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 24 Chef reviews

2,304 Views
599 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

March 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

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

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

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

"Self-service for developers, because they are able to deploy to development departments on their own, without needing people from operations."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

More Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] pros

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

"Manual deployments came to a halt completely. Server provisioning became lightning fast."

"The most valuable feature is automation."

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

"The most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."

"It has been very easy to tie it into our build and deploy automation for production release work, etc. All the Chef pieces more or less run themselves."

"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."

"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."

More Chef pros

Cons

"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."

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

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

"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."

"We're a WebSphere shop so I would like to see more support for WebSphere, only because it's the platform that they seem to want to use the most."

"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."

More Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] cons

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

"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."

"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."

"In terms of revenue, I have not observed much because it is holistically depending on the project."

"The compatibility with the different platforms that we are using needs improvement."

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

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

More Chef cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Customers often complain about the price."

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

"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."

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

"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."

"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."

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

"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

No data available

Comms Service Provider

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

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 12% of the time

GitLab vs Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL]

Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 7% of the time

Jenkins vs Chef

Compared 6% of the time

AWS CloudFormation vs Chef

Compared 5% of the time

GitHub Actions vs Chef

Compared 5% of the time

More Chef Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL]

March 2026

Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] report

Download Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

Chef

March 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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