Chef vs GNU Make comparison

Progress Software and GNU are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Progress Software is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.2, while GNU is ranked #16 with an average rating of 9.0. Progress Software holds a 2.0% mindshare in BA, compared to GNU’s 1.9% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Progress Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 83% of GNU users who would recommend it.

Chef

Read 24 Chef reviews

2,762 Views
773 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

GNU Make

Read 6 GNU Make reviews

720 Views
677 Comparison Views

83% willing to recommend

Chef

GNU Make

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Chef and GNU Make compete in the automation space within the software development lifecycle. Chef is perceived as having the upper hand due to its comprehensive configuration management tools and advanced features, while GNU Make is favored for its simplicity and performance in specific use cases.

Features: Chef provides robust infrastructure automation, allowing extensive customization and scalability. It excels in managing complex environments and continuous delivery pipelines. Its features align with professional environments demanding full-stack development. GNU Make's strengths lie in its simplicity, efficiency, and compatibility with various systems, especially for automating repetitive tasks within smaller projects. It offers optimized code compilation and can easily build targets by integrating with other utilities.

Room for Improvement: Chef could enhance its user interface and streamline deployment processes to be more user-friendly for smaller teams. Additionally, improving rollback capabilities would be beneficial. GNU Make could develop a more comprehensive customer support system and introduce a graphical interface to widen accessibility. Enhancing its integration features with other automation tools would also add value.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Chef offers structured deployment models with substantial enterprise-level support, appealing to businesses needing detailed configuration and customer assistance. GNU Make follows a straightforward, lightweight deployment strategy, ideal for smaller teams but provides limited customer support.

Pricing and ROI: Chef involves higher setup costs with significant ROI for large-scale operations due to expanded features and scalability. In contrast, GNU Make, being open-source, offers minimal setup costs, delivering substantial ROI for smaller projects thanks to its simplicity and low operational demands, making it financially appealing for teams with constrained budgets.

To learn more, read our detailed Chef vs. GNU Make Report (Updated: April 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. GNU Make

April 2026

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Helped 886,576 peers since 2012

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

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Release Automation (5th), Configuration Management (11th)

GNU Make

Ranking in Build Automation

16th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 2.0%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of GNU Make is 1.9%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Chef	2.0%
GNU Make	1.9%
Other	96.1%

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

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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Josh Call

Software Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

Enhances productivity with efficient dependency handling and a straightforward setup

GNU Make is used as a build system tool. Most people don't use GNU Make directly but utilize other systems like CMake to generate Make files, which are then run by GNU Make. This is common for tasks like compiling C++ code. In the industry, AI developers, for example, use GNU Make in their work…

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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 most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."

"I would rate this solution a nine because it's simple, easy to use, more versatile, and most importantly, it can handle the hundred thousand servers at the same time very easily and almost in no time."

"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."

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

"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."

"The scalability of the product is quite nice; we have deployed it across six to seven organizations."

"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."

"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."

More Chef pros

"GNU Make is such an essential tool that it is almost impossible to imagine working without it."

"The initial setup of GNU Make is straightforward."

"I have not encountered any scalability issues with GNU Make. It is as scalable as the project's structure is, and then some."

"I think this product has all you need."

"Makefiles are extremely easy to work with using any preferred editor. GNU Make can be run directly from the terminal, not requiring any time wasted on clicking."

"GNU Make is such an essential tool that it is almost impossible to imagine working without it. Not having it, developers would probably have to resort to doing everything manually or via shell scripts."

"Setup is extremely straightforward."

"One of the best things about GNU Make is that, it is available on almost all Linux platforms."

More GNU Make pros

Cons

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

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

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

"It is an old technology."

"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."

"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."

"I would rate this solution a nine because our use case and whatever we need is there. Ten out of ten is perfect."

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

More Chef cons

"Vanilla GNU Make does not support any kind of colored output. A wrapper named colormake exists to work around this, but native (opt-in) support would be welcome."

"GNU Make requires using the Tab symbol as the first symbol of command line for execution. In some text editors this can be problematic, as they automatically insert spaces instead of tabs."

"GNU make is a bad candidate for builds that require incremental builds often, as it does not support this feature."

"GNU Make requires using the Tab symbol as the first symbol of command line for execution. In some text editors this can be problematic, as they automatically insert spaces instead of tabs."

"Make’s reliability is very poor and is not suitable for larger or incremental builds."

"GNU Make does not provide traditional customer support."

"Poor reliability for larger or incremental builds."

"Vanilla GNU Make does not support any kind of colored output."

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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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

"There is no price for this product. No licensing. It’s open-source."

"GNU Make is free and open source software."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Computer Software Company

Retailer

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	19

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GNU Make?

GNU Make is a free solution that comes with Linux, which positively impacts operational costs by eliminating licensing fees.

See all answers

What needs improvement with GNU Make?

I am not familiar enough with it to suggest any specific new features or areas for improvement. It occupies its niche well.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for GNU Make?

See all answers

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Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 14% of the time

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Compared 12% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

April 2026

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Build Automation

March 2026

Download GNU Make product report

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

Make is a tool which controls the generation of executables and other non-source files of a program from the program's source files.

GNU

Sample Customers

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

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. GNU Make

April 2026

Free Report: Chef vs. GNU Make

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