We performed a comparison between Chef and Puppet Enterprise based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat, Microsoft, HCLTech and others in Configuration Management.
"The dashboards, the security, and the customization capabilities work very well for us."
"Stable product that's easy to set up compared to other MDM products."
"The Autopilot feature is fantastic. It is a Microsoft product, so it deals best with Microsoft operating systems, but it can integrate with iOS, Mac OS, Linux, and Android."
"It's easy to deploy a configuration or policy to a system, especially when you don't have Azure AD. Now we are talking to all these small and medium-sized customers who don't necessarily have an on-premise Windows Active Directory. If they have invested in Office 365 Premium, this functionality becomes available to them."
"It is a very stable and scalable cloud-only solution."
"The Microsoft Windows Autopilot and Defender policies are the most valuable features of this solution."
"The solution is scalable. We currently have tens of thousands of users within our organization using the solution."
"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."
"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."
"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."
"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 feature is automation."
"It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."
"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."
"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."
"Puppet Enterprise has reduced the time of production changes or environment changes."
"Puppet Enterprise is a stable solution."
"Puppet3 and 4 series provides optimum deployment solutions for infrastructure and applications."
"Anything that we manage through Puppet always runs perfectly."
"The main purpose for this automation tool would be: deploying, controlling, ordering change for the system and IT Infrastructure."
"Puppet Enterprise has good functionalities."
"The versatility is great."
"The most valuable features are the agent, high load balancing, and overall robustness and features."
"No option to do end-to-en macOS management. Slow implementation of policies."
"I would like to see the ability to deploy custom packages as a Windows 64-bit package, as opposed to the Windows 32-bit, which is the only one available now."
"It needs certificate provisioning for S/MIME purposes."
"What would make this product better is adding more security policies and features in the next upgrade."
"For an existing customer who has an SCCM, it would need to be upgraded to an MECM first before I can introduce Microsoft Intune."
"An area for improvement is the absence of seamless integration, particularly with external dashboards."
"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."
"Reporting and troubleshooting for the application deployment could be better. It's very difficult to understand."
"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."
"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."
"It is an old technology."
"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."
"It's a bit of a pain point to make sure that everything works once we've upgraded it because Puppet has been evolving pretty fast."
"The solution has really complex code, you have to understand the Ruby language. However, once you know the code then you can move ahead without any problems."
"We would like Puppet to add more integration for applications."
"Puppet Enterprise is more complex and difficult to configure."
"At the beginning the initial setup was kind of complex."
"There's a lot of scope for enhancement on the DevSecOps side. They should definitely include features for compliance, for both the Linux and Windows side of the devices, as well as for network devices. Compliance is something they need to work on."
"Puppet Enterprise should improve the general extensibility for places where they can't install it."
Chef is ranked 15th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews while Puppet Enterprise doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in Configuration Management with 12 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while Puppet Enterprise 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 Puppet Enterprise writes "A set-it-and-forget-it management solution". Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager and BigFix, whereas Puppet Enterprise is most compared with AWS Systems Manager, Red Hat Satellite, Microsoft Configuration Manager, BigFix and BMC TrueSight Server Automation.
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.
