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 8.1. Chef holds a 0.5% mindshare in BA, compared to Jenkins’s 11.0% 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

284 Views
182 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Jenkins

Read 93 Jenkins reviews

4,563 Views
3,948 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: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Jenkins

January 2025

Download the complete report

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

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)

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 February 2025, 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 11.0%, down from 14.2% 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

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

Dinesh-Patil

Consultant at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

A highly-scalable and stable solution that reduces deployment time and produces a significant return on investment

The dashboard needs to be improved. Though the access management and authentication functionalities are present, the dashboard and UI could be more user-friendly. The product has many plug-ins. Users have to go through the documentation to be able to use the product. The UI must be more user-friendly. The information should be available in the dashboard itself. The users shouldn’t have to refer to the documentation. When a user hovers over the elements on the dashboard, it should reveal information about them.

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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 product is useful for automating processes."

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

More Chef pros

"Jenkins is a CI/CD tool and is the most robust tool."

"The deployment of traditional Jenkins is easy."

"We use Jenkins to automatically build Python binaries into several OS's i.e. OS X, Ubuntu, Windows 32-bit and Windows 64-bit."

"Jenkins is very easy to use."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is its integration between different tools."

"Jenkins' most valuable feature is Pipeline."

"I can install Jenkins for integration from multiple developers and automate application delivery, staging, and production environments."

"We have started to integrate Pipelines as a part of a build, and built a library of common functions. It simplified and made our build scripts more readable."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

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

"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."

"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."

"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."

"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."

"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."

"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."

More Chef cons

"And I don't care too much for the Jenkins user interface. It's not that user-friendly compared to other solutions available right now. It's not a great user experience. You can do just fine if you are a techie, but it would take a novice some time to learn it and get things done."

"Jenkins could simplify the user interface a little bit because it sometimes creates too many features cramped in the UI."

"The solution could improve by having more advanced integrations."

"The documentation is not helpful, as it is not user-friendly."

"The scriptwriting process could be improved in this solution in the future."

"This solution would be improved with the inclusion of an Artifactory (Universal artifact repository manager)."

"The UI of Jenkins could improve."

"Logging could be improved to offer a clearer view."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"Pricing for Chef is high."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

"Jenkins is a free solution, it is open source."

"The pricing for Jenkins is free."

"It is an open source."

"Jenkins is an open-source platform."

"We are using the free version of Jenkins. There are no costs or licensing."

"There is no cost. It is open source."

"Jenkins is an open-source tool."

"It is a cheap solution."

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

838,640 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

23%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

University

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 used in many companies to save money, especially within R&D divisions, by avoiding the expenses of proprietary tools.

See all answers

Comparisons

BigFix vs Chef

Compared 25% of the time

AWS Systems Manager vs Chef

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

BMC TrueSight Server Automation vs Chef

Compared 7% of the time

More Chef Competitors

GitLab vs Jenkins

Compared 16% of the time

Harness vs Jenkins

Compared 13% of the time

Bamboo vs Jenkins

Compared 11% of the time

Bazel vs Jenkins

Compared 9% of the time

AWS CodePipeline vs Jenkins

Compared 7% of the time

More Jenkins Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

February 2025

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Jenkins

February 2025

Download Jenkins product report

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.

Chef

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

Jenkins

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

January 2025

Free Report: Chef vs. Jenkins

Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. Jenkins and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

838,640 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.