Chef vs Jenkins comparison

Chef

Read 18 Chef reviews

366 Views
241 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Jenkins

Read 83 Jenkins reviews

6,536 Views
5,610 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Chef

Jenkins

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

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.

To learn more, read our detailed Chef vs. Jenkins Report (Updated: May 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Jenkins

May 2024

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Helped 787,061 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

Chef

Ranking in Build Automation

15th

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Release Automation (15th), Configuration Management (16th)

Jenkins

Ranking in Build Automation

2nd

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Market share comparison

As of June 2024, in the Build Automation category, the market share of Chef is 0.1% and it decreased by 64.0% compared to the previous year. The market share of Jenkins is 11.6% and it decreased by 22.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation

Unique Categories:

Release Automation

1.0%

Configuration Management

1.2%

No other categories found

Featured Reviews

Aaron P

DevOps Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Sep 18, 2023

Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation

Chef is like a master chef in a kitchen for computer systems. It's used to create recipes (cookbooks) that specify how servers and apps should be set up. Chef then makes sure these instructions are followed the same way on all computers in a network. The ChefServer is like the recipe book, where…

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Dinesh-Patil

Consultant at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Jul 18, 2023

A highly-scalable and stable solution that reduces deployment time and produces a significant return on investment

We use the solution for continuous integration and deployment The deployment time has reduced considerably. Since we started using it, the solution has taken care of everything that we used to do manually. It helps us with the automation of the deployment process. The most valuable feature of…

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"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."

"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."

"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."

"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 is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."

"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."

"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."

More Chef pros

"Jenkins is the most widely used development tool, so there are many plugins and it's easy to integrate. There is a large user base to provide community support, which I find very valuable. If I need to find a better way to do something, I can always get help from the community. Automation is about thinking outside of the box, and other users are constantly adding new plugins."

"We really appreciate that this solution is plug and play. When coding in the version control system, this product completes the build process automatically."

"It is very useful for us to be able to collect and manage automatic processing pipelines."

"Jenkins can be used for elastic management, if you have any sensitive data or credentials you can use them across the environment. Additionally, the solution is easy to use and can be used across multiple use cases."

"We used it for all continuous integration parts, like automation testing, deployment, etc."

"Jenkins's open-based framework is very valuable."

"Distributed execution of build and test jobs."

"The most valuable features of Jenkins are the integration with GitHub, and the automation for deployment."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."

"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 agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."

"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."

"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."

"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."

"It is an old technology."

More Chef cons

"The disadvantage of Jenkins is writing Groovy scripts. There are other CI tools where you do not need to write this many scripts to manage and deploy."

"A more user-friendly UI for creating pipelines would be helpful."

"It can be improved by including automated mobile reporting integrations."

"We cannot change the ownership of any directory or file or any kind of directory."

"It would be helpful if they had a bit more interactive UI."

"Its schedule builds need improvement. It should have scheduling features in the platform rather than using external plug-ins."

"I would like to see even more integrations included in the next release."

"UI is quite outdated."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are able to save in development time, deployment time, and it makes it easier to manage the environments."

"Chef is priced based on the number of nodes."

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

"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."

"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."

"We are using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time."

"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."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

"This is an open-source solution for the basic features. However, if an organization wishes to include specific functionality, outside of the basic package, there are extra costs involved."

"Jenkins is a free open-source server."

"It is free."

"It is a cheap solution."

"It is a free product."

"Jenkins is open source."

"I used the free OSS version all the time. It was enough for all my needs."

"It could be cheaper because there are many solutions available in the market. We are paying yearly."

More Jenkins pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user184734

Systems Administrator at Facebook

Jan 22, 2015

I generally find TeamCity a lot more intuitive than Jenkins.

Moving to TeamCity from Jenkins At work, we’re slowly migrating from Jenkins to TeamCity in the hope of ending some of our recurring problems with continuous integration. My use of Jenkins prior to this job has been almost strictly on a personal basis, although I pretty much only use Travis…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Chef?

Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Chef?

Chef is priced based on the number of nodes.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Chef?

Chef does not support the containerized things of Chef products. In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images.

See all answers

How does Tekton compare with Jenkins?

When you are evaluating tools for automating your own GitOps-based CI/CD workflow, it is important to keep your requirements and use cases in mind. Tekton deployment is complex and it is not very e...

See all answers

What do you like most about Jenkins?

Jenkins has been instrumental in automating our build and deployment processes.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Jenkins?

It is an open source.

See all answers

Comparisons

AWS Systems Manager vs Chef

Compared 13% of the time

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Chef

Compared 12% of the time

BigFix vs Chef

Compared 9% of the time

SaltStack vs Chef

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Compared 8% of the time

More Chef Competitors

GitLab vs Jenkins

Compared 17% of the time

Bamboo vs Jenkins

Compared 15% of the time

AWS CodePipeline vs Jenkins

Compared 9% of the time

IBM Rational Build Forge vs Jenkins

Compared 7% of the time

Digital.ai Release vs Jenkins

Compared 4% of the time

More Jenkins Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

June 2024

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Jenkins

June 2024

Download Jenkins product report

Learn More

Chef

Jenkins

Overview

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.

Jenkins is an award-winning application that monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron.

Sample Customers

Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap

Airial, Clarus Financial Technology, cubetutor, Metawidget, mysocio, namma, silverpeas, Sokkva, So Rave, tagzbox

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Jenkins

May 2024

Free Report: Chef vs. Jenkins

Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. Jenkins and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.

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