Chef vs Perforce Puppet comparison

Progress Software and Perforce are both solutions in the Configuration Management category. Progress Software is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.3, while Perforce is ranked #16 with an average rating of 8.0. Progress Software holds a 2.8% mindshare in CM, compared to Perforce’s 2.9% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Progress Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Perforce users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 21, 2025

Puppet and Chef compete in the configuration management category. Chef appears to have the upper hand in feature richness and long-term value, while Puppet is favored for pricing and support.

Features: Puppet features cross-platform management, robust reporting tools, and a wide array of pre-built configurations, making it suitable for diverse environments. Chef, however, offers flexibility, scalability, and seamless management of complex infrastructures, appealing to larger organizations. Chef's use of Ruby and its integration capabilities are highlighted for automating detailed configuration workflows.

Room for Improvement: Puppet could benefit from enhanced automation capabilities and reducing complexity in large-scale deployments. Improving the learning curve and integration with cloud platforms might also add value. Chef could focus on easing the initial setup process and simplifying its automated deployment model, while also enhancing rollback functionalities and resource utilization efficiency.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Puppet is known for its quick setup and strong support framework, offering detailed documentation and a dedicated support team. Chef provides highly automated deployment with scalability but requires a steeper learning curve initially. Its active community and comprehensive support resources help balance initial complexities over time.

Pricing and ROI: Puppet offers competitive pricing with an appealing initial setup cost, providing quick ROI for small to mid-sized projects, attracting budget-conscious organizations. Chef's higher upfront costs demonstrate a solid ROI in complex deployments due to its extensive feature set, making it a worthwhile investment for large-scale operations.

To learn more, read our detailed Chef vs. Perforce Puppet Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Perforce Puppet

December 2025

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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

Microsoft Intune

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Configuration Management category, the mindshare of Microsoft Intune is 8.2%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Chef is 2.8%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Perforce Puppet is 2.9%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Configuration Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Microsoft Intune	8.2%
Chef	2.8%
Perforce Puppet	2.9%
Other	86.1%

Configuration Management

Featured Reviews

AkashKamble

Sr MacOS specialist engineer at Cyber24

Enables management of multiple operating systems with a single license

The best feature is that it's a Microsoft product, so if anything goes wrong, we get quick support for anything required. Remote system functionality allows us to sit anywhere and take control of any device via remote management. We can enhance security for clients' laptops with built-in Microsoft Defender, which is available with the Microsoft Intune license. We use it for reporting purposes through endpoint analytics. When pushing scripting, there are two types available: remediation script and reservation script. Through endpoint analytics, you can push defender policies to clients. It helps with reporting, inventory updates, and monitoring tenant status health.

Read full review

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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reviewer2284542

Business Development Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Automated configuration management ensures consistent server setups

The strength of Puppet is in automated configuration management. We can configure a server once and set rules with Puppet so that future server configurations are automatic and consistent with company requests. Puppet is declarative, meaning it finds the best state for itself and corrects any deviations in the configuration.

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

"The most valuable feature is that we can manage workstations or Android devices remotely without needing the device to be connected to our local network."

"Intune's integration with Defender and other security solutions is valuable because it offers a view into different security vulnerabilities and enables us to secure them more effectively."

"Intune's integration with Microsoft 365 is exceptional."

"It works pretty well for us."

"It has a useful device management feature."

"It is a cloud solution, and you can easily scale as your needs grow."

"The device profiling which uses the official Outlook email enabled us to control the screenshot feature and prevent copying outside of the organization's application."

"What I appreciate most about Microsoft Intune is that we can manage multiple devices simultaneously in a single frame of time, and I can manage everything remotely from anywhere."

More Microsoft Intune 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."

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

"Chef has impacted my organization positively by ensuring that consistent deployments across production and test environments help more effective testing and faster deployments mean that more work can be done in one release cycle."

"If you're handy enough with DSL and you can present your own front-facing interface to your developers, then you can actually have a lot more granular control with Chef in operations over what developers can perform and what they can't."

"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."

"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."

"The scalability of the product is quite nice."

"Using Chef for automating infrastructure and applications in my organization has helped us reduce manual tasks by more than forty percent, thereby saving significant revenue for the client."

More Chef pros

"Puppet3 and 4 series provides optimum deployment solutions for infrastructure and applications."

"Puppet Enterprise is a stable solution."

"Puppet Enterprise has reduced the time of production changes or environment changes."

"The agent-based feature helps me by being stable."

"Anything that we manage through Puppet always runs perfectly."

"The versatility is great."

"The main purpose for this automation tool would be: deploying, controlling, ordering change for the system and IT Infrastructure."

