Cancel
You must select at least 2 products to compare!
Atlassian Logo
3,403 views|3,414 comparisons
75% willing to recommend
Chef Logo
Read 18 Chef reviews
373 views|251 comparisons
95% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Bamboo and Chef 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.
To learn more, read our detailed Bamboo vs. Chef Report (Updated: May 2024).
771,157 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The most valuable features of Bamboo are its performance and UI. Additionally, there are a lot of useful plugins, integration with other solutions, such as Bitbucket and Jira, and a helpful online community.""One of the significant benefits of Bamboo is its built-in support for numerous clients and the ability to tailor its capabilities to your specific requirements. This high level of customization enables you to create pipelines that are ideally suited to your needs, making it an invaluable tool for conducting advanced testing.""It can do the CI pipeline well.""It's one of the best solutions in this line of work. We have many Atlassian products. We use Bamboo, JIRA, Service Desk, and some other Atlassian plugins. We like that it's easy to integrate into each other. It's a suite of services.""Bamboo's integration with the rest of Atlassian's tech tools, like Jira, helps manage the end-to-end development and release process.""The most valuable features are compiling and deployment.""In my experience Bamboo is scalable.""Bamboo was used extensively in our organization for PCA compliance."

More Bamboo Pros →

"One thing that we've been able to do is a tiered permission model, allowing developers and their managers to perform their own operations in lower environments. This means a manager can go in and make changes to a whole environment, whereas a developer with less access may only be able to change individual components or be able to upgrade the version for software that they have control over.""The scalability of the product is quite nice.""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.""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.""Chef can be scaled as needed. The Chef server itself can scale but it depends on the available resources. You can upgrade specific resources to meet the demand. Similarly, with clients, you can add as many clients as you need. Again, this depends on the server resources. If the server has enough resources, it can handle the number of servers required to manage the infrastructure. Chef can be scaled to meet the needs of the infrastructure being managed.""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.""Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments.""Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."

More Chef Pros →

Cons
"It can be challenging for someone new to the system or ecosystem to grasp, making it difficult to train new people and help them understand.""The solution needs to support more customization in the training. What's offered is pretty generic. They need better training and should offer more guidance.""Bamboo is a bit complicated to use compared to other solutions, such as GitLab. You have to integrate different actions that are difficult that could be made easier.""Bamboo can improve by providing more with scripting, such as they have with Jenkins. Bamboo is more UI-driven at this time, Jenkins is going in that direction too.""The performance around the deployment feature could be improved.""It should be much easier to use. It shouldn't require a lot of reading to be able to use it. It should have just two or three screens rather than hundreds of screens requiring a lot of clicking. It also requires a lot of integration. It has a steep learning curve. It takes a lot of time to understand and put in the data. There is also no proper training.""It would be great if Bamboo could introduce a more containerized deployment model.""The marketing strategy of Bamboo is an area of concern where improvements are needed."

More Bamboo Cons →

"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based.""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.""Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that.""Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation.""Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this.""If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best.""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."

More Chef Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "There is a subscription required to use Bamboo."
  • "If Bamboo could provide more flexibility on pricing, that would help. On the agent side, if you want to increase the number of agents it should be less expensive. If they can provide some better pricing model, it will help, whether we are going to use it or are already using it."
  • "The server products for small teams used to offer excellent pricing. However, Atlassian has since changed the offering and the pricing is more expensive. I do still think the solution offers good value for money."
  • "The price of Bamboo is reasonable."
  • "I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten."
  • More Bamboo Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "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."
  • "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."
  • "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."
  • "Purchasing the solution from AWS Marketplace was a good experience. AWS's pricing is pretty in line with the product's regular pricing. Though instance-wise, AWS is not the cheapest in the market."
  • "We are able to save in development time, deployment time, and it makes it easier to manage the environments."
  • "We are using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time."
  • "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."
  • "Pricing for Chef is high."
  • More Chef Pricing and Cost Advice →

