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."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 valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."
"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."
"The most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."
"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."
"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."
"The product is useful for automating processes."
"GitHub linking is pretty good. We have a deployment application where we can run our tests and add various variables to be passed as assertions to those tests. This is pretty fluid with Jenkins."
"We are using the open-source version and there is a lot of plugins and features that are available and it works on agents for free. In other solutions, it will cost extra to use them with the agent."
"Jenkins is very stable."
"Jenkins has been instrumental in automating our build and deployment processes."
"Jenkins has built good plugins and has a good security platform."
"Jenkins optimizes the CI/CD process, enhances automation, and ensures efficiency and management of our build and deployment pipeline."
"The simplicity of Jenkins and the evolving ecosystem of Jenkins are most valuable. Today, you do not have to write a pipeline from scratch. The library functionality of Jenkins helps you to bring all those in ready-made, and you also get the best practices for them. That is a great feature of Jenkins, and that is why it is being used significantly."
"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."
"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."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."
"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."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."
"Jenkins could simplify the user interface a little bit because it sometimes creates too many features cramped in the UI."
"I think an integrated help button, that respected the context of the change/work in hand, would be a worthwhile improvement."
"The disadvantage of Jenkins is writing Groovy scripts. There are other CI tools where you do not need to write this many scripts to manage and deploy."
"It would be better if there were an option to remove its Java dependency. This would make it more compatible with other software, and it could be much better. At present, we have to depend on Java whenever we want to deploy agents."
"I would like to see even more integrations included in the next release."
"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 solution could improve by having more advanced integrations."
"The enterprise version is less stable than the open-source version."
Chef is ranked 15th in Build Automation with 18 reviews while Jenkins is ranked 2nd in Build Automation with 83 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while Jenkins is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Chef writes "Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Jenkins writes "A highly-scalable and stable solution that reduces deployment time and produces a significant return on investment". Chef is most compared with AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager, SaltStack and BigFix, whereas Jenkins is most compared with GitLab, Bamboo, AWS CodePipeline, IBM Rational Build Forge and AWS CodeBuild. See our Chef vs. Jenkins report.
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