"The most valuable features are the agent, high load balancing, and overall robustness and features."

More Perforce Puppet pros

Cons

"Enrollment into the Microsoft Intune service can still get easier, especially for legacy-managed systems, such as how we get it from a GPO or an SCCM configuration into Intune."

"There can be delays in the deployment of new policies."

"There are a couple of issues with stability."

"We haven't really gone through all the features of Intune. We are just discovering them. Every day, we see a new feature that we want to apply, but what will be great for Intune is to be able to deploy apps in a simple fashion. We should be able to easily install various apps on the Windows platform, iOS, and Android. Currently, we have to write some scripts. It's not as straightforward as we would like it to be. It should be simplified so that we can do it just with three clicks—next, next, finish—without needing to write a script."

"Microsoft Intune has potential for improvement; I would like to see a lot more customization in the reporting tools."

"Manually syncing devices to enforce policies is cumbersome."

"Microsoft Intune has potential for improvement; I would like to see a lot more customization in the reporting tools."

"In terms of the admin experience, it is straightforward, but the Windows enrollment experience could be improved. Sometimes, for enrollment, we have to reset devices and re-enroll them."

More Microsoft Intune cons

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

"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."

"One thing that Chef needs to improve on is making it available in as many languages as possible."

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

"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."

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

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

"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."

More Chef cons

"Puppet Enterprise is more complex and difficult to configure."

"At the beginning the initial setup was kind of complex."

"Puppet Enterprise should improve the general extensibility for places where they can't install it."

"The solution has really complex code, you have to understand the Ruby language. However, once you know the code then you can move ahead without any problems."

"It's a bit of a pain point to make sure that everything works once we've upgraded it because Puppet has been evolving pretty fast."

"Clients with less technical expertise may find Puppet complex to configure. Our team may struggle if technical team members leave the organization, leaving others uncertain about using the tool."

"We would like Puppet to add more integration for applications."

"There's a lot of scope for enhancement on the DevSecOps side. They should definitely include features for compliance, for both the Linux and Windows side of the devices, as well as for network devices. Compliance is something they need to work on."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Intune is moderately expensive. You can get the license bundled with Office 365 E3 or E5 licenses. The E5s are a bit expensive, but you get some cheaper solutions with Intune."

"I don't have any problem as far as cost is concerned. It is bundled with our license."

"We use Defender ATP and E5 licenses."

"The purchase of the product was handled by someone else."

"If you're ever going to buy an Office 365 environment, then pricing is reasonable given all that it does, but if you're not, then you might find the pricing expensive."

"Its price is quite okay. I wish they provide certain additional features with the same license."

"The clients pay for a license and each can have a different type of license, such as an E3 or E5."

"There is a license needed for this solution and it is either included in one of the enterprise license agreements. Microsoft licensing is a mathematical institute, it could be quite complex. We tend to ask specialized organizations to research what the most profitable way it would be for us to use licenses in the organizations."

More Microsoft Intune pricing and cost advice

"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."

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

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

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

"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

"Puppet Enterprise can be an expensive solution for smaller businesses."

"The main thing that we noticed when we switched from the enterprise version to the community version was the difference in cost — the infrastructure is pretty expensive."

"Puppet Enterprise’s pricing is competitive."

"Depending on the size of the organization there is a point when the price of Puppet Enterprise should be lower. However, they provide really good functionality, features, and capabilities."

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Comparison Review

it_user185772

Senior Software Architect with 5,001-10,000 employees

Oct 27, 2015

Docker v. CFEngine v. Puppet Data Center Automation v. Chef v. Ansible

Originally posted at http://technologyconversations.com/2015/08/26/configuration-management-in-the-docker-world/ Anyone managing more than a few servers can confirm that doing such a task manually is a waste of time and risky. Configuration management (CM) exists for a long time and there is no…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Outsourcing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	117
Midsize Enterprise	46
Large Enterprise	152

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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	10
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	4

Questions from the Community

How does Microsoft Intune compare with VMware Workspace One?

Microsoft Intune is a great tool for managing a mobile device fleet while keeping access control. The solution makes ...

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What are the pros and cons of Microsoft Intune?

Microsoft Intune is a great configuration management tool and has a lot of good things going for it. Here are some of...

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How does Google Cloud Identity compare with Microsoft Intune?

Microsoft Intune offers not only an easy-to-deploy data protection and productivity management solution, but also ...

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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 fun...

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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 Terrafo...

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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...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Puppet Enterprise?

Regarding the cost, I find it expensive, always. I don't know how much the license would cost per year or per user ap...

