Chef vs VMware Tanzu Platform comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Progress Software and Broadcom are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Progress Software is ranked #13 with an average rating of 7.6, while Broadcom is ranked #17 with an average rating of 8.0. Progress Software holds a 2.2% mindshare in BA, compared to Broadcom’s 2.7% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Progress Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Chef

Read 26 Chef reviews

5,607 Views
1,738 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

VMware Tanzu Platform

Read 23 VMware Tanzu Platform reviews

12,672 Views
1,647 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Chef

VMware Tanzu Platform

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 29, 2026

Chef and VMware Tanzu Platform are competing in infrastructure management and application modernization. VMware Tanzu Platform tends to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive features, favoring scalability and innovation.

Features: Chef offers robust configuration management, automation for infrastructure scripting, and easy integration with CI processes. VMware Tanzu Platform includes application lifecycle management, cloud-native infrastructure capabilities, and supports microservices architectures.

Room for Improvement: Chef could improve in deployment processes, rollback mechanisms, and providing a GUI for less technical users. VMware Tanzu Platform needs to simplify its deployment process, enhance initial setup efficiency, and broaden support for legacy applications.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Chef is known for its straightforward setup and strong customer support, facilitating integration in existing environments. VMware Tanzu Platform, despite its complex deployment due to extensive capabilities, provides robust resources and support to ensure successful implementation.

Pricing and ROI: Chef is recognized for competitive pricing and favorable ROI due to efficient infrastructure management. VMware Tanzu Platform, with a higher initial cost, offers extensive capabilities that justify the investment for improved modern development frameworks and deployment efficiencies.

To learn more, read our detailed Chef vs. VMware Tanzu Platform Report (Updated: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. VMware Tanzu Platform

September 2026

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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 Build Automation

13th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Release Automation (6th), Configuration Management (12th)

VMware Tanzu Platform

Ranking in Build Automation

17th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

PaaS Clouds (13th), Cloud Management (33rd), Development Platforms (5th), Container Management (9th), Service Mesh (8th), Agile and DevOps Services (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 2.2%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Tanzu Platform is 2.7%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Chef	2.2%
VMware Tanzu Platform	2.7%
Other	95.1%

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

G Srivastava

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.

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ErmiasGirma

Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at Safaricom Ethiopia plc

Has supported container-based deployments and improved infrastructure visibility through monitoring tools

Aria Operations, formerly known as VMware vRealize Operations, has been renamed to vROps. We are currently using this for monitoring purposes. For orchestration, we are using VCD to automate Telco Cloud. VCD is an automation tool, and we are also using VMware Tanzu Platform for the Kubernetes environment, alongside TKG, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. These are also other solutions for the Tanzu Kubernetes environment. For Telco Cloud, we are using it to automate our company's operations, which is for a telecom company. We are familiar with these products, especially vCenter, ESXi, VCD, vCF, and vROps. It is very easy to integrate applications when we deploy vCenter and ESXi since we can enable vSphere with Tanzu feature. We can build namespaces and provide application developers the platform to deploy their applications on pods within containerization. We can easily manage, pull results, and create containers efficiently, making it a simple way to handle applications. We provide namespace labels for application developers, and we can manage their resources along with other aspects easily. Regarding security, we use many tools such as CDX and LDAP, AD for integrating our Kubernetes cluster with the developer teams. We can manage roles and permissions simply. It is very straightforward to integrate with EDX and other third-party tools, Active Directory, to the Kubernetes cluster, allowing easy access and management.

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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

"My clients are happy, which is the most important thing."

"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 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."

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

"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."

"Chef benefited my organization by definitely reducing time because we were provisioning tens of thousands of servers."

"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."

"The manual work has been reduced with the help of this automation, we only need two or three people to write those recipes and upload them on the Chef server, and once the configuration tool pulls those changes from the Chef server, it automatically deploys all those changes and has reduced our manpower and our costs."

More Chef pros

"We can build namespaces and provide application developers the platform to deploy their applications on pods within containerization, and we can easily manage, pull results, and create containers efficiently, making it a simple way to handle applications."

"Tanzu Mission Control has quite a set of rich features when compared to OpenShift."

