Compare Chef vs. Quest KACE Systems Management
Chef is ranked 4th in Configuration Management with 13 reviews while Quest KACE Systems Management is ranked 8th in Configuration Management with 3 reviews. Chef is rated 8.4, while Quest KACE Systems Management is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Chef writes "It never uses any type of human-readable interface. Therefore, you don't have to go into a GUI nor use a command line tool". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Quest KACE Systems Management writes "This product made the job easy to do, without having to go put hands on the machines. This made things more convenient and more efficient". Chef is most compared with SCCM, Ansible and BigFix, whereas Quest KACE Systems Management is most compared with SCCM, BigFix and Ansible. See our Chef vs. Quest KACE Systems Management report.
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 Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. Quest KACE Systems Management and other solutions. Updated: March 2020. 408,154 professionals have used our research since 2012. | |||||
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros | |
You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations. 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 scalability of the product is quite nice. The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby. 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 important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints. Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy. 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. | I am impressed by the service desk ticketing and asset management. The most valuable feature is the ability to have an overview of all devices that are accessing our environment. This product made the job easy to do without having to go put hands on the machines. The ability to push an image to a machine, wake that image up, and just blast a new image to a computer without even having to touch it, and then push the software to that machine. This just made things so much more convenient for us and so much more efficient. |
Cons | |
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. The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky. I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation. 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. Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this. There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based. If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best. Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms. | I've had some issues with patch catalogue. I think it should have the ability to have the applications automatically update. It would be really helpful if this would override what the user might choose to do. The only hiccups we had were some power issues, where the box was a little under-powered early on. Imaging becomes a problem when you start to try to go beyond doing more than thirty or forty machines at a time. We initially tried to do that virtually and it just, it wouldn't work. |
Pricing and Cost Advice | |
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. We are able to save in development time, deployment time, and it makes it easier to manage the environments. The price is always a problem. It is high. There is room for improvement. I do like purchasing on the AWS Marketplace, but I would like the ability to negotiate and have some flexibility in the pricing on it. 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. 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. | It was a very attractive price. This is a huge feature of this product. If you would "credit score" this product versus others out there on the market, this one has a very attractive price. It may be more expensive, but you get what you pay for. |
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Ranking  | |
Views 5,626 Comparisons 4,074 Reviews 13 Average Words per Review 602 Avg. Rating 8.5 | Views 5,276 Comparisons 3,405 Reviews 3 Average Words per Review 576 Avg. Rating 8.7 |
Top Comparisons | |
 Compared 26% of the time.  Compared 26% of the time.  Compared 16% of the time. | Compared 67% of the time. Compared 8% of the time. Compared 4% of the time. |
Also Known As | |
| Dell KACE Systems Management | |
Learn | |
| Chef | Quest Software Video Not Available |
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. | The KACE Systems Management Appliance provides a growing organization with comprehensive management of network-connected devices, including servers, PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, tablets, printers, storage, networking gear and the Internet of Things (IoT). KACE can fulfill all of the organization's systems management needs, from initial deployment to ongoing management and retirement. |
Offer | |
Learn more about Chef | Learn more about Quest KACE Systems Management |
Sample Customers | |
| Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap | Waypoint, Mattos Filho, Meetic, Gems Education, Green Clinic HealthSystem, Service King |
Top Industries | |
Software R&D Company33% Comms Service Provider12% Government7% Retailer6% | Software R&D Company28% Comms Service Provider12% Media Company11% Retailer10% |
Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. Quest KACE Systems Management and other solutions. Updated: March 2020.
408,154 professionals have used our research since 2012.
See also Chef Reviews, Quest KACE Systems Management Reviews, and our list of Best Configuration Management Companies.
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