Chef vs Jenkins comparison

Chef and Jenkins are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Chef is ranked #16 with an average rating of 7.0, while Jenkins is ranked #3 with an average rating of 7.8. Chef holds a 0.5% mindshare in BA, compared to Jenkins’s 11.3% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Chef users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Jenkins users who would recommend it.

Chef

Read 19 Chef reviews

316 Views
209 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Jenkins

Read 89 Jenkins reviews

5,264 Views
4,524 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Chef

Jenkins

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

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.

To learn more, read our detailed Chef vs. Jenkins Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Jenkins

October 2024

Download the complete report

Helped 814,649 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

Chef

Ranking in Build Automation

16th

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Release Automation (7th), Configuration Management (17th)

Jenkins

Ranking in Build Automation

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 0.5%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 11.3%, down from 14.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

Arun S .

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

Feb 14, 2023

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.

Read full review

AllenUmlas

Engineer at Etisalat

Feb 29, 2024

Streamlines the CI/CD process with its user-friendly interface, extensive plugin ecosystem and efficient automation capabilities

In our CI/CD pipeline, we rely on Jenkins to trigger various tasks related to the Telco Cloud infrastructure. It's an essential tool for managing our infrastructure tasks efficiently Jenkins is incredibly user-friendly, so I haven't encountered any difficulties using it. It's the only product…

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."

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

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

"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."

"The product is useful for automating processes."

"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."

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

"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."

More Chef pros

"Jenkins is very user-friendly."

"I like the business logs. It's a very useful tool. Client-server communication is also very fast."

"The most valuable features of Jenkins are the ease of use and the information about how to use the features is readily available on the internet. Additionally, with the solution, I can use other reporting tools, such as Flow."

"It offers continuous deployment and continuous testing. It enables us to figure out anything."

"For business needs, Jenkins is the most relevant choice because it can be self-hosted, the price is good, it’s robust, and requires almost no effort for maintenance."

"Jenkins allows us to automate deployment, so I no longer have to do it manually. That's the primary use case. The other advantage of Jenkins is that it's open source. It was free for me to download and install. It's a product that's been in use for many years, so I can find a lot of support online for any issues that I may encounter while configuring anything for a given use case."

"The most valuable feature of Jenkins is its continuous deployment. We can deploy to multi-cluster and multi-regions in the cloud."

"The most valuable features of Jenkins are its ease of use and good plugins available. You are able to connect to a lot of solutions."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

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

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

"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."

"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 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."

"It is an old technology."

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

More Chef cons

"Upgrading and maintaining plugins can be painful, as sometimes upgrading a plugin can break functionality of another plugin that a job is dependent on."

"Jenkins can improve by continuing to add additional plugins for all the new solutions that are coming out within the cloud sphere."

"Performance-wise. This needs to be improved. Not only performance-wise, some functionality or some features can be added to Jenkins."

"They need to improve their documentation."

"The UI of Jenkins could improve."

"In our case, we have several products built using Jenkins. It is quite difficult to navigate into the latest stable build in a given OS."

"Jenkins needs a faster deployment process."

"The documentation on plugin development could be better: more examples. "

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

"It is an open source."

"It is a cheap solution."

"Jenkins is an open-source tool."

"This is an open-source solution for the basic features. However, if an organization wishes to include specific functionality, outside of the basic package, there are extra costs involved."

"The open-source version is free, but small companies would not be able to afford the cloud-based version."

"It's free software with a big community behind it, which is very good."

"Jenkins is open source and free."

"We use the tool's open-source version which is free. There is an enterprise version which is expensive but comes with better support."

More Jenkins pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Build Automation solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Comparison Review

it_user184734

Systems Administrator at Facebook

Jan 22, 2015

I generally find TeamCity a lot more intuitive than Jenkins.

Moving to TeamCity from Jenkins At work, we’re slowly migrating from Jenkins to TeamCity in the hope of ending some of our recurring problems with continuous integration. My use of Jenkins prior to this job has been almost strictly on a personal basis, although I pretty much only use Travis…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Chef?

Chef is priced based on the number of nodes.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

How does Tekton compare with Jenkins?

When you are evaluating tools for automating your own GitOps-based CI/CD workflow, it is important to keep your requirements and use cases in mind. Tekton deployment is complex and it is not very e...

See all answers

What do you like most about Jenkins?

Jenkins has been instrumental in automating our build and deployment processes.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Jenkins?

Jenkins is open source and free to use. You simply download it, install it on your server, and it manages your pipelines.

See all answers

Comparisons

AWS Systems Manager vs Chef

Compared 20% of the time

BigFix vs Chef

Compared 17% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Compared 15% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Chef

Compared 13% of the time

More Chef Competitors

GitLab vs Jenkins

Compared 17% of the time

Bamboo vs Jenkins

Compared 15% of the time

Harness vs Jenkins

Compared 10% of the time

AWS CodePipeline vs Jenkins

Compared 9% of the time

Bazel vs Jenkins

Compared 8% of the time

More Jenkins Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

November 2024

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Jenkins

October 2024

Download Jenkins product report

Learn More

Chef

Jenkins

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.

Jenkins is an award-winning application that monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron.

Sample Customers

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

Airial, Clarus Financial Technology, cubetutor, Metawidget, mysocio, namma, silverpeas, Sokkva, So Rave, tagzbox

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Jenkins

October 2024

Free Report: Chef vs. Jenkins

Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. Jenkins and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.

DOWNLOAD NOW

814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Chef vs. Jenkins report.

See our list of best Build Automation vendors.

We monitor all Build Automation 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.