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."Technical support, in general, has been quite helpful."
"It is very easy to use. It has a very easy interface."
"Stable solution at a good price."
"We are a remote company, and the product helps us manage the global endpoints. It helps us natively manage the endpoints in the cloud from anywhere."
"As the solution is a software as a service, the scalability is unlimited."
"The most valuable feature for us is the security, including risk analysis and patch management."
"It provides control over all mobile devices that are being connected to the corporate network."
"I haven't used other mobile device management solutions, but compared to SCCM, we eliminate a lot of on-premises infrastructure and maintenance by using Intune."
"The most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."
"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."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."
"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."
"The scalability of the product is quite nice."
"It has improved our organization through provisioning and security hardening. When we do get a new VM, we have been able to bring on a provisioned machine in less than a day. This morning alone, I provisioned two machines within an hour. I am talking about hardening, installing antivirus software on it, and creating user accounts because the Playbooks were predesigned. From the time we got the servers to the actual hand-off, it takes less than an hour. We are talking about having the servers actually authenticate Red Hat Satellites and run the yum updates. All of that can be done within an hour."
"The solution is capable of integrating with many applications and devices in comparison to BigFix."
"The user interface is well-built and very easy to navigate around."
"Role-based access control and agentless architecture are the main features which may attract users."
"I like the agentless feature. This means we don't install any agent in worker nodes."
"Ansible provides great reliability when coupled with a versioning system (git). It helps providing predictability to the network by knowing exactly what's being pushed after validating it in production."
"Automation tracking is the most valuable feature."
"We can automate a few host configurations using the product."
"One big problem with Microsoft is that they're changing the names of the products quite often, or they're quite consistently doing so. Intune is now Endpoint administration. Constantly switching the user interface or the administrative interface makes it quite hard to keep pace. If you are on a two-week holiday and you come back and look at the same screen you have looked at for the last couple of months, it looks different, which is annoying. Changing things around all the time doesn't make it easy."
"There can be some added features, such as an improved dashboard. Any new feature that could be a benefit to our customers would be good."
"Intune has some limitations when it comes to application updates for third-party applications. You can schedule an update, but when it's a package setup, you need to supercede and replace it each time."
"I know that their AI pieces are at the infancy stage, but allowing users to do more tagging for information would be an interesting thing because Intune also directly integrates with Azure. Because a lot of the devices are hosted with that, you also get a lot of tagging of user data and other things like that."
"We only have major classifications for iOS and Android, but there are different brands that have different cycles of updates. If they can fine-tune it to make it more brand-specific, that would be even better."
"What would make this product better is adding more security policies and features in the next upgrade."
"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."
"The add-ons must be integrated into the solution."
"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"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."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"It is an old technology."
"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."
"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."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"It needs better documentation."
"The solution should add a nice self-service portal."
"The communication on it is not probably where it could be. We could use some real life examples where we could point customers to them and say, "This is what you are trying to do. If you follow these steps, it would at least get you started a bit quicker.""
"Documentation could be improved. Many times, if I'm looking for something, I have to Google it in a lot of places, then figure out what the best approach will be. There are some best practices documents, but they don't give you the information."
"The area which I feel can be improved is the custom modules. For example, there are something like 106 official modules available in the Ansible library. A year ago, that number was somewhere around 58. While Ansible is improving day by day, this can be improved more. For instance, when you need to configure in the cloud, you need to write up a module for that."
"At this time, I do not have anything to improve. What we struggle with is the knowledge base, but that is more about us having to go and find it and learn the platform on our own rather than an actual Ansible issue."
"What I'm trying to figure out, personally, is, when doing mass updates, how I can parallelize that a little bit better. It seems right now - and maybe, it's a shortcoming on my end - that I run through one set of servers, and then another set of servers, ad then another set of servers, but it seems like I could throw a lot of these checks out. Different types of servers, like web servers and DB servers, if I could parallelize that a little bit to make everything run a little bit more efficiently, that would help."
"The user interface on the Ansible Tower product could be better, but it is functional."
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 62 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 "Makes it easy to build playbooks and saves time and resources". Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, BigFix and Digital.ai Agility, 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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