coding and testing to deployment and monitoring. The goal is to improve collaboration, reduce deployment times, and enhance software reliability.
Each phase of the software lifecycle has specialized automation tools that help achieve this. In this article, we’ll explore some of the best DevOps automation tools in 2025 across different categories, to help you and your team streamline the process.
Version Control Systems
Before anything else, software development teams need an efficient and reliable way to track and manage code changes. Version control systems allow multiple developers to work on the same project without conflicts, while ensuring code history is preserved.
Git
Git is one of the most popular VCS, no matter if you’re working solo or in a team. It’s fast, flexible, and has powerful branching and merging ability. Since it’s a distributed system, you can work independently with full copies of the repository, even offline, and sync the changes later.
Apache Subversion (SVN)
Apache Subversion is used mostly in enterprise environments with strict access control. Unlike Git, it is centralized, meaning it uses a single, central repository where all changes are stored. To commit code changes or update their local copies, developers need to be online and commits are either fully applied or not applied at all. This ensures that no half-completed changes exist in the repository, and prevents broken code that could disrupt other team members.
🐰 Hare Hint: SVN is more straightforward than Git, making it beginner-friendly.
CI/CD (Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment)
CI/CD tools automate the process of integrating, testing, and deploying code changes. This makes sure that every code update is tested and deployed smoothly and reliably.
Jenkins
Jenkins is an open-source automation server with extensive plugins for integrating with other tools to build, deploy, and automate software projects. It runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, and other Unix-like operating systems, and can be easily configured via its web interface. For faster performance, you can distribute builds across multiple machines to speed up the process.
GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions is a built-in tool for GitHub repositories, allowing you to automate all your workflows right from GitHub, including building, testing, and deploying your code. It can be run directly on a VM or inside a container, whether it’s self-hosted or in the cloud. You can also test across multiple operating systems and runtime versions simultaneously.
GitLab CI/CD
GitLab CI/CD is a CI/CD tool available to both GitLab and non-GitLab users. It offers built-in CI/CD pipeline templates, allowing developers to build, test, package, and deploy their applications without starting from scratch. Besides that, it has integrated security testing and compliance checks at code commit, ensuring that the application is secure and reliable.
AzureDevOps
Azure DevOps is Microsoft’s cloud-based DevOps platform that offers a complete suite of tools for source control, CI/CD, testing, project management, and collaboration. You can use the full suite, or just specific tools that fit your existing workflow. Azure DevOps includes a range of tools such as Azure Pipelines, Azure Test Plans, Azure Artifacts, Managed DevOps Pools, and more.
CircleCI
CircleCI offers both cloud-hosted and self-hosted CI/CD solutions. It supports various operating systems like Linux, macOS, and Windows, and maintains Docker images for various programming languages, databases, and operating systems. Developers can run builds in the Docker containers easily and quickly, without worrying about infrastructure setup.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Instead of manually setting up servers, networks, and cloud resources, IaC tools automate the process using code. With IaC, developers and operations teams can define infrastructure components like servers, networks, databases, and storage using configuration files or scripts. This makes the infrastructure deployment more automated, consistent, and scalable.
Terraform
Terraform is an open-source IaC tool that automates infrastructure provisioning, from low-level components like compute instances, storage, and networking, to high-level components like DNS entries and SaaS features—all using code. It uses its own declarative configuration language, HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), and like any other code, the infrastructure configurations can easily be edited, reviewed, versioned, shared, and reused.
Pulumi
Unlike Terraform which uses its own configuration language, Pulumi allows developers to define, deploy, and manage cloud infrastructure in their familiar programming languages like Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Go, C#, and Java using their open source SDKs. It supports almost any cloud environment, including AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, and more.
AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation is an IaC tool that allows you to define, provision, and manage AWS resources using YAML or JSON templates. Since it’s AWS-native, it integrates seamlessly with AWS services, and automates the creation and configuration of EC2 instances, S3 buckets, databases, and more, without having to manually manage their dependencies.
Configuration Management
Configuration management tools are used to manage and maintain the desired state of infrastructure and systems. They typically help to track, control, and standardize configurations across multiple environments (development, testing, production) to ensure consistency.
Ansible
Ansible is an open source automation tool for not only configuration management, but also provisioning, application deployment, orchestration, and many other IT processes. It uses Playbooks, which are written in simple, readable YAML to automate processes, and this is where you define the desired state of a local or remote system so that Ansible ensures it stays that way.
Chef
Chef offers an infrastructure management automation tool that ensures configurations are applied consistently in all environments. It takes a policy as code based approach that builds upon the principles of test-driven development to keep the environments consistent. This way, configuration changes must be tested before deployment, ensuring that environments are properly set up for running applications.
Monitoring and Logging
After an application is deployed, real-time insights into its performance are essential. Monitoring and logging tools can help detect issues early and troubleshoot them before they cause downtime. This ensures the application runs smoothly and reliably.
Prometheus
Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit that offers powerful time series data queries, visualization, and precise alerting. It collects and stores metrics as time series data, where each data point is recorded with a timestamp and optional key-value pairs called labels. This multi-dimensional data model enables flexible and detailed monitoring, making it easier to track application performance and detect issues early.
Grafana
Grafana is a versatile open-source analytics and interactive data visualization platform. It provides a suite of tools to query and visualize metrics, logs, and traces, giving you deeper insights into your system's performance. Unlike other monitoring tools that focus on just one type of data, Grafana connects to multiple data sources at the same time and combines them into a single dashboard, providing a complete view of your system’s health and behavior.
New Relic
New Relic is a comprehensive observability platform that helps you monitor, debug, and optimize the performance of your entire software stack. It provides real-time monitoring for applications, logs, and infrastructure, with pre-built interactive dashboards that offer actionable insights into your system. On top of that, it uses AI to automatically detect unusual patterns, and links logs to metrics and traces automatically to troubleshoot issues.
Security
Security tools are essential in DevOps automation. By integrating security into CI/CD pipelines, you can automate vulnerability scanning, secret management, and compliance enforcement to protect applications and infrastructure from attacks.
Snyk
Snyk is a developer-first security tool that helps developers secure their entire application lifecycle. It integrates seamlessly into existing development workflows and uses advanced security intelligence, combining public sources, community data, proprietary research, machine learning, and human-in-the-loop AI to detect vulnerabilities accurately.
Trivy
Trivy is an all-in-one, open-source security scanner developed that detects vulnerabilities and misconfiguration in containers, code repositories, binary artifacts, and more. It is available across various distribution channels and can be easily installed using the terminal/command line. Trivy also integrates seamlessly with popular platforms like GitHub Actions, Kubernetes, and VS Code, making it a versatile tool for securing your applications.
Final Thoughts
Choosing the right DevOps automation tools can greatly improve efficiency, scalability, and security. With so many options out there, it can be overwhelming to decide which ones to use. Hopefully, this list gives you a good starting point. Try them out, experiment, and see what works best for you!