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What needs improvement with Puppet Enterprise?

I don't know what could be improved in Perforce Puppet to make this tool better for the next release. I can't think o...

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What is your primary use case for Puppet Enterprise?

My main use case for Perforce Puppet is for configuration management.

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 10% of the time

Workspace ONE UEM vs Microsoft Intune

Compared 8% of the time

ManageEngine Endpoint Central vs Microsoft Intune

Compared 6% of the time

IBM MaaS360 vs Microsoft Intune

Compared 6% of the time

Microsoft Entra ID vs Microsoft Intune

Compared 5% of the time

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BigFix vs Chef

Compared 20% of the time

AWS CloudFormation vs Chef

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Compared 7% of the time

BMC TrueSight Server Automation vs Chef

Compared 4% of the time

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AWS Systems Manager vs Perforce Puppet

Compared 18% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Perforce Puppet

Compared 17% of the time

Red Hat Satellite vs Perforce Puppet

Compared 12% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Perforce Puppet

Compared 9% of the time

BigFix vs Perforce Puppet

Compared 5% of the time

More Perforce Puppet Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Intune

December 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Chef

December 2025

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Perforce Puppet

December 2025

Download Perforce Puppet product report

Also Known As

Intune, MS Intune, Microsoft Endpoint Manager

No data available

Puppet

Overview

Microsoft Intune provides centralized management of mobile devices and applications, ensuring security, compliance, and productivity through integration with Microsoft services like Microsoft 365 and Azure Active Directory.

Organizations use Intune for managing mobile devices and applications, enhancing security and compliance across platforms. With features like single sign-on, conditional access, and zero-touch deployment via Autopilot, it facilitates efficient operations. Intune's scalability, easy enrollment, and capabilities such as remote wipe support diverse device management, offering robust data protection and efficient operation. Despite its features, improvement areas include reporting, compatibility with non-Microsoft devices, and better support for macOS and Linux devices.

What are the key features of Microsoft Intune?

Seamless Integration: Works with Microsoft 365, Azure Active Directory, and System Center for streamlined management.
Conditional Access: Enhances security with policies that restrict access based on conditions.
Autopilot: Provides zero-touch deployment for setting up new devices efficiently.
Mobile Device Management: Enables control over both personal and corporate devices.
Application Deployment: Facilitates app delivery across a range of devices.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Centralized Management: Reduces complexity by managing devices and applications in one place.
Security Enhancement: Protects data with features like remote wipe and compliance monitoring.
Improved Productivity: Enhances efficiency with seamless integration and automation features.
Device Scalability: Supports diverse device management for growing business needs.

In industries such as finance, healthcare, and education, Microsoft Intune is implemented to ensure secure and compliant device management. Companies leverage its capabilities to deploy security policies and manage both corporate-owned and BYOD environments, facilitating a unified approach to data protection and compliance.

Microsoft

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

Perforce Puppet provides robust features for configuration management, compatible with Linux, Windows, and UNIX. It simplifies infrastructure management with automation and role-based access control, though it requires mastering command-line operations due to limited GUI.

Perforce Puppet utilizes a hub-spoke architecture to enhance automation across production environments, excelling in provisioning and configuration management for on-prem servers. Its infrastructure as code approach eases deployment and maintenance, supported by community resources for stabilization. Support for diverse devices makes it adaptable for complex configurations, but pricing and integration gaps, especially with Infosec tools, pose challenges for some.

What are the key features of Perforce Puppet?

Remote Package Installation: Centralized server management for remote installations
File Management: Streamlined file operations from a single point
Infrastructure as Code: Simplifies infrastructure maintenance
Scalability: Grows with organizational demands
Role-Based Access Control: Ensures secure user management
Device State Control: Efficient device integration and configuration

What benefits should users expect?

Automation Efficiency: Reduces manual tasks with hub-spoke architecture
Versatility: Supports multiple operating systems
Community Support: Backed by a stable and organized community
Configuration Simplicity: Simplifies and streamlines setup processes

Puppet is implemented across industries for managing production servers, especially in regulated environments. Its security compliance checks ensure adherence to required standards, while public configurations assist in device network integration. Industries benefit from its ability to streamline Linux server automation and explore expansion into Windows systems to meet cross-platform requirements.

Perforce

Sample Customers

Mitchells and Buzzers, Callaway

Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap

Los Alamos National Laboratory, GitHub, IP Commerce, Cedexis, Spiceworks, Server Density, Swisstopo, Chockstone, Constant Contact, NICS, Citrix

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Perforce Puppet

December 2025

Free Report: Chef vs. Perforce Puppet

Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. Perforce Puppet and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.

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