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Chef vs Digital.ai Release comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 7, 2025

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 Build Automation
12th
Ranking in Release Automation
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (12th)
Digital.ai Release
Ranking in Build Automation
15th
Ranking in Release Automation
10th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
DevSecOps (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 1.9%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Digital.ai Release is 2.0%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Chef1.9%
Digital.ai Release2.0%
Other96.1%
Build Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Walter Ochieng Odhiambo - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Jeanne-Mari Chandran - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Configuration Specialist at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
Experience seamless project management and integration with robust tools
The features I find most valuable in Digital.ai Release are the integration with MS Teams, because we have MS Teams channels that publish or push notifications to that. When we start deployments, it sends a notification to the people that we are doing a deployment to their environment. It notifies them when the deployment is started, completed, or if attention is required. I also appreciate the fact that it has plugins for Bamboo and I use lots of Gradle and JSON scripts, and we do SQL upgrades as well, triggering Flyway scripts via Bamboo, along with the integration with XLD and Jira; it's all Atlassian software. Regarding environment management capabilities, Digital.ai Release is mostly useful for me, as it is more application related and that is managed via my XLD dictionary. We have one artifact that is environment agnostic, which has placeholders that correspond to my XLD keys and values, and at deployment time, it substitutes the placeholders with those environment specific values. We don't need to make a specific deployment artifact for dev, test, or production; it is all the same artifact using environment variables, ensuring what we take to production is what was tested.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."
"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 product is useful for automating processes."
"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."
"Chef has impacted my organization positively by ensuring that consistent deployments across production and test environments help more effective testing and faster deployments mean that more work can be done in one release cycle."
"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."
"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."
"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"The time is also reduced because the manual work has tremendously decreased. We just have to click one button, and it will create everything for us."
"Overall, I would give Digital.ai Release a rating of nine out of ten; there's always room for improvement, but it's really good."
"The solution can apply one template across multiple applications."
"The orchestration, building the release, and then just executing it and managing that pipeline — the orchestration capabilities are great for that."
"The most valuable feature of Digital.ai Release is its ability to communicate with various deployment systems, such as XLD and batch deployments, as well as integrate with tools, such as Flyway and Bamboo. We use Bamboo as our build orchestrator, and Digital.ai Release also integrates with Jira, another Atlassian solution. These capabilities make it a powerful tool for managing workflow, test automation, and other processes."
 

Cons

"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."
"In terms of revenue, I have not observed much because it is holistically depending on the project."
"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."
"One thing that Chef needs to improve on is making it available in as many languages as possible."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."
"It is an old technology."
"Currently, we put artifact details manually. What we could improve, in our case, is the deployment instruction base. Developers input all the information, including which artifact and where it needs to be deployed. What Digital.ai could do is automatically go to the deployment instruction page, take those artifact details, and implement them."
"The backfill could be improved, we could automate that. Right now it's subjective — it's up to the lead developer's memory to remember to backfill."
"Digital.ai Release could improve by having a better plugin that works with Guardian that we use for mainframe migrations. If there could be an interface or plugin for Guardian that would be beneficial."
"I would like to improve Digital.ai Release by exploring its cloud capabilities as we are currently in the middle of migrating to the cloud, but I actually have no idea what Digital.ai's cloud capabilities are."
"The solution is a little bit expensive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Chef is priced based on the number of nodes."
"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."
"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."
"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 solution's license includes all features."
"Overall, the price is just too high; especially considering we're in the middle of a pandemic."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Retailer
8%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
12%
Insurance Company
12%
Healthcare Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise19
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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...
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...
What do you like most about Digital.ai Release ?
The time is also reduced because the manual work has tremendously decreased. We just have to click one button, and it will create everything for us.
What needs improvement with Digital.ai Release ?
Based on my experience, I would like to improve Digital.ai Release by exploring its cloud capabilities as we are currently in the middle of migrating to the cloud, but I actually have no idea what ...
What is your primary use case for Digital.ai Release ?
My use case for Digital.ai Release is that I work for an insurance company on a very big project that develops multiple different pieces of software. We use Digital.ai Release to move our software ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
XL Release, XebiaLabs XL Release
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap
3M, GE, John Deere, Deutsche Telekom, Cable & Wireless, Xerox, and Société Générale, Liberty Mutual, EA, Rabobank
Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. Digital.ai Release and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
881,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.