We performed a comparison between Chef and Microsoft Configuration Manager 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."Intune's most valuable features are the device, compliance, and configuration policies."
"Configuration profiles, remediation, scripts, and auto-pilot features are very good."
"We have a BYOD policy, and this solution helps us manage our devices."
"It's very informative when there is an error. It allows us to backtrace where the error is and resolve that ourselves. It's a bit of a Swiss Army penknife. We find that it fixes most issues."
"It allows our clients to have the confidence to centrally manage policies for security. It helps them in securing the organization from a technology aspect."
"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."
"While Microsoft Intune boasts a wide range of features, its user-friendliness and bundled licensing cost are key considerations for me."
"Intune provides full visibility into all active mobile device users. If their devices are noncompliant with our security policies, I have the flexibility to update them remotely."
"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."
"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."
"The product is useful for automating processes."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the scalability."
"The solution is highly scalable."
"The solution has a very good set of features."
"It lets you know what your infrastructure is like and what state you are in."
"It has the ability to perform mass distribution."
"The solution effectively handles inventory management, deployment, and reporting."
"The scalability to deploy the package."
"Microsoft has done a good job with authentication solutions, such as single sign-on, or open authentication."
"Intune doesn't provide much control over Windows servers. It's something we struggle with."
"More integration with monitoring tools is needed."
"There is no catalog for mobile access management (MAM) security."
"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."
"The configuration could be better by consolidating options and making it simpler."
"The solution can have some compliance problems in general and the end-point user can bypass easily the company policies in Intune."
"Could benefit from user having more control over devices."
"The difficulty of the the roll out is surprisingly difficult considering this product is supposed to be an integrated part of the 365 suite."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"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."
"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."
"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."
"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"A lot of experience is needed in terms of troubleshooting, as this is one of the most difficult tasks in MECM. We were seven people in a group and I was the only one that had the patience to do the troubleshooting at times."
"The database should be made to be more stable and robust, but not so much the configuration."
"The TSM component could be improved."
"The operations could be faster and you need some patience with this tool."
"This solution needs to be supported on all Operating systems."
"There's no way to say, "I want this maintenance window to be on the second Tuesday of the month." It's strict. This window is this and that's it. You can't fluctuate."
"Their compliance reporting is not accurate, and they admitted it on the phone when we had a call with them. We were trying to understand why their numbers didn't match on our compliance reports. It is not accurate and you cannot depend on the compliance reports. The numbers just don't match, and we can't figure out why. We called Microsoft and they said, "Yeah, that's a known issue." But there is no word that they're working on it."
"There is a reboot issue with the patching. Sometimes, if patching runs into any issue whatsoever, it doesn't reboot but it doesn't tell you it errored out. It just sits there and we don't find out until the next day whether it patched or not. That was a big issue for us. We're working through that. They added some stuff in there now where you can actually tell reboot is pending. But we still need some kind of notification that if something fails or is pending, we know. We shouldn't have to go in and look. They don't have anything for that right now."
More Microsoft Configuration Manager Pricing and Cost Advice →
Chef is ranked 15th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews while Microsoft Configuration Manager is ranked 2nd in Configuration Management with 78 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while Microsoft Configuration Manager is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Chef writes "Useful for large infrastructure, reliable, but steep learning cureve". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Configuration Manager writes "Seamless system updates, useful integration, and reliable". Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, BigFix and SaltStack, whereas Microsoft Configuration Manager is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, ManageEngine Endpoint Central, BigFix, Tanium and AWS Systems Manager. See our Chef vs. Microsoft Configuration Manager report.
See our list of best Configuration Management vendors.
We monitor all Configuration Management 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.
