Chef vs Jenkins comparison

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Chef

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Chef and Jenkins are both solutions in the automation domain, typically viewed as complementary. Jenkins appears to have an upper hand due to its feature robustness.

Features: Chef offers significant flexibility in infrastructure automation, focusing on easy configuration management and system operation simplification. Jenkins is recognized for its expansive plugin ecosystem, which facilitates diverse integrations and supports continuous integration along with automation pipeline capabilities. Chef offers powerful functionalities tailored for managing infrastructure, while Jenkins supports multiple programming languages with ease.

Room for Improvement: Chef could improve its integration and inventory management to be more streamlined like other market options, enhance rollback processes during deployment, and better support for smaller-scale operations. Jenkins, while robust, would benefit from modernizing its default UI, improving handling of YAML manifesting and GitOps, and enhancing clarity in documentation for new users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Jenkins provides a straightforward deployment model backed by a large community. It tends to be favored for ease of implementation in CI processes. Chef demands more infrastructure knowledge for deployment but offers more personalized customer assistance. Jenkins’ community-driven support contrasts with Chef’s dedicated service, which adds value in complex infrastructure setups.

Pricing and ROI: Chef generally involves higher initial setup costs but offers substantial ROI for complex infrastructure management. Jenkins, as an open-source solution, reduces initial investment thanks to its strong community support. Although Chef may justify its pricing with comprehensive assistance in managing infrastructure, Jenkins presents cost-efficient benefits by minimizing expenses from its user community.

To learn more, read our detailed Chef vs. Jenkins Report (Updated: February 2026).

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Chef vs. Jenkins

February 2026

Helped 881,360 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

12th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Release Automation (5th), Configuration Management (12th)

Jenkins

Ranking in Build Automation

4th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 1.9%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 7.2%, down from 11.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Jenkins	7.2%
Chef	1.9%
Other	90.9%

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

Walter Ochieng Odhiambo

Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom

Automation has transformed daily infrastructure work and now frees teams to focus on new challenges

One thing that Chef needs to improve on is making it available in as many languages as possible. There should be a focus on how to make it understandable, not just to infrastructure people, but also to those working in monitoring. How can we ensure that it is part of their daily input? That is something that still has a small missing link. We are almost there, but it can help us achieve outcomes in the future in terms of objectives, not just workflows and visibility. How can we make real-time interactive dashboards more available? Look at what kind of tools can be integrated with them, not just working with the ones like Chef Kitchen and Habitat, but trying to make it even more flexible than what we have right now. On support, I think there should be more focus on how we can achieve AI automations in answering questions for beginners and addressing deep concerns without general manual management.

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Jamshaid I

Principal Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Efficient resource allocation and robust workflow with autoscaling capabilities

In Kubernetes, we use node-based architecture with nodes and pods and follow practices like RBAC and rollback. Multiple pods can run concurrently. We benefit from Kubernetes' ability to autoscale pods and use horizontal pod autoscalers to adjust the number of pods based on metrics like CPU or memory usage, ensuring efficient resource allocation and stability under load.

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

"Chef offers valuable features in infrastructure as code, where it uses cookbooks and recipes written in Ruby language for detailed and flexible configuration of systems and applications."

"Chef benefited my organization by definitely reducing time because we were provisioning tens of thousands of servers."

"The scalability of the product is quite nice."

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

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

"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."

"Chef has given us an easy time doing all that automation, security, and monitoring by automating the processes across all those servers so that we don't do manual work, going one place at a time to install updates."

More Chef pros

"The most valuable features of Jenkins are the integration of automatic scripts for testing and the user's ability to use any script."

"It has a lot of community posts and support."

"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 is very customizable."

"I am not aware of the available options in the market right now compared to Jenkins, but I am pretty much happy with the service that Jenkins is providing our company."

"I like that you can find a wide range of plugins for Jenkins."

"When we have manual tasks, we have to depend on multiple technical teams. With Jenkins, we can bring all the technologies together by the click of a button. We can see results without having to depend on different teams. Jenkins makes life easy for the database and DevOps teams."

"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."

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 learning curve is steep due to Chef's Ruby-based DSL and the complex components of cookbooks and recipes, which can be challenging for new users, especially those without programming backgrounds."

"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."

"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."

"Chef has a very steep learning curve, especially for beginners."

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

"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."

More Chef cons

"Jenkins could improve by allowing more scripting languages. We need to use Groovy scripting and it is difficult to debug and it is not ideal for creating file scripts. We tried to search for assistance but we did not find much help."

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

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

"Jenkins takes a long time to create archive files."

"The user interface could be improved, and its reporting capabilities need enhancement. The plugins could be more effective."

"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."

"We would like to see the addition of mobile simulators support to this solution, as part of its open-source offering. We currently have to carry out manual testing for these platforms."

"UI is quite outdated."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing for Chef is high."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"We are using the free version of Jenkins. There is not a license required to use the solution because it is open-source."

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

"Jenkins is an open-source tool."

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

"Jenkins is not expensive and reasonably priced."

"It is an open source."

"The pricing for Jenkins is free."

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

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Retailer

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	19

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	28
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	56

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Chef?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that we sidestepped it by using Cinc because none of the functionality that is exclusive to the paid version was actually in use in the orga...

What needs improvement with Chef?

I would add that Ruby is a domain-specific language in the Chef dialect, which is a learning curve, but so is Terraform and so is Ansible. The only feedback would be if they could come up with an i...

What is your primary use case for Chef?

My main use case for Chef is configuration and deployments. We receive blank servers and use Chef to build predefined application or appliance servers. A quick specific example of how I use Chef to...

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...

What do you like most about Jenkins?

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

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.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

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Product Reports

Download Chef product report

Chef

January 2026

Download Jenkins product report

January 2026

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.

Progress Software

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

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