Chef vs Jenkins comparison

Chef and Jenkins are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Chef is ranked #17 with an average rating of 7.0, while Jenkins is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.1. Chef holds a 0.4% 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

302 Views
191 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Jenkins

Read 93 Jenkins reviews

4,766 Views
4,121 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Chef

Jenkins

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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

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Helped 831,158 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

17th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Release Automation (6th), 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 January 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 0.4%, down from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 11.3%, down from 14.3% 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.

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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.

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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

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

"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."

"Stable and scalable configuration management and automation tool. Installing it is easy. Its most valuable feature is its compliance, e.g. it's very good."

"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."

"I wanted to monitor a hybrid cloud environment, one using AWS and Azure. If I have to provision/orchestrate between multiple cloud platforms, I can use Chef as a one-stop solution, to broker between those cloud platforms and orchestrate around them, rather than going directly into each of the cloud-vendors' consoles."

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

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

More Chef pros

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

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

"With Jenkins, the pipeline will take your code from any versioning system like GitHub or Bitbucket. All the security scans can happen in one go and then all the tests also get run. You can just build one container in it and deploy it."

"The most valuable feature of Jenkins is its open source."

"It is a stable solution."

"The most valuable aspect of Jenkins is pipeline customization. Jenkins provides a declarative pipeline as well as a scripted pipeline. The scripted pipeline uses a programming language. You can customize it to your needs, so we use Jenkins because other solutions like Travis and Spinnaker don't allow much customization."

"Distributed execution of build and test jobs."

"We really appreciate that this solution is plug and play. When coding in the version control system, this product completes the build process automatically."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

"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 agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

More Chef cons

"Jenkins could improve in areas related to Kubernetes and Docker container integration, like machine allocation of nodes and Marshaling integration improvements."

"Sometimes, random errors of metadata are not there, which causes delays. These are essentially gaps in the information being passed to the job."

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

"The UI of Jenkins could improve."

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

"Its schedule builds need improvement. It should have scheduling features in the platform rather than using external plug-ins."

"The user interface could be updated a little."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

"Jenkins is a free open-source server."

"Jenkins is not expensive and reasonably priced."

"Jenkins is open source."

"The solution is open source."

"It could be cheaper because there are many solutions available in the market. We are paying yearly."

"It is a cheap solution."

"In our company, we do pay for the licensing of the solution."

"Jenkins is an open-source tool."

More Jenkins pricing and cost advice

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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…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

16%

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

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Compared 25% of the time

AWS Systems Manager vs Chef

Compared 18% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Chef

Compared 14% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Compared 13% of the time

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GitLab vs Jenkins

Compared 16% of the time

Harness vs Jenkins

Compared 12% of the time

Bamboo vs Jenkins

Compared 12% of the time

Bazel vs Jenkins

Compared 9% of the time

AWS CodePipeline vs Jenkins

Compared 8% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

January 2025

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Jenkins

January 2025

Download Jenkins product report

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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

January 2025

Free Report: Chef vs. Jenkins

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