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 8.0. Chef holds a 0.4% mindshare in BA, compared to Jenkins’s 11.5% 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

301 Views
197 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Jenkins

Read 93 Jenkins reviews

5,015 Views
4,320 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: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Jenkins

December 2024

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Helped 824,053 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

Chef

Ranking in Build Automation

17th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.9

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 December 2024, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 0.4%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 11.5%, down from 14.4% 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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AllenUmlas

Engineer at Etisalat

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

Jenkins is incredibly user-friendly, so I haven't encountered any difficulties using it. It's the only product I've used for automation, but I find it to be very intuitive and effective. Jenkins has been instrumental in automating our build and deployment processes. We're leveraging Jenkins to automate tasks related to Telco, particularly in upgrading the manual orchestration. It's a critical tool for streamlining our operations.

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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

"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."

"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."

"It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."

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

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

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

"The scalability of the product is quite nice."

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

More Chef pros

"It's very useful when you want to automate different processes from beginning to end."

"The initial setup is pretty simple."

"Automation of chores like deployment, frequent manual tasks (like running scripts on test and production systems) reduced the time used and the number of errors made by engineers, freeing them to do meaningful work instead."

"Jenkins is very stable."

"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."

"Very easy to understand for newcomers."

"Has enabled full automation of the company."

"A lot of support material exists via a single web search of exactly what you're looking for."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

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

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

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

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

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

"It is an old technology."

"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."

More Chef cons

"I sometimes face a bottleneck when installing the plugins on an offline machine. Mapping the dependencies and then installing the correct sequence of dependencies is a nightmare, and it took me two days to do it."

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

"The user interface could be updated a little."

"I would like to have an integrated dashboard on top of it and a better UX to look at. The dashboard could be better in terms of integration with other tools. We should be able to have a single pane of glass across all the tools that we use where Jenkins is the pipeline. This can be a very good upgrade to it."

"Jenkins could have better cloud functionality. Currently, we are using the existing legacy model, but we are moving toward the cloud, so it would be great if they could improve in that area. In the future, I would like more cloud features and related training materials, like a video tutorial."

"It would be helpful if they had a bit more interactive UI."

"The product should provide more visualization as to how many pipelines are performing and how many builds are happening. It should also integrate with Kubernetes and OpenShift."

"The major drawback with Jenkins is the lack of support."

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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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

"The solution is one of the lowest costs compared to competitors."

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

"Jenkins is not expensive and reasonably priced."

"Jenkins is an open-source tool."

"It is free."

"The pricing for Jenkins is free."

"Jenkins is open-source, so it is free."

"It is a free product."

More Jenkins pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

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824,053 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…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

15%

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

BigFix vs Chef

Compared 22% 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 12% of the time

More Chef Competitors

GitLab vs Jenkins

Compared 16% of the time

Bamboo vs Jenkins

Compared 14% of the time

Harness vs Jenkins

Compared 11% of the time

Bazel vs Jenkins

Compared 9% of the time

AWS CodePipeline vs Jenkins

Compared 8% of the time

More Jenkins Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

December 2024

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Jenkins

December 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

December 2024

Free Report: Chef vs. Jenkins

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

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