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 96% 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 25 Chef reviews

2,068 Views
517 Comparison Views

96% 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.

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Buyer's Guide

Release Automation

January 2026

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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

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Build Automation (12th), Release Automation (5th), Configuration Management (12th)

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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Walter Ochieng Odhiambo

Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom

Automation has transformed daily infrastructure work and now frees teams to focus on new challenges

One thing that Chef needs to improve on is making it available in as many languages as possible. There should be a focus on how to make it understandable, not just to infrastructure people, but also to those working in monitoring. How can we ensure that it is part of their daily input? That is something that still has a small missing link. We are almost there, but it can help us achieve outcomes in the future in terms of objectives, not just workflows and visibility. How can we make real-time interactive dashboards more available? Look at what kind of tools can be integrated with them, not just working with the ones like Chef Kitchen and Habitat, but trying to make it even more flexible than what we have right now. On support, I think there should be more focus on how we can achieve AI automations in answering questions for beginners and addressing deep concerns without general manual management.

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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 IT process automation is the most valuable aspect of this solution."

"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."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to see which problems have been resolved from deployment."

"Gives people insight into what's happening during the deployment."

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

"The capability to provide visibility to the stakeholders, to management, is the biggest piece that showcases what the solution is about."

"I think on a day-to-day basis, it has increased the capacity to deploy. We don't have to wait for someone to do something."

"The product provides efficiency, in terms time, cost, and resources."

More Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] pros

"Chef can be scaled as needed. The Chef server itself can scale but it depends on the available resources. You can upgrade specific resources to meet the demand. Similarly, with clients, you can add as many clients as you need. Again, this depends on the server resources. If the server has enough resources, it can handle the number of servers required to manage the infrastructure. Chef can be scaled to meet the needs of the infrastructure being managed."

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

"Chef benefited my organization by definitely reducing time because we were provisioning tens of thousands of servers."

"The most valuable feature is automation."

"Chef offers valuable features in infrastructure as code, where it uses cookbooks and recipes written in Ruby language for detailed and flexible configuration of systems and applications."

"The scalability of the product is quite nice."

"All the use cases—configurations, deployment, compliance, and other common situations—demonstrate how helpful Chef is, and we found it very beneficial, which is why both my past organization and my current organization are using it."

"It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."

More Chef pros

Cons

"There is an issue with the stability in the tool. The process of agent will stop, then the monitoring agent can't be recognized because the process is running, but you can talk with the system."

"The stability of the solution can be improved."

"I would like to see more support for WebSphere."

"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."

"Not a perfect ten because the user interface is brand new and it needs improvement."

"We hope that we can integrate the new CD Directive into our portfolio, so we can bring the deployment and release management closer together."

"GUI for mobile phones: Availability to approve and start deployment through mobile phones."

"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."

More Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] cons

"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."

"I would like them to add database specific items, configuration items, and migration tools. Not necessarily on the builder side or the actual setup of the system, but more of a migration package for your different database sets, such as MongoDB, your extenders, etc. I want to see how that would function with a transition out to AWS for Aurora services and any of the RDBMS packages."

"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."

More Chef cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Customers often complain about the price."

"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."

"I can save time and money more quickly."

"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."

"The price per node is a little weird. It doesn't scale along with your organization. If you're truly utilizing Chef to its fullest, then the number of nodes which are being utilized in any particular day might scale or change based on your Auto Scaling groups. How do you keep track of that or audit it? Then, how do you appropriately license it? It's difficult."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Retailer

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	7
Large Enterprise	19

Questions from the Community

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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...

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What needs improvement with Chef?

I would add that Ruby is a domain-specific language in the Chef dialect, which is a learning curve, but so is Terraform and so is Ansible. The only feedback would be if they could come up with an i...

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What is your primary use case for Chef?

My main use case for Chef is configuration and deployments. We receive blank servers and use Chef to build predefined application or appliance servers. A quick specific example of how I use Chef to...

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Comparisons

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Nolio Release Automation vs Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL]

Compared 13% of the time

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Compared 13% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 8% of the time

AWS CloudFormation vs Chef

Compared 6% of the time

GitHub Actions vs Chef

Compared 6% of the time

Jenkins vs Chef

Compared 6% of the time

More Chef Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL]

February 2026

Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] report

Download Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

Chef

February 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 the leader in DevOps, driving collaboration through code to automate infrastructure, security, compliance and applications. Chef provides a single path to production making it faster and safer to add value to applications and meet the demands of the customer. Deployed broadly in production by the Global 5000 and used by more than half of the Fortune 500, Chef develops 100 percent of its software as open source under the Apache 2.0 license with no restrictions on its use. Chef Enterprise Automation Stack™, a commercial distribution, is developed solely from that open source code and unifies security, compliance, infrastructure and application automation with observability. Chef provides an unequaled developer experience for the Coded Enterprise by enabling users to express infrastructure, security policies and the application lifecycle as code, modernizing development, packaging and delivery of any application to any platform. For more information, visit http://chef.io and follow @chef.

Progress Software

Sample Customers

BET365, Charter Communications, TASC

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

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