I wish native Nodejs deployment was a solved problem, but there really is no comprehensive and universally used tool for deploying Nodejs using Nodejs. ShipIt mentioned in the article is barely a year old, it has a short featurelist and short list of users. PM2 (Keymetrics) is not bad but is buggy, also they seem a bit overwhelmed at the moment. Flightplan is decent but the syntax is more awkward than ShipIt. Every other common language has a stable deployment tool besides Nodejs.

I ended up going with Distelli, it's a SaaS but it's fantastic. These days deploys often involve more than just one app or language, and I really prefer a tool that can ship anything. Also, having a GUI to see deployment statuses is invaluable. With those requirements none of the Nodejs tools can stand up to the other, more mature utilities. And rather than have to write all my deploy logic in another language, I just purchase the service.