No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Chef vs vCenter Configuration Manager comparison

Why PeerSpot?
Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 16, 2024

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

Microsoft Intune
Sponsored
Ranking in Configuration Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
384
Ranking in other categories
Remote Access (3rd), Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) (1st), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (1st)
Chef
Ranking in Configuration Management
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (14th), Release Automation (8th)
vCenter Configuration Manager
Ranking in Configuration Management
18th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
8.2
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Configuration Management category, the mindshare of Microsoft Intune is 4.2%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Chef is 3.4%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of vCenter Configuration Manager is 2.2%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Configuration Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Intune4.2%
Chef3.4%
vCenter Configuration Manager2.2%
Other90.2%
Configuration Management
 

Featured Reviews

HA
Senior Business Development Executive at Digitaltrack
Centralized device management has automated onboarding and improves remote security compliance
One thing I feel Microsoft Intune could improve is troubleshooting visibility. In many cases, when a policy or application deployment fails, the error messages are a bit generic. So, admins still spend time checking logs manually or testing on devices one by one. Compared to the simplicity of deployment, troubleshooting sometimes feels less mature. I also think reporting and real-time monitoring could be stronger. The dashboard gives useful information, but in large environments, many teams still depend on additional tools or scripts for deeper reporting and analytics. If I had to focus on one area first, I would probably choose troubleshooting and reporting. Deployment through Microsoft Intune is generally straightforward, but when something fails, identifying the exact root cause can still take more time than expected. Error messages are sometimes too generic, and admins often have to dig through logs, sync status, or multiple portals to understand what actually happened. I think user experience and policy management could also improve further. Microsoft Intune has become much better over the years, but sometimes the admin portal still feels fragmented because certain configurations open in different sections or redirect to older interfaces. For new admins, especially, it can take time to understand where everything is located. Another thing is policy conflict handling. In larger organizations, multiple device policies, compliance rules, and configuration profiles can overlap. When conflicts happen, the visibility is not always very clear, so admins spend time figuring out which policy actually won or caused the issue.
G Srivastava - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Agent setup and complexity have limited automation benefits but have reduced manual patching work
There are other automation tools, configuration management tools in the market, which offer many good functionalities compared to Chef. For Chef, we need to install those agents, the Chef client, on all those nodes. That is another heinous task to perform on those nodes. Compared with other tools, they do not require any agent; they simply push configurations to all the clients. Chef needs to improve on this agent installation on all those nodes. I would say that the agent configuration is required, and we need to manage the workstation, the Chef server, and then the Chef client. These two or three things are very difficult. It is a time-taking task compared with other configuration management tools. They need to compete with other tools, such as Ansible or Terraform. They should work on their agent part. If they can remove the agent installation on the nodes and combine both the Chef server and workstation into one server, that will provide a significant benefit in cost for the clients. They should aim for an agentless architecture rather than an agent-based architecture, which will help other customers. That is a very difficult thing because I have stopped using Chef. If you have very good developers who are skilled in Ruby language and can write codes in the Chef recipe, then those developers should start using Chef.
Nikhil Nikhil - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Operations Lead at TT Systems LLC
Compliance management has improved efficiency but licensing changes pose challenges
I am not using any advanced features or AI. I am employing a basic VMware vCenter setup for my infrastructure. Scalability has no major limitations, and the solution is efficient. Overall, it's satisfactory. I would rate the vCenter experience as seven out of ten due to concerns regarding license, pricing, and AI features.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"On the cloud, you can manage everything; you can push policies, maintain patches, and maintain security because everything interacts on the cloud and a VPN is not required."
"The feature I find most valuable in Microsoft Intune is being able to configure policies and push them directly to mobile phones."
"The solution appears to be stable and scalable."
"Microsoft Intune has improved endpoint visibility, simplified remote device management, and helped standardize security policies across both corporate and remote devices."
"Configuration profiles, remediation, scripts, and auto-pilot features are very good."
"Microsoft Intune is a must and should be needed for this time, for this hybrid model period, and I highly recommend this product for employees, education institutions, or device management."
"The best feature in Microsoft Intune is zero touch deployment, which allows me to automate many tasks compared to manually installing Windows and applications one by one, making it easier to enroll devices with Autopilot and pre-deploy applications."
"The many policies available in Microsoft Intune for managing our devices are valuable."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"The scalability of the product is quite nice; we have deployed it across six to seven organizations."
"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."
"This solution has improved my organization in the way that deployment has become very quick and orchestration is easy. If we have thousands of servers we can easily deploy in a small amount of time. We can deploy the applications or any kind of announcements in much less time."
"Manual deployments came to a halt completely. Server provisioning became lightning fast."
"The product is useful for automating processes."
"My clients are happy, which is the most important thing."
"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."
"By taking manual tasks and automating them, it provides a great value for the customer."
"The stability has been very good, with no bugs or glitches, making it a reliable solution that never crashes or freezes."
"The tool's scalability is good and easy, especially when compared to Microsoft Hyper-V."
"The interface is very user-friendly and the solution is simple to use."
"It is a stable solution."
"The clustering part and the load balancing part are most valuable."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is the virtual machine management across different hosts, located in different areas."
"I like vMotion because it manages fault tolerance."
 

