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.
"If you need only to load a specific profile and you don't have deep security functionalities, et cetera, Intune is very nice and good."
"We can manage and standardize security across your environment, identify problems, receive alerts, and so on. That's its purpose, and that's also why it's so 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."
"The ability to send configurations to our systems is valuable, particularly as we don't have a regular Windows AD server. Our current environment doesn't have a Windows AD, which limits our ability to push GPOs. However, this is where the solution can step in and help us push policies."
"The initial setup is not overly complex or difficult."
"The ability to wipe data from and reset devices is one of the most important and valuable features. If a device is reported stolen, we can freeze it or wipe the data from it, preventing data leakage."
"We have not experienced any bugs or glitches with this solution."
"The most important thing for me is the autopilot feature."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"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."
"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."
"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."
"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."
"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 recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"Automation is everything. Having so many servers in production, many of our processes won't work nor scale. So, we look for tools to help us automate the process, and Chef is one of them."
"Installing it is a PIP command. So, it's pretty easy. It is a one liner."
"The automation manager is very good."
"Ansible Tower offers use a UI where we can see all the pushes that have gone into the server."
"Ansible Tower provides a GUI, which is an enhancement, and a well-liked feature by operation teams."
"It is quick to production. It has an API in the back which allows for integrations."
"Ansible is agentless. So, we don't need to set up any agent into the computer we are interacting with. The only prerequisite is that the host with which we are going to interact must have the Python interpreter installed on it. We can connect to a host and do our configuration by using Ansible."
"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."
"Feature-wise, the solution is a good open-source software offering broad support. Also, it's reliable."
"There is room for improvement in integration and security as well."
"The installation could be improved to be simplified."
"I wanted to check if there is any provision at the Intune level to restrict certain things, such as a website, but unfortunately, that feature is available only in Microsoft Defender. Intune has web filtering capabilities, but they are only useful for protection from malicious websites, whereas we would like to be able to restrict a website. For example, YouTube is a clean website. No one would identify it as a malicious website, but if we want to stop the end-users from going to that website, we have to go for another product, such as Microsoft Defender or another third-party proxy solution. It would be great if this capability is included in Intune."
"It needs certificate provisioning for S/MIME purposes."
"I'm still playing around with it and haven't had any issues with the product yet, but support can definitely be improved."
"It would be better if they can reduce the cost of the license."
"There is room for improvement, particularly in terms of compatibility, extending beyond the well-known major brands."
"When somebody has a customized application or their own company's application, we cannot deploy that application."
"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."
"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."
"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."
"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."
"The time that it takes in terms of integration. Cloud integration is comparatively easy, but when it comes to two-link based integrations - like trying to integrate it with any monitoring tools, or maybe some other ticketing tools - it takes longer. That is because most of the out-of-the-box integration of the APIs needs some revisiting."
"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."
"The solution is slightly expensive, and its pricing could be improved."
"Ansible is great, but there are not many modules. You can do about 80% to 90% of things by using commands, but more modules should be added. We cannot do some of the things in Ansible. In Red Hat, we have the YUM package manager, and there are certain options that we can pass through YUM. To install the Docker Community Edition, I'll write the yum install docker-ce command, but because the Docker Community Edition is not compatible with RHEL 8, I will have to use the nobest option, such as yum install docker-ce --nobest. The nobest option installs the most stable version that can be installed on a particular system. In Ansible, the nobest option is not there. So, it needs some improvements in terms of options. There should be more options, keywords, and modules."
"For Ansible Tower, there are three tiers with ten nodes. I would like them to expand those ten nodes to 20, because ten nodes is not enough to test on."
"The solution should add a nice self-service portal."
"The support could be better."
"The product could do a better job at building infrastructure."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is not the best at server provisioning. Terraform is better."
"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."
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 "Capable of broad integrations with easy-to-operate infrastructure and user controls". 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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