We performed a comparison between Chef and HashiCorp Terraform 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."We have one MDM that works with Windows, iOS, and Android."
"I can reach devices or computers over the internet. I don't need to worry about the network connectivity between the offices. I can manage any device. That is the most important part."
"If the product works, remote access will be a benefit. To this point we have not had reason to have confidence in achieving that access."
"For the price, the features included with Microsoft are appealing."
"This product offers an alternative solution to other UEM (Unified Endpoint Management) solutions."
"The initial setup is not complex."
"Its security is most valuable. It gives us a way to secure devices, not only those that are steady. We do have a few tablets and other devices, and it is a way for us to secure these devices and manage them. We know they're out there and what's their status. We can manage their life cycle and verify that they're updated properly."
"Intune is effective because of the configuration management and endpoint security it provides. The graphical interface makes it easier to configure and deploy devices."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"The product is useful for automating processes."
"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."
"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."
"It has been very easy to tie it into our build and deploy automation for production release work, etc. All the Chef pieces more or less run themselves."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable features of HashiCorp Terraform are automation and management capabilities."
"HashiCorp Terraform is highly stable."
"It's very easy to automate functions on the cloud with HashiCorp Terraform. The commands are easy as well."
"Can be used across multiple cloud providers and multiple platforms."
"With Terraform, you don't need to understand the console of your cloud providers. You only need to understand how Terraform works, and you manage your infrastructure tools in Terraform."
"The solution allows us to work faster with ease and to set up new environments and workspaces."
"It is the customization of Terraform's modules that I find most valuable."
"It is one of the best things because now we have everything automated with Terraform. We didn't have an outage for the last three years because everything is written in a code, and every change we have made is recorded. If we didn't have a tool like Terraform, it would be extremely complex to achieve this level of maturity with infrastructure."
"Intune has limited integration with non-Microsoft solutions."
"There are some issues using the solution with macOS and iOS, and it offers limited granular control with them. Intune works better on Windows and Android."
"The pricing can be expensive if you are not combining it with other products."
"When Microsoft Intune is used with different android devices it does not always work as it is supposed to."
"Lacking in features such as Wi-Fi and network security."
"It would be great to see on-premises mailboxes and for the solution to have geofencing capabilities."
"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."
"The biggest problem we ever have is when something goes out of date after 30 days when nobody has logged into it. We do have a problem trying to get those back online. We've been working with Microsoft to resolve that problem, but that's been the only issue that we've had in the last few years."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"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."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."
"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."
"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."
"I would rate this solution a nine because our use case and whatever we need is there. Ten out of ten is perfect. We have to go to IOD and stuff so they should consider things like this to make it a ten."
"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."
"I still struggle a bit when configuring VPNs when we have multiple rules. If we have five or six virtual private clouds and we have to give rights between those multiple VPCs, we can have big problems. I think it was a learning curve and then we improved it."
"The product's initial setup phase was easy."
"They should include tutorials for understanding the use cases."
"There is always room for improvement somewhere. I don't know everything about the product."
"On occasion, I have noticed a number of bugs in this solution that have needed to be fixed."
"The price of the solution could improve."
"The state locking functionality can be improved. In certain situations, we have to force-unlock the state, which sometimes does not work. When that happens, we have to manually go to the state backend and remove that particular state, which is kind of a cumbersome process. It should also have more functions, more expressions, and support for more products."
"The solution is missing a lot of properties for specific resources."
Chef is ranked 15th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews while HashiCorp Terraform is ranked 6th in Configuration Management with 38 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while HashiCorp Terraform is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Chef writes "Useful for large infrastructure, reliable, but steep learning cureve". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HashiCorp Terraform writes "Easy to use, technically strong, and great for multi-provider or multi-cloud environments". Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager and BigFix, whereas HashiCorp Terraform is most compared with SaltStack, Red Hat Satellite, Microsoft Configuration Manager, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and SolarWinds Server Configuration Monitor. See our Chef vs. HashiCorp Terraform report.
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