"The most important feature of Tanzu Mission Control is its integration with the other products, especially with ESX and vSAN. This is a strong part of Tanzu Mission Control. In other solutions, such as OpenShift or Kubernetes, you can find similar features, but they don't have similar integration. With Tanzu Mission Control, you get a total solution with only one provider. You have the integration with the infrastructure, virtualization of networking, and virtualization of storage. You have a natural integration, and you don't have the problem of integrating it with different products or providers. Sometimes, different companies have good integration, but it is not always guaranteed. For example, many years ago, Cisco and VMware were good partners in networking, but when VMware started to sell ESX, the relationship was broken. This is the problem that you can face when you are using solutions from two different companies."

"The valuable feature I have found to be the management of Kubernetes clusters in a private cloud or public clouds, such as Azure or Google Cloud Platform."

"The Tanzu platform is highly available, scalable, and flexible."

"I have multiple Kubernetes environments within my environment, and TMC gives me a single pane view, which is good for managing everything."

"The initial setup is easy."

"The most valuable feature of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is the management functionality of the cluster life cycle. Additionally, the solution integrates well with other vendors, such as Velero for backups and Sonobuoy for compliance. Additionally, it works well in multi-cluster environments."

More VMware Tanzu Platform pros

Cons

"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."

"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."

"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."

"However, if you are on-premise, it may not be the best solution."

"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."

"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."

"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."

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

More Chef cons

"The infrastructure is quite challenging."

"The implementation is not easy, it is very complex and can take a day or two to complete."

"Tanzu provides better manageability as compared to OCP, but when it comes to tagging it with other products, it's a bit rigid. If I have to bring in any new product or something out of the box from a different vendor, working with Tanzu becomes a little difficult. For example, if I want to use the F5 services, I have to add one more layer of Avi, but I don't want to do that. If I have a list of the products that I want to use, such as for firewall services, with Tanzu, I will have to go through another layer, which creates complexity."

"The biggest gap for me was just that the solution is relatively tied to Cloud Foundry. If you have anything you need to deploy outside of that, it becomes burdensome."

"The installation of VMware Tanzu Service Mesh is very complex."

"The solution is currently focused on VMware infrastructure and I would like to see more options made available."

"Customers have noticed a considerable price increase after VMware's acquisition by Broadcom."

"The network control and security policies must be improved."

More VMware Tanzu Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

"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."

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

More Chef pricing and cost advice

"The price of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is greater than that of Red Hat's competitor solution"

"Since we were at a large data center, the price might not have been a concern for us."

"It is not the most expensive option, and I believe the capabilities align well with the value it provides."

"VMware Tanzu Mission Control is cheaper than Red Hat OpenShift."

"The product is not expensive, but it is not cheap."

"The license for VMware Tanzu Application Service is expensive. The license should be cheaper."

"Its pricing is very competitive. We get around 70% or 75%, sometimes even 80%, discount on the product. I would rate it a four out of five in terms of pricing."

"The licensing cost is expensive."

More VMware Tanzu Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Outsourcing Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

12%

Construction Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Outsourcing Company

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	20

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	11

Questions from the Community

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 SaaS-based and self-managed. For the SaaS-based version, it is $59 per node per ye...

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What needs improvement with Chef?

See all answers

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 patches on numerous servers, first on the development box, then on QA, and then ...

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Which is better - OpenShift Container Platform or VMware Tanzu Mission Control?

Red Hat Openshift is ideal for organizations using microservices and cloud environments. I like that the platform is auto-scalable, which saves overhead time for developers. I think Openshift can b...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Concourse for VMware Tanzu?

The least expensive licensing cost for VMware is around $350 per core. Pricing varies based on commitment and volumetric, with discounts provided for long-term commitments. VMware sells directly or...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Concourse for VMware Tanzu?

The price is very high compared to other Kubernetes environments because Kubernetes is open source. We can easily work with Docker, and when we compare it with OpenShift, the price is very high. We...

