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Chef vs GoCD 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)
GoCD
Ranking in Build Automation
17th
Ranking in Release Automation
13th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (18th)
 

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 GoCD is 2.3%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Chef1.9%
GoCD2.3%
Other95.8%
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.
RajeshReddy - PeerSpot reviewer
Dev Ops Engineer at Infosys
The UI is colorful, but the user experience must be improved
We can see all the pipelines with a simple search. The UI is colorful. The user experience is very rich. The product is very easy to learn if we know a bit of the basics. If we have someone to show us how to use it, it is very easy.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"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."
"Automation is everything. Having so many servers in production, many of our processes won't work nor scale. So, we look for tools to help us automate the process, and Chef is one of them."
"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."
"The scalability of the product is quite nice."
"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."
"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 most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."
"The UI is colorful."
"The most notable aspect is its user interface, which we find to be user-friendly and straightforward for deploying and comprehending pipelines. We have the ability to create multiple pipelines, and in addition to that, the resource consumption is impressive."
"GoCD's open-source nature is valuable."
"Permission separations mean that we can grant limited permissions for each team or team member."
 

Cons

"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."
"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."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"Other things would be the need to use Cinc if you want to use the open-source version because Progress Software's policy on copyright is confusing for new users and it puts a barrier in the way to adoption because many small, medium enterprises, startups, and non-profits who might want to use Chef would find the whole Cinc versus Chef situation confusing and the fact that there is not an easy path to install Chef and then go to a paid version without having to change from Cinc to Chef or Chef to Cinc."
"Chef has a very steep learning curve, especially for beginners."
"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."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"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."
"It is difficult to assign different access levels because it relies on separate keys for developer and admin access, which could be simplified."
"The documentation really should be improved by including real examples and more setup cases."
"The tool must be more user-friendly."
"The aspect that requires attention is the user management component. When integrating with BitLabs and authenticating through GitLab, there are specific features we desire. One important feature is the ability to import users directly from GitLab, along with their respective designations, and assign appropriate privileges based on that information. Allocating different privileges to users is a time-consuming process for us."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are able to save in development time, deployment time, and it makes it easier to manage the environments."
"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."
"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."
"Chef is priced based on the number of nodes."
"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."
"We are using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time."
"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."
"It's an open-source and free tool."
"This is an open-source solution and it is inexpensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Retailer
8%
Computer Software Company
11%
University
10%
Educational Organization
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
 

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 needs improvement with GoCD?
One area of product improvement is the access control system. It is difficult to assign different access levels because it relies on separate keys for developer and admin access, which could be sim...
What is your primary use case for GoCD?
The solution helps us deploy microservices across multiple environments.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Adaptive ALM, Thoughtworks Go
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap
Ancestry.com, Barclay Card, AutoTrader, BT Financial Group, Gamesys, Nike, Vodafone, Haufe Lexware, Medidata, Hoovers
Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. GoCD and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
881,707 professionals have used our research since 2012.