AWS OpsWorks vs Beanstalk: What are the differences?

Developers describe AWS OpsWorks as "Model and manage your entire application from load balancers to databases using Chef". Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component . On the other hand, Beanstalk is detailed as "Private code hosting for teams". A single process to commit code, review with the team, and deploy the final result to your customers.

AWS OpsWorks belongs to "Server Configuration and Automation" category of the tech stack, while Beanstalk can be primarily classified under "Code Collaboration & Version Control".

Some of the features offered by AWS OpsWorks are:

• AWS OpsWorks lets you model the different components of your application as layers in a stack, and maps your logical architecture to a physical architecture. You can see all resources associated with your application, and their status, in one place.
• AWS OpsWorks provides an event-driven configuration system with rich deployment tools that allow you to efficiently manage your applications over their lifetime, including support for customizable deployments, rollback, partial deployments, patch management, automatic instance scaling, and auto healing.
• AWS OpsWorks lets you define template configurations for your entire environment in a format that you can maintain and version just like your application source code.

On the other hand, Beanstalk provides the following key features:

• Setup and manage repositories- Import or create Subversion and Git repositories that are instantly available to your team.
• Invite team members, partners & clients- Restrict access to certain repos and provide read-only or full read/write permissions.
• Browse files and changes- Every version of every file you’ve committed to Beanstalk is just a click away. See a timeline of who made changes and view the differences between revisions. Syntax highlighting for over 70 languages.

"Devops" is the primary reason why developers consider AWS OpsWorks over the competitors, whereas "Ftp deploy" was stated as the key factor in picking Beanstalk.

Accenture, DeveloperTown, and NoRedInk are some of the popular companies that use AWS OpsWorks, whereas Beanstalk is used by Accenture, Docplanner, and UNION. AWS OpsWorks has a broader approval, being mentioned in 73 company stacks & 19 developers stacks; compared to Beanstalk, which is listed in 21 company stacks and 8 developer stacks.