Bamboo vs Chef comparison

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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).

Bamboo vs. Chef

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Helped 831,020 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

17th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Release Automation (6th), Configuration Management (17th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Bamboo is 8.3%, down from 8.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Chef is 0.4%, down from 0.6% 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

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

"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 platform helps us with automated and timely backup. It provides data replication as well."

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

"One of the big things that made us choose Bamboo, is it seamlessly integrates its APIs into NetSuite, which is our main ELP system."

"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."

"The tool is useful for continuous deployment."

"In Bamboo, build and deployment have been segregated. The build plan and deployment plan are different. When comparing Bamboo to other solutions, the native feature you will not find in another tool, such as Jenkins. They have segregated the build and deployment plan. This means, building the application and deploying it are two separate parts in Bamboo, they have segregated it apart from the UI. This makes the tool a bit better compared to other tools."

More Bamboo pros

"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."

"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."

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

"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."

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

"The scalability of the product is quite nice."

"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."

More Chef pros

Cons

"Bamboo’s technical support services, in terms of speed of response, need improvement."

"The tool is not capable of using YAML efficiently."

"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."

"It should be much easier to use. It shouldn't require a lot of reading to be able to use it. It should have just two or three screens rather than hundreds of screens requiring a lot of clicking. It also requires a lot of integration. It has a steep learning curve. It takes a lot of time to understand and put in the data. There is also no proper training."

"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."

"The performance around the deployment feature could be improved."

"Bamboo can improve by providing more with scripting, such as they have with Jenkins. Bamboo is more UI-driven at this time, Jenkins is going in that direction too."

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

More Bamboo cons

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

"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."

"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."

"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."

"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."

"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."

"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."

"It is an old technology."

More Chef cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

"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."

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

"The price of Bamboo is reasonable."

"There is a subscription required to use Bamboo."

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

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Computer Software Company

12%

Government

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

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

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Jenkins vs Bamboo

Compared 17% of the time

Tekton vs Bamboo

Compared 9% of the time

Harness vs Bamboo

Compared 9% of the time

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VMware Aria Automation vs Chef

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Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Compared 13% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

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Product Reports

Bamboo

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Atlassian

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.

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

Bamboo vs. Chef