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Chef pros and cons

Vendor: Progress Software

4.0 out of 5

25 reviews
96% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Chef revolutionizes deployment and orchestration, enhancing server provisioning speed and efficiency while enabling tiered permission models for diverse operational control. It effectively scales to manage up to 100,000 servers, boosting infrastructure management flexibility using Ruby-based cookbooks. Despite its benefits, Chef's Ruby-based DSL and complex integrations present a steep learning curve. The need for improvements in built-in analytics, third-party integration, and support limits its adoption within the tech community.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Chef automates deployment and orchestration processes, significantly speeding up server provisioning and improving organizational efficiency.

Chef enables tiered permission models, allowing developers and managers varying levels of operational control in different environments.

Chef scales effectively, handling up to 100,000 servers concurrently, demonstrating excellent scalability and stability.

The automation capabilities of Chef streamline various processes such as infrastructure and application management, reducing manual tasks over forty percent.

Chef's infrastructure as code approach, using Ruby-based cookbooks and recipes, enhances system configuration and application management flexibility.

CONS

Chef is difficult to use and code, limiting its wider adoption by the community.

Integration can be time-consuming, especially with non-cloud tools like monitoring or ticketing systems.

It lacks built-in analytics and reporting features, requiring users to create custom solutions using third-party tools like Power BI or Tableau.

The steep learning curve due to its Ruby-based DSL and complex components makes it challenging for new users.

Support, pricing, and third-party integration could see improvement for better usability.

Chef Pros review quotes

Senior DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 1, 2018

Manual deployments came to a halt completely. Server provisioning became lightning fast. Chef-docker enabled us to have fewer sets of source code for different purposes. Configuration management was a breeze and all the servers were as good as immutable servers.

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Principal Architect at Brillio

Aug 2, 2018

I wanted to monitor a hybrid cloud environment, one using AWS and Azure. If I have to provision/orchestrate between multiple cloud platforms, I can use Chef as a one-stop solution, to broker between those cloud platforms and orchestrate around them, rather than going directly into each of the cloud-vendors' consoles.

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WW

Lead DevOps Engineer at General Assembly

Dec 5, 2018

One thing that we've been able to do is a tiered permission model, allowing developers and their managers to perform their own operations in lower environments. This means a manager can go in and make changes to a whole environment, whereas a developer with less access may only be able to change individual components or be able to upgrade the version for software that they have control over.

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SA

Sharath Annabathina

Senior Software Engineer at BMS

Dec 5, 2018

Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments.

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AC

Primary Architect at Autodesk, Inc.

Dec 9, 2018

The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints.

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JB

CTO at FCamara

Dec 9, 2018

The most valuable feature is automation.

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IH

Manager at ZS Associates

Dec 10, 2018

This solution has improved my organization in the way that deployment has become very quick and orchestration is easy. If we have thousands of servers we can easily deploy in a small amount of time. We can deploy the applications or any kind of announcements in much less time.

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DevOps Director at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

Dec 11, 2018

Automation is everything. Having so many servers in production, many of our processes won't work nor scale. So, we look for tools to help us automate the process, and Chef is one of them.

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AWS Content Support Manager at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Dec 11, 2018

The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby.

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SN

Director at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Dec 11, 2018

It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for.

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Chef Cons review quotes

Senior DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 1, 2018

If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community.

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Principal Architect at Brillio

Aug 2, 2018

The time that it takes in terms of integration. Cloud integration is comparatively easy, but when it comes to two-link based integrations - like trying to integrate it with any monitoring tools, or maybe some other ticketing tools - it takes longer. That is because most of the out-of-the-box integration of the APIs needs some revisiting.

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WW

Lead DevOps Engineer at General Assembly

Dec 5, 2018

There appears to be no effort to fix the command line utility functionality, which is definitely broken, provides a false positive for a result when you perform the operation, and doesn't work.

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Free Report: Chef Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Chef. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.

881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

SA

Sharath Annabathina

Senior Software Engineer at BMS

Dec 5, 2018

They could provide more features, so the recipes could be developed in a simpler and faster way. There is still a lot of room for improvement, providing better functionalities when creating recipes.

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AC

Primary Architect at Autodesk, Inc.

Dec 9, 2018

Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this.

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JB

CTO at FCamara

Dec 9, 2018

The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved.

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IH

Manager at ZS Associates

Dec 10, 2018

I would rate this solution a nine because our use case and whatever we need is there. Ten out of ten is perfect. We have to go to IOD and stuff so they should consider things like this to make it a ten.

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DevOps Director at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

Dec 11, 2018

If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best.

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AWS Content Support Manager at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Dec 11, 2018

I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation.

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SN

Director at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Dec 11, 2018

Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms.

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Configuration Management

Build Automation

Release Automation

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See all alternatives

Product Categories

Product Categories

Configuration Management

Build Automation

Release Automation

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Microsoft Intune vs Chef

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Chef

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Chef

VMware Aria Automation vs Chef

Red Hat Satellite vs Chef

GitHub Actions vs Chef

Jenkins vs Chef

AWS Systems Manager vs Chef

UrbanCode Deploy vs Chef

BMC TrueSight Server Automation vs Chef

See all alternatives

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