    report
    Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Build Automation solutions are best for your needs.
    771,157 professionals have used our research since 2012.
    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    A biased and subjective comparison of Bamboo and Jenkins as CI servers for mobile development, based on practical experience with both. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (Delivery, Distribution) has been around for quite a while. But surprisingly enough on a global scale it pretty much just got into its teen years in regards to mobile development. Well, subjectively, of course. You can see all levels of mobile CI these days. Some would still install builds from Xcode, others would have a quickly patched up build server under their desk. Xcode Bots meet the needs of yet another group of people. Travis CI is good and for open source projects it’s probably the best option. And guess what, I know few successful iOS development companies that develop apps for enterprise clients, and have no CI at all. The advanced level of CI would include distributed build systems with multiple build nodes, support for automated unit and UI tests, running tests on simulator and physical devices, automatic deployment to TestFlight, Hockey App, Over the Air, and much more. It becomes not just mobile development, but spans into areas like DevOps and others. Etsy’s blog post is somewhat outdated but still a very good example of where this path can take you. If you decide to take mobile CI under your total control, you have to pick a build server to start with. I personally have worked with Bamboo for 1.5 years and I’m dealing with Jenkins right now, so I have few insights… Read more →
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Bamboo's integration with the rest of Atlassian's tech tools, like Jira, helps manage the end-to-end development and release process.
    Top Answer:I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten.
    Top Answer:The tools and capabilities of the system are extensive. It can be challenging for someone new to the system or ecosystem to grasp, making it difficult to train new people and help them understand.
    Top Answer:Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code.
    Top Answer:Chef does not support the containerized things of Chef products. In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images.
    Ranking
    5th
    out of 41 in Build Automation
    Views
    3,403
    Comparisons
    3,414
    Reviews
    6
    Average Words per Review
    554
    Rating
    7.7
    15th
    out of 41 in Build Automation
    Views
    373
    Comparisons
    251
    Reviews
    4
    Average Words per Review
    304
    Rating
    6.8
    Comparisons
    GitLab logo
    Compared 43% of the time.
    Jenkins logo
    Compared 21% of the time.
    GitHub Actions logo
    Compared 8% of the time.
    Harness logo
    Compared 7% of the time.
    Tekton logo
    Compared 7% of the time.
    Jenkins logo
    Compared 20% of the time.
    AWS Systems Manager logo
    Compared 13% of the time.
    Microsoft Azure DevOps logo
    Compared 10% of the time.
    SaltStack logo
    Compared 8% of the time.
    Learn More
    Overview
    Bamboo is a continuous integration and delivery tool that ties automated builds, tests and releases together in a single workflow. It works great alongside JIRA and Stash providing a fully traceable deployment pipeline.

    Chef, is the leader in DevOps, driving collaboration through code to automate infrastructure, security, compliance and applications. Chef provides a single path to production making it faster and safer to add value to applications and meet the demands of the customer. Deployed broadly in production by the Global 5000 and used by more than half of the Fortune 500, Chef develops 100 percent of its software as open source under the Apache 2.0 license with no restrictions on its use. Chef Enterprise Automation Stack™, a commercial distribution, is developed solely from that open source code and unifies security, compliance, infrastructure and application automation with observability. Chef provides an unequaled developer experience for the Coded Enterprise by enabling users to express infrastructure, security policies and the application lifecycle as code, modernizing development, packaging and delivery of any application to any platform. For more information, visit http://chef.io and follow @chef.

    Sample Customers
    Neocleus, MuleSoft, Interspire
    Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company40%
    Financial Services Firm20%
    Marketing Services Firm10%
    Non Tech Company10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Manufacturing Company14%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Government9%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company30%
    Comms Service Provider20%
    Non Tech Company10%
    Legal Firm10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm20%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Government8%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business30%
    Midsize Enterprise30%
    Large Enterprise40%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business15%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise71%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business5%
    Midsize Enterprise35%
    Large Enterprise60%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise69%
    Buyer's Guide
    Bamboo vs. Chef
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Bamboo vs. Chef and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
    771,157 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Bamboo is ranked 5th in Build Automation with 20 reviews while Chef is ranked 15th in Build Automation with 18 reviews. Bamboo is rated 7.4, while Chef is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Bamboo writes "High availability, helpful support, and plenty of plugins available". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Chef writes "Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation". Bamboo is most compared with GitLab, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Harness and Tekton, whereas Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager and SaltStack. See our Bamboo vs. Chef report.

    See our list of best Build Automation vendors.

    We monitor all Build Automation 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.