Rundeck earned its place: node-targeted jobs, a live per-node monitor, and finely grained access control. SwitchTender delivers that job from one static Go binary instead of a JVM with an external database behind it. Terraform and OpenTofu run as first-class steps alongside Ansible, Bash, PowerShell, Python, and Go. Approval gates are enforced by policy in the core, the drag-and-drop workflow editor is free rather than commercial, and every run lands in a hash-chained audit trail a third party can verify offline. State is one SQLite file, with Postgres optional.
Rundeck is a capable runbook engine. These are the walls teams hit as governance and tooling needs grow.
Rundeck runs on a Java virtual machine, and its bundled H2 datastore is documented as unsuitable for production, so a real deployment adds an external database. Its published minimum is 8 GB of RAM and 2 CPUs. SwitchTender is one static Go binary and one SQLite file, and Postgres is optional rather than required.
Rundeck runs Ansible and generic scripts, but has no Terraform or OpenTofu step type, so infrastructure changes live outside the runbook. SwitchTender runs Ansible, Terraform, OpenTofu, Bash, PowerShell, Python, and Go as first-class tools in one plan, with drift detected from a dry run.
Rundeck's workflow visualization and its ACL GUI editor sit in the commercial tier, and approval gates are not documented in the free one. SwitchTender ships the drag-and-drop workflow editor, policy-enforced approvals, and a tamper-evident, signed audit trail in the core, free to self-host.
Every claim below is checked against Rundeck's own documentation, version 6.0.1. The full six-way table with sources is on the comparison page.
| Capability | SwitchTender | Rundeck |
|---|---|---|
| Runs without a JVM | ||
| Production datastore built in | SQLite, Postgres optional | H2, not for production |
| Live per-host view | Host-by-task matrix | Per-node, per-step monitor |
| Tools | Ansible, Terraform, OpenTofu, Bash, PowerShell, Python, Go | Ansible and scripts, no Terraform step |
| Tamper-evident, signed audit | ||
| Verifiable offline by a third party | ||
| Enforced approval policies | Not documented | |
| Visual workflow editor in the free tier | Engine free, visualization commercial | |
| Fine-grained access control | Per-object grants | ACL policy files; GUI editor commercial |
| Fleet memory: flaky hosts, trends | ||
| Drift detection from a dry run | ||
| Duration-balanced job splitting | ||
| Minimum published footprint | One binary, one file | 8 GB RAM, 2 CPU |
Honesty first. Rundeck's live per-node, per-step monitor is a peer capability it has shipped for years, not a gap. Its file-based ACL model applies regex-matched, deny-first policy to authorization as a whole, which is more granular than SwitchTender's approval policy files in that one respect. It has more than a decade of production history, a large plugin ecosystem, and a commercial vendor behind it. And there is no one-command Rundeck import into SwitchTender yet, unlike the AWX and Semaphore paths, so jobs move by pointing SwitchTender at the same playbooks, scripts, and inventories.
One binary, no JVM, nothing else to install. Point it at the same hosts your Rundeck jobs target and compare the run views side by side.
brew install kordloom/tap/switchtenderswitchtender serveThe get started guide covers signed binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows, and go install.