Ascender is CIQ's commercially supported continuation of AWX, and it solves the one thing AWX broke: it ships releases and you can buy a support contract. But it keeps AWX's footprint. A Kubernetes-based install, Postgres, and a Receptor mesh stand up before the first playbook runs, and Ansible is still the only tool. SwitchTender is one Go binary. Download it, run it, and you have job templates, schedules, RBAC, surveys, SSO, workflows, and approvals, plus a live host-by-task matrix and seven tools instead of one. Your AWX-format export imports in one command.
Ascender answers AWX's maintenance problem. It doesn't answer the three that sent teams looking in the first place.
Ascender installs onto Kubernetes, k3s or a cluster you bring, with Postgres and a Receptor mesh underneath. That is a platform team standing it up and keeping it patched. SwitchTender is one process and one file. Upgrading is replacing a binary.
Ascender runs Ansible, the same as AWX. Real fleets also run Terraform, scripts, and one-off tooling. SwitchTender runs Ansible, Terraform, OpenTofu, Bash, PowerShell, Python, and Go through one engine, one UI, and one audit trail, each with a dry-run mode.
Ascender inherits AWX's job view, a text stream you scroll. SwitchTender paints every run as a live host-by-task matrix, one cell per host and task, with the failed host highlighted and per-task drill-down. You read a run like a dashboard.
AWX froze in July 2024 and has shipped nothing since. Ascender is the answer to exactly that. CIQ, the team behind Rocky Linux, maintains it, ships releases, and sells the support contract and SLA that a regulated shop often needs before it will run anything in production. If what you're buying is a phone number and someone accountable, Ascender delivers it and SwitchTender doesn't pretend to. This page is about the other axis: whether you want AWX's capabilities without inheriting AWX's architecture.
The enterprise checklist, side by side. The full three-way table including AWX and Semaphore is on the comparison page.
| Capability | SwitchTender | Ascender |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy | One binary, SQLite or Postgres | Kubernetes or k3s + Postgres + Receptor |
| Model | Source-available, self-host free | Commercial, support-backed |
| Commercial support and SLA | Community and SDK | |
| Tools | Ansible, Terraform, OpenTofu, Bash, PowerShell, Python, Go | Ansible only |
| Live host-by-task matrix | ||
| Job templates, surveys, schedules | ||
| Drag-and-drop workflow editor | ||
| RBAC, teams, per-object grants | ||
| LDAP, SAML, OIDC sign-in | ||
| Execution environments | All seven tools, Docker or Podman | Ansible only, Podman |
| Instance groups | ||
| High availability | Active-active on Postgres | Via Kubernetes |
| Duration-balanced job splitting | Round-robin slicing | |
| Fleet memory: flaky hosts, trends | ||
| Tamper-evident, signed audit | ||
| Drift detection and reconcile, Ansible and Terraform | ||
| Notification channels | Eleven, each with per-template targets | About ten, per job template |
| Advisory AI triage and fleet answers | ||
| Drop-in Go plugins: tools, secrets, AI, notifiers | ||
| Import from the other side | One command |
Ascender is AWX's core with years of production use, a deep Ansible ecosystem of credential types, inventory plugins, and execution environments, and a Receptor mesh built for running across network boundaries at scale. Behind it is a company you can pay to answer the phone. SwitchTender is new. Every claim on this page is backed by a test you can run, and what it doesn't have yet is that history or a support desk. It closes the ecosystem gap differently. Any team can add a tool, a secret engine, an AI provider, or a notification channel as a drop-in Go plugin binary, no fork and no rebuild of the server. Pick Ascender when the deciding factor is a support contract. Pick SwitchTender when it is the product and the footprint.
Ascender uses AWX's data model, so its export imports into SwitchTender the same way AWX's does. Projects, inventories, templates, surveys, and schedules come across, with a dry run first so you see the plan before anything is written.
switchtender import awx awx-export.json --db switchtender.dbswitchtender import awx awx-export.json --db switchtender.db --applyThe switching guide maps every AWX concept to its SwitchTender equivalent, and the migration reference covers the details. Coming from stock AWX instead? The AWX alternative page makes that case.
The three asked most often when somebody is comparing this against what they already run.
No. It reaches the machines it manages over SSH, the same way Ansible does, and installs nothing on them. There is no per-host daemon to deploy, patch, or account for. You run the one server binary, and optionally a few more worker processes against the same store for throughput, which are pool members rather than agents belonging to a host.
All three, resolved at launch rather than copied into this database. Vault dynamic secrets go further: a short-lived credential is minted for each run and revoked when the run ends. AWS and Azure both authenticate from an instance role or managed identity with no stored key, and anything else resolves through a command whose output is the secret.
Yes, and it is what pipelines are for here. Steps mix tools freely on a dependency graph with parallel branches, built on a drag-and-drop canvas. The approval is not a convention somebody can skip: a policy decides which runs are held, the core enforces the hold, and the approval binds to the exact plan reviewed, so a run cannot be approved as one thing and executed as another.