Chef vs Digital.ai Agility comparison

Progress Software and Digital.ai are both solutions in the Release Automation category. Progress Software is ranked #11 with an average rating of 7.0, while Digital.ai is ranked #18. Progress Software holds a 1.2% mindshare in RA, compared to Digital.ai’s 1.6% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Progress Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 75% of Digital.ai users who would recommend it.

Chef

Read 19 Chef reviews

315 Views
73 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Digital.ai Agility

Read 6 Digital.ai Agility reviews

243 Views
40 Comparison Views

75% willing to recommend

Chef

Digital.ai Agility

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 7, 2025

Chef and Digital.ai Agility compete in the software development and automation category, with Chef often having an edge in automation capabilities, while Digital.ai Agility excels in comprehensive project management features.

Features: Chef offers robust automation capabilities, a strong focus on infrastructure as code, and seamless integration with third-party tools using Ohai inventory. Digital.ai Agility provides superior project management capabilities, including team room features, "what if" forecasting, and multiple planning levels adaptable for enterprise needs.

Room for Improvement: Chef could improve in handling rollbacks and enhancing its user interface experience as it heavily relies on command line interactions. Digital.ai Agility could benefit from reducing its initial learning curve and optimizing the cost of its comprehensive package to be more competitive.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Chef enables efficient deployment with an active support community that aids users in resolving issues. Digital.ai Agility offers a structured deployment model that pairs well with strong customer service, ensuring seamless project execution with enterprise-level features.

Pricing and ROI: Chef provides a strategic costing model designed for quick returns on automation-focused projects, making it attractive for budget-conscious teams. Digital.ai Agility, with higher initial setup costs, justifies its investment with extensive features and integration possibilities that lead to promising long-term returns.

To learn more, read our detailed Chef vs. Digital.ai Agility Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Digital.ai Agility

June 2025

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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

Chef

Ranking in Release Automation

11th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Build Automation (20th), Configuration Management (18th)

Digital.ai Agility

Ranking in Release Automation

18th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (16th), Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (11th), Value Stream Management Software (9th)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Release Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 1.2%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Digital.ai Agility is 1.6%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Release Automation

Featured Reviews

Aaron P

DevOps Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation

In terms of improvement, Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation. There is also an issue with shared resources like cookbooks lacking context, which could lead to problems when multiple companies use them. Chef should aim for wider availability, better flexibility, clearer documentation, and improved management of shared resources to prevent conflicts. Many companies are now moving to Ansible, so I would recommend better documentation, easier customer use, and simpler integration. I have concerns about the complexity of migrating to different servers and would prefer a simpler process.

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Debbie Brey

Technical Fellow at Boeing

A scalable, full-package solution with a tech support team that bends over backwards to help

There is room for improvement in getting the analytics portion of the solution more integrated with the rest of it. The feature I would like to see is already in their newer licensing structure, and that's the live integration between Agility, Jira and Azure DevOps. That's the piece that I think is really valuable.

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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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."

"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."

"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."

"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."

More Chef pros

"With some of the other tools, you have to buy 20 different plugins to get to the same capability that comes with the basic Agility capability."

"For visualization capabilities, the automation capabilities make it possible to support the different personas. The features and capabilities are excellent and come with excellent support."

"It can generate reports showing a burndown chart, burnup chart, and the planned vs actual velocity."

"Agility is highly flexible. It can do much more than what our client is doing with it. They use it in a defined way. Some at that company have a much broader knowledge of agile and SAFe, but they're given applications and a mandated way to work. We had to work within their parameters and provide an accurate transition so the data would be mapped and pushed through."

"It allows my clients to have one central tool to manage their agile projects."

Cons

"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."

"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."

"I would also like to see more analytics and reporting features. Currently, the analytics and reporting features are limited. I'll have to start building my own custom solution with Power BI or Tableau or something like that. If it came with built-in analytics and reporting features that would be great."

"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."

"It is an old technology."

"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."

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

"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."

More Chef cons

"It was not supporting some plugins. We wanted to migrate data that we were already using."

"The user interface can be improved by adding Save, Edit, Add, Cancel, and Return buttons to the popup windows that are displayed when you click on a child item."

"Improve how to create and track releases. Currently, I have to create child projects."

"There is room for improvement in getting the analytics portion of the solution more integrated with the rest of it."

"The machine learning features are a new capability but could be improved. This is being worked by Digital.ai currently. Multicolor simulation, specifically, could be improved."

"In my work as a contractor, it's always frustrating when a client has multiple software applications that don't talk to each other and they all perform the same function. That presents a huge challenge between their IT groups."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

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

"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."

"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."

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

More Chef pricing and cost advice

"You get what you pay for. Don't let your development teams dictate what the portfolio management team should use as the main tool."

"Comparing the pricing to other products, I think this solution is in the middle."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

15%

University

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

18%

Insurance Company

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Chef?

Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Chef?

Chef is priced based on the number of nodes.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Chef?

Chef does not support the containerized things of Chef products. In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images.

See all answers

Ask a question

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Comparisons

BigFix vs Chef

Compared 45% of the time

AWS Systems Manager vs Chef

Compared 13% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Chef

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Compared 8% of the time

More Chef Competitors

Jira vs Digital.ai Agility

Compared 48% of the time

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Digital.ai Agility

Compared 12% of the time

Jira Align vs Digital.ai Agility

Compared 10% of the time

OpenText Deployment Automation vs Digital.ai Agility

Compared 6% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Digital.ai Agility

Compared 6% of the time

More Digital.ai Agility Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

June 2025

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Digital.ai Agility

June 2025

Download Digital.ai Agility product report

Also Known As

No data available

VersionOne Lifecycle, VersionOne, CollabNet VersionOne, Digital.ai Continuum

Overview

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

Enterprise business agility rests on agile planning that scales and has the flexibility needed to meet the needs of customers and the market. Digital.ai Agility enables organizations to scale up agile from the team level across the product portfolio, improve collaboration and efficiency, and deliver software that provides more value.

Digital.ai

Sample Customers

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

Siemens Health Services (HS), Cerner Corporation, Aaron's, Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta, Kelley Blue Book, AOL, Axway, Tideworks, bwin Interactive Entertainment, AG, Intergraph, Eos Group, PeopleCube, Liquid Machines

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Digital.ai Agility

June 2025

Free Report: Chef vs. Digital.ai Agility

Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. Digital.ai Agility and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.

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