We performed a comparison between AWS CloudFormation and Chef 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."It is a stable solution."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Intune is having all our devices compliant with our policies."
"This product offers an alternative solution to other UEM (Unified Endpoint Management) solutions."
"The most valuable feature is the UEM capabilities."
"The performance of Microsoft Intune is good."
"Its protection policies are most valuable. It protects mobile devices as well as individual apps. It is pretty scalable, and its documentation is also pretty good. It is also pretty straightforward to deploy."
"It provides control over all mobile devices that are being connected to the corporate network."
"Based on my experience, I find Intune very flexible for managing Windows devices. We can use scripting, and we can make use of the self-service portal or the company portal to publish some of the applications for Windows."
"The CloudFormation template can be reused to create multiple stacks, reducing duplications and improving our infrastructure."
"The most valuable feature of AWS CloudFormation is the simple tracking of infrastructure."
"It is easy to work from the console and deploy new database services."
"Its ability to treat infrastructure's code is valuable. It makes things automatable and reproducible."
"Scripting does what we need to reinstall something from scratch."
"The most beneficial aspect lies in its capability to handle input acquisition and assessment."
"What I found most valuable in AWS CloudFormation is its configurability. The solution is easy to configure. I also like its change management configuration because that's also good."
"AWS CloudFormation has automated the resource-building process, thereby removing the scope of human errors. We can tag the resources which help the billing process."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"The scalability of the product is quite nice."
"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 product is useful for automating processes."
"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."
"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."
"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."
"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."
"It's the granularity: 'Is your firewall on? Is BitLocker on?' It's not amazing granularity. But I've looked into other products, like Duo, and they're all similar."
"Could benefit from user having more control over devices."
"I would like to see micro VPN. I like the way that some of the other providers have done something similar where, as you open that app on an end-point device, it creates a micro VPN straight into your device, which is quite a nice little feature. Also, Microsoft Intune relies heavily on its fellow products in the suite. It would be nice if Microsoft Intune could stand on its own two feet."
"Microsoft Intune needs to improve the initial login process."
"Additional application deployment options e.g. MSI deployment with more complex parameters or additional side-by-side files, and non-MSI deployment options."
"The reports aren't complete, and it's not easy to build custom reports. For example, Windows Autopilot isn't working well in cases where the computers don't have a good internet connection. Then the option is not good enough."
"The reports that are generated aren't so great. They don't give a lot of meaning so far, but that could be down to user knowledge than the actual reporting side of things. I'm not a big user of it, but I was a bigger user of MaaS360, and we used to be able to run weekly and monthly reports. In the case of any deviations. we'd get a warning immediately. That's not so easy to do or to get in place for Intune. This could be just a user issue, but when I compare both, that's the only thing that's lacking for me."
"There can be more logs. I do not have any other requirements."
"As soon as they manage to parametrize the whole thing and to implement parameters at all levels, it will become automatically a lot more flexible."
"The product should be made cloud-agnostic, allowing users to deploy the same environment with minimal tweaks across different cloud platforms, similar to Terraform. Additionally, it would be beneficial to have the ability to manage templates outside of the AWS environment."
"It would help all users if AWS improved the auto-generation of the CloudFormation file."
"Creating the inline policies is not great."
"The code we write in AWS CloudFormation is pretty big compared to Terraform. We need to have more modules in the solution. A library should also be there where we can save code lines. A dashboard feature would be good for designers."
"The solution needs to offer better support to other cloud vendors."
"For a beginner, it's kind of difficult to set up. So, the user does need some knowledge in order to do it."
"The solution must enable more hands-on designing of the templates."
"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."
"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."
"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."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."
"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 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."
AWS CloudFormation is ranked 8th in Configuration Management with 28 reviews while Chef is ranked 16th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews. AWS CloudFormation is rated 8.4, while Chef is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of AWS CloudFormation writes "Pretty easy setup with great automations for provisioning that save time and money". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Chef writes "Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation". AWS CloudFormation is most compared with AWS Systems Manager, Spring Cloud, Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, whereas Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager and UrbanCode Deploy. See our AWS CloudFormation vs. Chef report.
See our list of best Configuration Management vendors.
We monitor all Configuration Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
