Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] vs Chef comparison

Broadcom and Progress Software are both solutions in the Release Automation category. Additionally, 86% of Broadcom users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Progress Software users who would recommend it.

Automic Continuous Delivery...

Read 13 Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] reviews

86% willing to recommend

Chef

Read 26 Chef reviews

4,001 Views
960 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Automic Continuous Delivery...

Chef

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] and Chef based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, GitLab, Red Hat and others in Release Automation.

To learn more, read our detailed Release Automation Report (Updated: June 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Release Automation

June 2026

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Helped 900,838 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Automic Continuous Delivery...

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Chef

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Build Automation (13th), Release Automation (5th), Configuration Management (11th)

Featured Reviews

reviewer895359

Principal Project Engineer at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

Automatic installation for complex deployments and environments, with good workflow support

I like that really complex deployments are possible with it. It's very good. You have everything you need. You can design your workflows for your needs. You can do so much more, it's not just an automatic installation tool. It's a real deployment tool. I can do the complete deployment with everything that is possible.

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G Srivastava

Senior Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Agent setup and complexity have limited automation benefits but have reduced manual patching work

There are other automation tools, configuration management tools in the market, which offer many good functionalities compared to Chef. For Chef, we need to install those agents, the Chef client, on all those nodes. That is another heinous task to perform on those nodes. Compared with other tools, they do not require any agent; they simply push configurations to all the clients. Chef needs to improve on this agent installation on all those nodes. I would say that the agent configuration is required, and we need to manage the workstation, the Chef server, and then the Chef client. These two or three things are very difficult. It is a time-taking task compared with other configuration management tools. They need to compete with other tools, such as Ansible or Terraform. They should work on their agent part. If they can remove the agent installation on the nodes and combine both the Chef server and workstation into one server, that will provide a significant benefit in cost for the clients. They should aim for an agentless architecture rather than an agent-based architecture, which will help other customers. That is a very difficult thing because I have stopped using Chef. If you have very good developers who are skilled in Ruby language and can write codes in the Chef recipe, then those developers should start using Chef.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The agents are one of the solution's most valuable features, and I like agents for file transfers so you can transfer the files from agent to agent on the different platforms."

"It can support very complex environments and dependencies."

"The main benefit is you can deploy everything with it."

"It gives us good feedback on visualizations and on how our processes have progressed."

"The metrics gathered after deployment, for example, the rate of success versus the rate of failure."

"The event monitor is very good. You can monitor when the file is created so you can pick up the file once it's done."

"You can design your workflows for your needs."

"They have gained efficiency that they cannot achieve in any other way."

More Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] pros

"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."

"It is easy to manage on our production systems because there is an agent running on all the servers."

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

"My clients are happy, which is the most important thing."

"The solution is easy to use and learn, and it easily automates all the code and infrastructure."

"Stable and scalable configuration management and automation tool. Installing it is easy. Its most valuable feature is its compliance, e.g. it's very good."

"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."

"The scalability of the product is quite nice."

More Chef pros

Cons

"Stability-wise I think it still needs to be improved; performance-wise. It crashes from time to time."

"There needs to be better error handling and error descriptions. It should be more clear what the errors are and what we can do to fix them."

"There are some bugs. For example, during the design of a workflow, important information is lost, it vanishes."

"One of the biggest features I've been asked by my team to put in there is opening more scripting languages to be part of the platform."

"At the moment, the version that we are using (version 12.0), the environment is complex with multiple installations. Therefore, the monitoring is not scalable, but this should be improved in 12.1 and 12.2."

"If you have a technical problem and need development of the tool, the support team is terrible, because they cannot help with the technical details."

"The stability of the solution can be improved."

"File transfer is not very efficient. It takes a bit longer than some other methods and when you send the file from one platform to another, especially from the mainframe, the results consumption is quite high compared to other methods."

More Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] cons

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

"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."

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

"One thing that Chef needs to improve on is making it available in as many languages as possible."

"I think it can be costly considering the advantages and disadvantages of Chef."

"However, if you are on-premise, it may not be the best solution."

"It is an old technology."

"Other things would be the need to use Cinc if you want to use the open-source version because Progress Software's policy on copyright is confusing for new users and it puts a barrier in the way to adoption because many small, medium enterprises, startups, and non-profits who might want to use Chef would find the whole Cinc versus Chef situation confusing and the fact that there is not an easy path to install Chef and then go to a paid version without having to change from Cinc to Chef or Chef to Cinc."