Cons

"I heard some pain points. The main thing is the learning curve. It took time to implement. It was not the best product starting out of the gate."
"Sometimes, customers compare it with AirWatch, but the concept of Intune is different from other solutions. It's an application management app. It gets a bit difficult to explain it to customers, but it's not a product limitation. It takes a presale document or presentation to explain it to customers."
"Microsoft Intune needs to improve the initial login process."
"For macOS devices, we use the Jamf portal. I understand that the Jamf portal and server are more secure than Microsoft Intune for macOS."
"There can be more logs. I do not have any other requirements."
"Yes, there are a couple of issues with stability."
"Microsoft support was not very responsive, and it took approximately one and a half months to get on a call to clear what the problem was."
"Certificate management within Microsoft Intune's Suite is still under development. It's not very reliable compared to other certificate tools, though it has made good progress within a couple of years."
"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."
"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"One thing that Chef needs to improve on is making it available in as many languages as possible."
"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 an old technology."
"It is not so user-friendly that you can just start the host and everything works."
"The platform's certificate management functionality can be challenging, along with troubleshooting when issues arise."
"Configuration Manager's reporting could be better. I need to use a third-party reporting solution to get the details. They could add reporting features similar to RVTools."
"There are some complexities within the system center."
"Some of the migrations are difficult to manage since the solution is not compatible with a few of the operating systems, which poses a challenge during the physical to virtual migration process."
"The product's price could be lesser."
"The tool's performance needs to be improved."
"When vCenter is in a Microsoft environment, there is a lot of licensing involved, where we face some difficulties."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If you ask the accountant or the finance department, they'll tell you that it is way too expensive, but when I look at the cost and compare it with the value you actually get, it's more than fair."
"I have no comment on pricing of the solution."
"The licensing costs we leave up to the customer and these vary from one to another."
"It is reasonable for the features it has."
"There is a license needed to use the solution and we are on an annual license."
"There is a license required to use this solution. However, it was part of a bundle package. Microsoft Intune is far less expensive than other solutions, such as Workspace ONE."
"The product is expensive."
"While I can't provide insights from a business perspective, it's worth noting that the pricing may differ significantly, and the discount we received might not be reflective of standard business rates."
"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 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."
"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."
"We are using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time."
"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."
"Pricing for Chef is high."
"We have to pay for the whole bundle and individual pricing is not available. One license costs us almost $200 every year."
"This product is not cheap. I have a yearly license for vCenter and the license is not cheap."
"While the pricing is reasonable for large corporations, it presents a substantial financial challenge for medium-sized businesses."
"The price of the solution is expensive. However, it is reasonably priced compared to competitors."
"The price of the solution is too expensive for us and we are looking to move to another solution."
"There is a free license for the standard version. Their enterprise version is expensive. I would advise starting with one server and working your way up as you go. The enterprise version provides support."
"The solution comes with three-year support. We have to renew the support annually after the three years are up."
"The solution is quite expensive."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Configuration Management solutions are best for your needs.
920,574 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Outsourcing Company
18%
Construction Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business195
Midsize Enterprise64
Large Enterprise190
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise20
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise20
 

Questions from the Community

How does Microsoft Intune compare with VMware Workspace One?
Microsoft Intune is a great tool for managing a mobile device fleet while keeping access control. The solution makes ...
What are the pros and cons of Microsoft Intune?
Microsoft Intune is a great configuration management tool and has a lot of good things going for it. Here are some of...
How does Google Cloud Identity compare with Microsoft Intune?
Microsoft Intune offers not only an easy-to-deploy data protection and productivity management solution, but also ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Chef?
The licensing cost is zero for Chef if you are using the free version. They have developed other versions, such as Sa...
What needs improvement with Chef?
There are other automation tools, configuration management tools in the market, which offer many good functionalities...
What is your primary use case for Chef?
We used Chef, the automation tool, as an Infrastructure as Code tool for configuration deployment, such as deploying ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for vCenter Configuration Manager?
Nowadays, it is a bit expensive. It's costly, primarily due to the licensing aspect.
What needs improvement with vCenter Configuration Manager?
My impression on the impact of the real-time monitoring features of vCenter Configuration Manager is that it's somewh...
What is your primary use case for vCenter Configuration Manager?
My usual use cases for vCenter Configuration Manager mainly involve migration, shift and lift mainly, and some type o...
 

Also Known As

Intune, MS Intune, Microsoft Endpoint Manager
No data available
vCM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Mitchells and Buzzers, Callaway
Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap
Bank Al Bilad, Thomas-Krenn.AG, Pronto!, Unimed Juiz de Fora
Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. vCenter Configuration Manager and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,574 professionals have used our research since 2012.