Compare Ascender Pro and Ansible Automation Platform
Ascender Pro is commercially supported Ansible automation, derived from the open source AWX project. Your playbooks, roles, and collections carry over unchanged, so there is no new language and no rebuild. Five components ship under one license: Ascender, Ledger, Reaqt, Registry, and Galaxy Proxy. What changes is where the platform runs, who picks up when you call, and how the licensing counts.
Talk to a CIQ engineer about switching
Enterprises, national laboratories, and government agencies run production automation on CIQ.
If this sounds like your infrastructure:
- You are running AWX in production on a release that is no longer receiving fixes
- Your automation platform expects a base operating system you would rather not stand up and license
- You have hand-assembled Ansible, AWX, and supporting tools instead of running one supported platform
- You pay separately for the analytics or SIEM you need just to see what your automation changed
- Your node count sits well under the block size you are licensing
- Support cases route through tiers before reaching anyone who can change the software
- You need centralized patching and job execution across a distributed, multi-region fleet
- You want enterprise support without replatforming what your team already built
See the whole platform on paper
The Ascender Pro solution brief covers Ascender, Ledger, Reaqt, Registry, and Galaxy Proxy, and how the five work together to keep a large fleet healthy from event to fix to audit record.
Ascender Pro and Ansible Automation Platform, side by side
| Ansible Automation Platform | |
| Runs your existing playbooks, roles, and collections | ||
| Relationship to the open source AWX project | Derived from AWX. AWX 24.6.1, released July 2024, remains the project’s latest release1 | Automation controller is Red Hat’s downstream of the upstream AWX project2 |
| Where the platform runs | Kubernetes on your own infrastructure, in a cloud, or at the edge. K3s, RKE2, AKS, EKS, and GKE | Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 or 10 for containerized installation, or Red Hat OpenShift via operator. The RPM installer was deprecated in 2.5 and is removed in 2.73 |
| Automation triggered by fleet events | Reaqt, for automated event response. Syslog and webhooks in, job templates out, with per-host throttle and burst limits. Existing Event-Driven Ansible rulebooks use a simplified format and need to be converted | Event-Driven Ansible, included in the platform4 |
| Private source for collections and execution environments | Registry, plus Galaxy Proxy for caching. Galaxy Proxy is open source and also works in front of AAP, AWX, and command-line Ansible | Private automation hub, included in the platform4 |
| Audit and compliance in the platform | Ledger, which records automation-driven changes: real change diffs, full-text search, drift detection, and errata and CVE status by host | Job history and activity streams in the platform, with Automation Analytics reporting through the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console4 |
| Who answers your support case | The engineers who build the platform, with no escalation queue in front of them | A tiered support organization, by service level purchased5 |
| How it is licensed | Per node, with no node minimum after the initial 100-node purchase. All five components under one license, nothing sold separately | Managed-node subscriptions sold in block increments beginning at 100 managed nodes, across Standard and Premium editions. Red Hat directs pricing inquiries to sales rather than publishing a list price6 |
| If you decide to leave | Your playbooks, roles, and collections are portable, and Galaxy Proxy is open source | Your playbooks, roles, and collections are portable |
- AWX releases
- Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform documentation
- Planning your installation, Ansible Automation Platform 2.6: installation planning guide and installation and upgrade guide
- Ansible Automation Platform product page and components
- Red Hat production support service levels
- Ansible Automation Platform pricing and deployment options
Comparison reflects Red Hat’s publicly published documentation as of August 2026. Red Hat’s offerings and terms change; verify current details with Red Hat before making a purchasing decision.
Red Hat, Ansible, Ansible Automation Platform, and OpenShift are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. in the United States and other countries. AWX is an open source project sponsored by Red Hat. CIQ is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Red Hat, Inc. References are made for identification and comparison purposes only.
Why teams switch
It runs where you already run
Ascender Pro deploys on Kubernetes in your data center, in a cloud, or at the edge, across K3s, RKE2, AKS, EKS, and GKE. There is no base operating system to stand up and license underneath it, and it automates any operating system you run.
Nothing gets rewritten
Same Ansible, same Jinja2, still agentless. Your playbooks come with you, which is the point of staying in the Ansible ecosystem rather than moving to a new language.
Five components, one license
Ascender, Ledger, Reaqt, Registry, and Galaxy Proxy ship together. Nothing is a separate line item, and existing customers get every component by rerunning the installer.
You stop paying to see what your automation did
Ledger records automation-driven changes in the platform, with real change diffs, drift detection, and errata and CVE status by host, so audit readiness is a byproduct of the automation you already run.
The license matches the estate
Per node, with no node minimum after the initial purchase, so adding a server does not mean rounding up to the next block.
Migration is an import, not a project
Ascender Pro speaks fluent AWX because AWX is what it is derived from. Inventories, credentials, projects, and job templates share the same data model, and the execution model, including mesh and instance groups, carries across.
- Playbooks, roles, and collections carry over without modification
- Inventories, credentials, projects, and job templates migrate on the same data model
- Your team keeps the workflows and the muscle memory it already has
- Event-Driven Ansible rulebooks use a simplified format in Reaqt, and CIQ engineers do the conversion with you
- CIQ engineers support the cutover from start to finish
See your playbooks running on Ascender Pro
Bring your node count, your renewal date, and one workflow. A CIQ engineer will run it on Ascender Pro next to your current setup.