We performed a comparison between Chef and Jenkins based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Build Automation solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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."
"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."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."
"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."
"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."
"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."
"We are using the open-source version and there is a lot of plugins and features that are available and it works on agents for free. In other solutions, it will cost extra to use them with the agent."
"I love Jenkins. I like that you work on anything, and you make anything. Jenkins is very important for my team. I am satisfied with the product."
"Has a good interface, is reliable and saves time."
"Jenkins has excellent task planning features."
"Jenkins' most valuable feature is Pipeline."
"I like that you can find a wide range of plugins for Jenkins."
"The auto-schedule feature is valuable. Another valuable feature is that Jenkins does not trigger a build when there is no change in any of the systems. Jenkins also supports most of the open-source plug-ins."
"Jenkins has built good plugins and has a good security platform."
"It is an old technology."
"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 AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."
"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."
"The time that it takes in terms of integration. Cloud integration is comparatively easy, but when it comes to two-link based integrations - like trying to integrate it with any monitoring tools, or maybe some other ticketing tools - it takes longer. That is because most of the out-of-the-box integration of the APIs needs some revisiting."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"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."
"Better and easy-to-use integration with Docker would be an improvement."
"Jenkins could improve by allowing more scripting languages. We need to use Groovy scripting and it is difficult to debug and it is not ideal for creating file scripts. We tried to search for assistance but we did not find much help."
"They need to improve their documentation."
"Improvement-wise, I would want the solution's user interface to be changed for the better. In short, the solution can be made more user-friendly."
"I sometimes face a bottleneck when installing the plugins on an offline machine. Mapping the dependencies and then installing the correct sequence of dependencies is a nightmare, and it took me two days to do it."
"Developer documentation for plugins, plugin development, integrations: Sometimes it’s tricky to do pretty obvious things."
"The scriptwriting process could be improved in this solution in the future."
"Partition security for the workflow of projects is not yet an option."
Chef is ranked 15th in Build Automation with 18 reviews while Jenkins is ranked 2nd in Build Automation with 83 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while Jenkins is rated 8.0. 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 Jenkins writes "A highly-scalable and stable solution that reduces deployment time and produces a significant return on investment". Chef is most compared with AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager, SaltStack and BigFix, whereas Jenkins is most compared with GitLab, Bamboo, AWS CodePipeline, IBM Rational Build Forge and AWS CodeBuild. See our Chef vs. Jenkins report.
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