Which one do you prefer? and why?

Ansible for me. No agent installation is necessary. No puppet master installation is necessary. Just install ansible on the machine you want to run your playbooks with, and you're pretty much ready.

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Not exactly what you asked, but I'm using Salt, and I like it pretty much.

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Easy. Ansible.

Unless you're trying to manage like thousands of servers, then you may want to consider puppet. But ask any puppet person, they'll ALL tell you, they're desperately moving everything into ansible.

The main diff is ansible is a 'push' methodology, vice puppet agents having to 'pull' updates. Pulling breaks frequently due to SSL cert issues, and unless you pay for the very expensive puppet console to show you these - they'll fly under the radar. When you run ansible to push out updates, you see immediately, and can react.

my 2 sense.

/tp

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I have worked with Ansible and started learning Puppet. I might be biased but I consider Ansible much easier to understand and handle. Agentless architecture is a plus.

Granted I have not dealt with complex or huge setups. Perhaps Puppet has advantages there.

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Does Ansible have a GUI for noobs? Or a GUI integration?

yes, Ansible has AWX for web based GUI which is upstream project for Red Hat Ansible tower.