Bamboo vs Chef comparison

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95% willing to recommend

Bamboo

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Bamboo and Chef 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.

To learn more, read our detailed Bamboo vs. Chef Report (Updated: January 2025).

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Bamboo vs. Chef

January 2025

Helped 838,640 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Bamboo

Ranking in Build Automation

6th

Average Rating

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Chef

Ranking in Build Automation

16th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Release Automation (6th), Configuration Management (16th)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Bamboo is 8.1%, down from 8.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Chef is 0.5%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

Andrea Carella

DevOps Engineer at Politecnico di Milano

High availability, helpful support, and plenty of plugins available

I have used Google Cloud Platform and Amazon AWS for implementing Bamboo. It is not difficult to complete. The length of time it takes for deployment depends on a lot of variables, such as how the pipeline is deployed and what type of infrastructure is present. However, it typically takes only hours not days. I rate the setup of Bamboo a nine out of ten.

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Arun S .

Senior Consultant at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Useful for large infrastructure, reliable, but steep learning cureve

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. The solution is good to manage multiple large infrastructures. We can have 10 to 10,000 users using this solution and it manages them well.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"In my experience Bamboo is scalable."

"The most valuable feature of Bamboo is that it is a good tool for CI/CD integration."

"The most valuable features are compiling and deployment."

"It can do the CI pipeline well."

"One of the significant benefits of Bamboo is its built-in support for numerous clients and the ability to tailor its capabilities to your specific requirements. This high level of customization enables you to create pipelines that are ideally suited to your needs, making it an invaluable tool for conducting advanced testing."

"The most valuable features of Bamboo are its performance and UI. Additionally, there are a lot of useful plugins, integration with other solutions, such as Bitbucket and Jira, and a helpful online community."

"The most useful feature of Bamboo is its integration with other solutions such as Jira and BitBucket, also offered by Atlassian. It is easier to use tools all provided by one vendor."

"Bamboo was used extensively in our organization for PCA compliance."

More Bamboo pros

"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."

"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."

"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."

"The solution is easy to use and learn, and it easily automates all the code and infrastructure."

"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."

"One thing that we've been able to do is a tiered permission model, allowing developers and their managers to perform their own operations in lower environments. This means a manager can go in and make changes to a whole environment, whereas a developer with less access may only be able to change individual components or be able to upgrade the version for software that they have control over."

"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."

"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."

More Chef pros

Cons

"Scalability depends on the use case. If it is really a big customer with a lot of tests, it might not be a scalable option for them."

"The marketing strategy of Bamboo is an area of concern where improvements are needed."

"It would be great if Bamboo could introduce a more containerized deployment model."

"The solution needs to support more customization in the training. What's offered is pretty generic. They need better training and should offer more guidance."

"It's a little outdated. It's three years old."

"One area that could be enhanced is the governance process, particularly with regard to building approvals and transitions between stages. In comparison to other solutions, such as Jira, which features a workflow that supports approval processes, this capability is not natively available in Bamboo. To implement this functionality, integration with other solutions, such as GSM may be necessary. Although some add-ons, such as Adaptavist ScriptRunner, are available in the market to circumvent this limitation, they may not offer the exact functionality needed. Therefore, there is certainly room for improvement in this area."

"Bamboo is a bit complicated to use compared to other solutions, such as GitLab. You have to integrate different actions that are difficult that could be made easier."

"Bamboo could improve by having compatibility with GitLab. It would be better to have this platform for deploying code and storing container registries. Bamboo does not have a container registry. Additionally, there could be more features added."

More Bamboo cons

"They could provide more features, so the recipes could be developed in a simpler and faster way. There is still a lot of room for improvement, providing better functionalities when creating recipes."

"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."

"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."

"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."

"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."

"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."

"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."

"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."

More Chef cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The server products for small teams used to offer excellent pricing. However, Atlassian has since changed the offering and the pricing is more expensive. I do still think the solution offers good value for money."

"I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten."

"There is a subscription required to use Bamboo."

"I rate the solution's pricing a three out of five."

"The price of Bamboo is reasonable."

"If Bamboo could provide more flexibility on pricing, that would help. On the agent side, if you want to increase the number of agents it should be less expensive. If they can provide some better pricing model, it will help, whether we are going to use it or are already using it."

"We are able to save in development time, deployment time, and it makes it easier to manage the environments."

"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."

"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."

"Chef is priced based on the number of nodes."

"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."

"We are using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time."

"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."

"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."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user217035

Senior iOS Developer at a media company with 5,001-10,000 employees

May 27, 2015

Bamboo vs. Jenkins

A biased and subjective comparison of Bamboo and Jenkins as CI servers for mobile development, based on practical experience with both. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (Delivery, Distribution) has been around for quite a while. But surprisingly enough on a global scale it pretty…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Computer Software Company

12%

Government

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Bamboo?

Bamboo's integration with the rest of Atlassian's tech tools, like Jira, helps manage the end-to-end development and release process.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Bamboo?

I rate the solution's pricing a three out of five.

What needs improvement with Bamboo?

Integrating workflows with other platforms can be challenging. The capabilities of these platforms sometimes fall short compared to others. Initially, it was difficult for us because the plugins we...

What do you like most about Chef?

Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Chef?

Chef is priced based on the number of nodes.

What needs improvement with Chef?

Chef does not support the containerized things of Chef products. In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images.

AWS Systems Manager vs Chef

Comparisons

GitLab vs Bamboo

Compared 36% of the time

GitHub Actions vs Bamboo

Compared 22% of the time

Jenkins vs Bamboo

Compared 15% of the time

Tekton vs Bamboo

Compared 10% of the time

Harness vs Bamboo

Compared 8% of the time

More Bamboo Competitors

BigFix vs Chef

Compared 25% of the time

Compared 16% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Chef

Compared 13% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Compared 11% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 10% of the time

More Chef Competitors

Product Reports

Download Bamboo product report

Bamboo

February 2025

Download Chef product report

February 2025

Overview

Bamboo is a continuous integration and delivery tool that ties automated builds, tests and releases together in a single workflow. It works great alongside JIRA and Stash providing a fully traceable deployment pipeline.

Atlassian

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.

Sample Customers

Neocleus, MuleSoft, Interspire

Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap