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

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

"You can design your workflows for your needs."

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

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

"Deployment workflow (WF) can be designed this way, so that it is not necessary to provide all applications (systems) artifacts of which an application consists."

"I would say our headwind, or our time to market, is reduced considerably. We get more consistent results out of it, because you write one time and once it's automated you expect it to behave the same way every time. And it cut down a lot of re-work for us."

"We have saved on our time costs and have seen more quality."

More Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] pros

"Using Chef for automating infrastructure and applications in my organization has helped us reduce manual tasks by more than forty percent, thereby saving significant revenue for the client."

"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."

"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."

"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."

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

"If you're handy enough with DSL and you can present your own front-facing interface to your developers, then you can actually have a lot more granular control with Chef in operations over what developers can perform and what they can't."

"Chef has given us an easy time doing all that automation, security, and monitoring by automating the processes across all those servers so that we don't do manual work, going one place at a time to install updates."

"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."

More Chef pros

Cons

"It would be very beneficial for us to see integrations into cloud environments, especially into the Google Cloud environment because we are heading towards cloud."

"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."

"The dashboard should allow you to see the current state of packages in each environment, not only on an individual application basis, but across the entire application platform."

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

"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. There is a little bit of a learning curve in learning how to code some of the workflows in Automic at this time. If widely used languages like Perl and Python were integrated, on top of what's already there, the proprietary language, it would make it easier to on-board new resources."

"key thing is support for cloud-based deployment. That is lacking."

"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."

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

More Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] cons

"It is an old technology."

"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."

"The learning curve is steep due to Chef's Ruby-based DSL and the complex components of cookbooks and recipes, which can be challenging for new users, especially those without programming backgrounds."

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

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

"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."

"Another area needing attention is better error messages, as we have found that Chef errors can sometimes be vague or too low-level to understand."

"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

"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."

"I can save time and money more quickly."

"Customers often complain about the price."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

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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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