Pallet vs Rex: What are the differences?

Pallet: Automates controlling and provisioning cloud server instances. DevOps for the JVM. The machines being managed require no special dependencies to be installed. As long as they have bash and ssh running, they can be used with pallet. Pallet has no central server to set up and maintain - it simply runs on demand. You can run it from anywhere, even over a remote REPL connection; Rex: the friendly automation framework. Rex is an automation framework that combines Perl and Secure Shell (SSH) for a portable and highly flexible approach to data center infrastructure management and software deployment.

Pallet and Rex can be categorized as "Server Configuration and Automation" tools.

Some of the features offered by Pallet are:

• Everything in Version Control
• Jar File Distribution of Crates
• Provisioning, Configuration and Administration

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

• Puts you in charge: Rex acknowledges that there is more than one way to manage it. It trusts you to be in the best position to decide what to automate and how, allowing you to build the automation tool your situation requires.
• Easy to get on board: automate what you are doing today, and add more tomorrow. Rex is instantly usable, making it ideal and friendly for incremental automation.
• It's just Perl: Perl is a battle-tested, mature language. Whenever you reach the limitations of the built-in Rex features, a powerful programming language and module ecosystem is directly available at your fingertips to seamlessly extend it even in other languages. So after all, it's not just Perl.

Pallet and Rex are both open source tools. It seems that Pallet with 797 GitHub stars and 123 forks on GitHub has more adoption than Rex with 620 GitHub stars and 204 GitHub forks.