See all answers

Comparisons

Jenkins vs Chef

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 7% of the time

AWS CloudFormation vs Chef

Compared 6% of the time

GitHub Actions vs Chef

Compared 6% of the time

Red Hat Satellite vs Chef

Compared 5% of the time

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Amazon AWS vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 5% of the time

Kubernetes vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 5% of the time

Docker vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 5% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 4% of the time

More VMware Tanzu Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

September 2026

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Tanzu Platform

August 2026

Download VMware Tanzu Platform product report

Also Known As

No data available

Tanzu Application Catalog, Application Platform, Application Service, Hub, Mission Control, Service Mesh, Build Service, Concourse for VMware Tanzu

Overview

Chef is a powerful automation tool designed for efficient infrastructure management across varied environments. With its environment-as-code model, Chef provides predictability and reliability in deployments, enhancing security compliance and reducing manual intervention.

Chef focuses on automating deployments and configurations, ensuring server consistency, managing scalable environments, and orchestrating service deployments. Its versatile recipe-writing and Ruby-based flexibility cater to large-scale operational needs. Chef’s integration with services like AWS and Azure enhances its versatility, while its idempotent deployments assure reliability. Despite its prowess, Chef requires improvements in feature offerings, especially regarding container orchestration and cloud technologies.

What are Chef's Key Features?

Automation: Streamlines infrastructure management across diverse environments.
Environment-as-Code: Offers predictability and efficiency in management.
Idempotency: Ensures reliable deployments by maintaining the same outcome no matter how often applied.
Cloud Integration: Seamlessly integrates with AWS and Azure.
Security Compliance: Enhances security measures across infrastructures.
Ruby-Based Flexibility: Provides versatile recipe-writing and flexible configurations.
Scalability: Suitable for large-scale operational needs.

What Benefits Should Users Consider?

Consistency: Automated deployments reduce errors and manual efforts.
Efficiency: Decrease in manual intervention enhances team productivity.
Reliability: Idempotent deployments ensure consistent outcomes.
Scalability: Supports expanding infrastructures effectively.
Security: Maintains compliance with enhanced security features.

Chef is implemented across industries to automate application deployments, manage CI/CD pipelines, provision infrastructure, and maintain compliance. Its recipes and cookbooks streamline workflows in application deployment, system updates, and orchestration of services, reducing errors and manual intervention in a variety of sectors.

Progress Software

VMware Tanzu Platform is designed for cloud-native development and management of Kubernetes, CI/CD processes, microservices, and containerized workloads. It supports deployments both on cloud and on-premises, providing centralized management via Mission Control.

VMware Tanzu Platform offers seamless integration with vSphere, ESX, and vSAN, supporting centralized cluster management and lifecycle management. The platform provides a GUI for monitoring CI/CD pipelines and network policies, enhancing multi-tenancy and Day 2 operations. Users can easily manage Kubernetes clusters, monitor applications, and integrate with tools such as GitHub, GitLab, Cloud Foundry, and Azure. It ensures compliance and security for service providers, financial institutions, and businesses.

What are the key features of VMware Tanzu Platform?

Integration with vSphere, ESX, and vSAN: Enhances compatibility and flexibility.
Seamless Cluster Management: Centralized control over Kubernetes clusters.
CI/CD Pipelines and Network Policies: Simplifies monitoring and management.
Multi-tenancy Support: Facilitates resource sharing among multiple users.
Comprehensive Lifecycle Management: Streamlines deployment and scalability.
Observability Platform: Provides enhanced visibility and control.

What benefits and ROI should users look for in VMware Tanzu Platform reviews?

Centralized Management: Simplifies operations and reduces manual effort.
Enhanced Compliance and Security: Meets regulatory requirements.
Flexibility in Deployment: Supports both cloud and on-premises options.
Seamless Integration: Works with multiple vendors and tools.
Developer-Friendly Environment: Improves productivity and innovation.

Industries such as financial institutions, service providers, and businesses requiring rigorous compliance and security deploy VMware Tanzu Platform. These entities benefit from centralized management, streamlined DevOps processes, and integrated tools, enhancing their capabilities in cloud-native developments and containerized workloads.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

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

Verizon, Cerner, Zipcar, Avarteq

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. VMware Tanzu Platform

September 2026

Free Report: Chef vs. VMware Tanzu Platform

Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. VMware Tanzu Platform and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.

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