We performed a comparison between Chef and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Configuration Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The policy and compliance monitoring of devices and the software deployment are most valuable."
"It works well if you have a Microsoft environment."
"The one feature we find most useful is the Mobile Application Manager. There are two types, we have the complete MDM and the Mobile Application Manager(MAM). We don't give our users phones, it is their own personal phone, and we need to allow them to have access to the company detail on their phone. We need to create a balance between their own personal data and the company data. We deploy the Mobile Application Manager for them so that we won't be able to interfere with their own personal data."
"The most valuable feature is the policy CSPs."
"It is a very stable and scalable cloud-only solution."
"The solution is easy to use."
"Mobile device management is most valuable."
"It is a comprehensive security solution that not only controls access to enterprise resources but also tracks and prevents unauthorized access, ensuring the protection of sensitive data and preventing potential data loss scenarios."
"If you're handy enough with DSL and you can present your own front-facing interface to your developers, then you can actually have a lot more granular control with Chef in operations over what developers can perform and what they can't."
"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."
"The product is useful for automating processes."
"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."
"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."
"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."
"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."
"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."
"Installing it is a PIP command. So, it's pretty easy. It is a one liner."
"One of the most valuable features is that Ansible is agentless. It does not have dependencies, other than Python, which is very generic in terms of dependencies for all systems and for any environment. Being agentless, Ansible is very convenient for everything."
"Some colleagues and other companies use it and comment that it is easy to use, easy to understand, and offers good features."
"Having the Dashboard from an admin point of view, and seeing how all the projects and all the jobs lay out, is helpful."
"The Organizations feature, where I can give clear silos and hand them over to different teams, that's amazing; everybody says that it's their own Tower. It's like they have their own Tower out there."
"It is very extensible. There are many plugins and modules out there that everybody helps create to interact with different cloud providers as well."
"Ansible Tower provides a GUI, which is an enhancement, and a well-liked feature by operation teams."
"The most valuable feature of Ansible is repeatability because when you're working at the DoD, you want things to be cookie-cutter and replicable."
"The backend of Microsoft Intune needs to be improved. We have seen a little bit of delay as compared to other MDM solutions. That needs to be improved. A little bit more granularity should also be added"
"Intune lags all of its competitors in terms of report generation."
"The UI is not user-friendly and has room for improvement."
"The documentation about the custom image setup could be better. Although Microsoft provides the steps to configure Intune or set up or deploy Intune, it doesn't have much information related to custom images. If you ask, "how can we deploy the custom image?" There is no information. The steps they mention ask you to connect to your on-premises environment or create your own image on the cloud itself once there is connectivity. But I needed to go to multiple websites to get all this information. I had to figure out how to upload the custom image if you want to use the on-premise custom image for Cloud PC. If you have the proper subscription, you must have the right access, like global admin or owner. Then you can add your custom image to that. There are no steps mentioned over there. Microsoft Intune doesn't have Chrome browser support. I would like to have that support because they will want it if we pitch the product to clients."
"The current Intune reporting functionality could benefit from some improvements."
"Some enrollment features could be improved."
"The reporting needs to be a bit more interactive."
"Microsoft needs to enhance device-level security, as sometimes when using Microsoft Intune, the device's operating system becomes stuck and requires a full uninstall to remove the Intune bug."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"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."
"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."
"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."
"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."
"It is an old technology."
"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."
"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."
"The tool should allow us to create infrastructure. It has everything when it comes to management, but it lacks the provisioning aspect."
"Additional features could be added."
"It is a little slow on the network side because every time you call a module, it's initiating an SSH or an API call to a network device, and it just slows things down."
"The governance features could be improved."
"It needs better documentation."
"Networking needs to be improved."
"What I would like to see is a refined Dashboard to see, when I log in: Here are all my jobs, here are how many times they've executed; some kind graphical stitching-together of the workflows and jobs, and how they're connected. Also, those "failed hosts," what does that mean? We have a problem, a failed host can be anything. Is SSH the reason it failed? Is the job template why it failed? It doesn't really distinguish that."
"There could be more stuff in the workflows. I hope that if I have ten templates with different services on it, workflow could auto-populate all the template-based services."
More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
Chef is ranked 16th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 58 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6. 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 Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Its agentless, making the deployment fast and easy". Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager and Nolio Release Automation, whereas Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, Microsoft Configuration Manager, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps and BMC TrueSight Server Automation. See our Chef vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform report.
See our list of best Configuration Management vendors and best Release Automation vendors.
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