More Chef cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If you have a fixed contract, it has limits to spreading out. If you have a flexible enterprise license contract, then you have a lot of scalability for this tool."

"We increased our quality and reduced our time costs."

"Customers often complain about the price."

"I can save time and money more quickly."

"We are able to save in development time, deployment time, and it makes it easier to manage the environments."

"We are using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time."

"Purchasing the solution from AWS Marketplace was a good experience. AWS's pricing is pretty in line with the product's regular pricing. Though instance-wise, AWS is not the cheapest in the market."

"The price is always a problem. It is high. There is room for improvement. I do like purchasing on the AWS Marketplace, but I would like the ability to negotiate and have some flexibility in the pricing on it."

"When we're rolling out a new server, we're not using the AWS Marketplace AMI, we're using our own AMI, but we are paying them a licensing fee."

"Chef is priced based on the number of nodes."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

"I wasn't involved in the purchasing, but I am pretty sure that we are happy with the current pricing and licensing since it never comes up."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

16%

Comms Service Provider

14%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Marketing Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	9

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	20

Questions from the Community

Ask a question

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Chef?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that we sidestepped it by using Cinc because none of the functionality that is exclusive to the paid version was actually in use in the orga...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Chef?

I do not have anything in mind at this time for how Chef could be improved.

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What is your primary use case for Chef?

My main use case for Chef is configuration management to set up systems, provision software, and keep configurations up to date. I create Chef recipes for setup and install needed software from a c...

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Comparisons

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Nolio Release Automation vs Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL]

Compared 13% of the time

AWS CodeStar vs Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL]

Compared 12% of the time

GitLab vs Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL]

Compared 9% of the time

More Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] Competitors

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 7% of the time

AWS CloudFormation vs Chef

Compared 7% of the time

Jenkins vs Chef

Compared 6% of the time

Red Hat Satellite vs Chef

Compared 6% of the time

BigFix vs Chef

Compared 5% of the time

More Chef Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL]

June 2026

Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] report

Download Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

Chef

June 2026

Download Chef product report

Also Known As

CA Continuous Delivery Automation, Automic Release Automation, Automic ONE Automation, UC4 Automation Platform

No data available

Overview

Deliver apps at pace with agile development and let customer satisfaction soar.

Today, the pressure is on to transform how you deliver applications to market. Get release agility and speed without compromising quality and stability with CA Continuous Delivery Automation. Deliver apps reliably on demand from development through production—mobile to mainframe. Agilely scale as the cadence, volume and complexity of your apps grow. It’s DevOps-ready release management and automation for your dynamic enterprise.

Broadcom

Chef is a powerful automation tool designed for efficient infrastructure management across varied environments. With its environment-as-code model, Chef provides predictability and reliability in deployments, enhancing security compliance and reducing manual intervention.

Chef focuses on automating deployments and configurations, ensuring server consistency, managing scalable environments, and orchestrating service deployments. Its versatile recipe-writing and Ruby-based flexibility cater to large-scale operational needs. Chef’s integration with services like AWS and Azure enhances its versatility, while its idempotent deployments assure reliability. Despite its prowess, Chef requires improvements in feature offerings, especially regarding container orchestration and cloud technologies.

What are Chef's Key Features?

Automation: Streamlines infrastructure management across diverse environments.
Environment-as-Code: Offers predictability and efficiency in management.
Idempotency: Ensures reliable deployments by maintaining the same outcome no matter how often applied.
Cloud Integration: Seamlessly integrates with AWS and Azure.
Security Compliance: Enhances security measures across infrastructures.
Ruby-Based Flexibility: Provides versatile recipe-writing and flexible configurations.
Scalability: Suitable for large-scale operational needs.

What Benefits Should Users Consider?

Consistency: Automated deployments reduce errors and manual efforts.
Efficiency: Decrease in manual intervention enhances team productivity.
Reliability: Idempotent deployments ensure consistent outcomes.
Scalability: Supports expanding infrastructures effectively.
Security: Maintains compliance with enhanced security features.

Chef is implemented across industries to automate application deployments, manage CI/CD pipelines, provision infrastructure, and maintain compliance. Its recipes and cookbooks streamline workflows in application deployment, system updates, and orchestration of services, reducing errors and manual intervention in a variety of sectors.

Progress Software

Sample Customers

BET365, Charter Communications, TASC

Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, GitLab, Red Hat and others in Release Automation. Updated: June 2026.

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