We performed a comparison between Chef and Jenkins based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Build Automation solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The product is useful for automating processes."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."
"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."
"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."
"Manual deployments came to a halt completely. Server provisioning became lightning fast. Chef-docker enabled us to have fewer sets of source code for different purposes. Configuration management was a breeze and all the servers were as good as immutable servers."
"It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."
"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."
"Jenkins has built good plugins and has a good security platform."
"A lot of support material exists via a single web search of exactly what you're looking for."
"For business needs, Jenkins is the most relevant choice because it can be self-hosted, the price is good, it’s robust, and requires almost no effort for maintenance."
"Jenkins is very easy to use."
"The deployment of traditional Jenkins is easy."
"It's very useful when you want to automate different processes from beginning to end."
"It is easy to use."
"The auto-schedule feature is valuable. Another valuable feature is that Jenkins does not trigger a build when there is no change in any of the systems. Jenkins also supports most of the open-source plug-ins."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."
"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."
"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."
"Jenkins could improve by allowing more scripting languages. We need to use Groovy scripting and it is difficult to debug and it is not ideal for creating file scripts. We tried to search for assistance but we did not find much help."
"Its schedule builds need improvement. It should have scheduling features in the platform rather than using external plug-ins."
"Tasks such as deployment, cloning, database switchover, and all other database missions and tasks are being done through Jenkins. If a job does not go through, at times the error message does not clearly indicate what caused the failure. I have to escalate it to the Jenkins DevOps team just to see what caused the failure. If the error message is clear, then I wouldn't have to escalate the issue to different teams."
"Upgrading and maintaining plugins can be painful, as sometimes upgrading a plugin can break functionality of another plugin that a job is dependent on."
"Centralized user management would be helpful."
"Jenkins could improve by adding the ability to edit test automation and make time planning better because it is difficult. It should be easier to do."
"The learning curve is quite steep at the moment."
"Jenkins is not an easy solution to use and the configuration is not simple. They can improve the solution by adding a graphical interface that is more user-friendly."
Chef is ranked 15th in Build Automation with 18 reviews while Jenkins is ranked 2nd in Build Automation with 83 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while Jenkins is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Chef writes "Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Jenkins writes "A highly-scalable and stable solution that reduces deployment time and produces a significant return on investment". Chef is most compared with AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager, SaltStack and BigFix, whereas Jenkins is most compared with GitLab, Bamboo, AWS CodePipeline, IBM Rational Build Forge and AWS CodeBuild. See our Chef vs. Jenkins report.
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