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 3.3% mindshare in CM, compared to Perforce’s 3.7% 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: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Perforce Puppet

February 2026

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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 February 2026, in the Configuration Management category, the mindshare of Microsoft Intune is 7.4%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Chef is 3.3%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Perforce Puppet is 3.7%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Configuration Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Microsoft Intune	7.4%
Chef	3.3%
Perforce Puppet	3.7%
Other	85.6%

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.

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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 ease of applying security policies to applications we deploy is the most valuable feature of Microsoft Intune."

"Comparing this to having an endpoint management solution, the efficiency gain may be up to 80%."

"Intune can wipe devices. For example, if a disgruntled employee wants to leak the data on their company phone, Intune can terminate their access and wipe the entire device with a click."

"We work completely in a Microsoft environment. Its interface is similar to other Microsoft solutions that we are using such as Microsoft Defender. So far, for our administrators, it is easy to use."

"Intune device restriction policies enable me to enforce limitations on the device, like blocking the mobile camera or restricting the employees from using and inserting USB devices, including thumb drives and flash drives."

"Microsoft Intune does help me save time in terms of management of various devices—I don't have to go to those locations to manage the devices at those locations, I can do it remotely, which is very helpful."

"Autopilot is the most valuable feature."

"The most valuable feature is Intune's ability to push out updates for the security and antivirus. I also like Intune's copilot and the ability to automate processes. For example, if you have 5,000 employees who are issued new PCs and you need to set them up with everything they need."

More Microsoft Intune pros

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."

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

"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."

More Chef pros

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

"Puppet Enterprise is a stable solution."

"The versatility is great."

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

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

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

"Puppet Enterprise has good functionalities."

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

More Perforce Puppet pros

Cons

"The time we have to wait to deploy policies has room for improvement."

"There are a lot of updates coming from Microsoft that suddenly affect our security policies."

"The security features should be improved."

"There is no catalog for mobile access management (MAM) security."

"Microsoft Intune could enhance its patch management for various devices, ensuring regular updates and tracking of device privileges."

"The scalability could be improved, and like most other MDM products, Intune is good but not 100% there yet."

"Microsoft Intune's app deployment presents challenges for non-MSI and non-store apps, particularly EXEs, requiring the use of a Win32 wrapper tool and adding overhead to the process."

"I would like to see the ability to deploy custom packages as a Windows 64-bit package, as opposed to the Windows 32-bit, which is the only one available now."

More Microsoft Intune cons

"Another area needing attention is better error messages, as we have found that Chef errors can sometimes be vague or too low-level to understand."

"It is an old technology."

"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."

"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."

"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."

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

"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."

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

More Chef cons

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cost is not my department, but the product is included in the E5 license that we already pay for every user, so no additional cost is incurred."

"Intune is cost-effective as it is included in some of the Office 365 packages."

"I am satisfied with the pricing."

"If you're subscribing to Premium or E3, there are no additional costs for Intune, it's included."

"Microsoft Intune's costliness stems from licensing fees and the overhead associated with its management, user experience, and device remediation."

"While Microsoft charges for actual usage, it lacks discount options."

"The pricing for Microsoft Intune is reasonable. Our clients are satisfied."

"With one user base license, we can use Intune for up to five devices. However, with Soti MobiControl, each license is tied to a single device, meaning one license is dedicated to one device only."

More Microsoft Intune pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

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

"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."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

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

"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."

"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."

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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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Retailer

Comms Service Provider

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Outsourcing Company

Marketing Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	122
Midsize Enterprise	48
Large Enterprise	160

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

Jamf Pro vs Microsoft Intune

Compared 10% of the time

IBM MaaS360 vs Microsoft Intune

Compared 8% 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

Microsoft Entra ID vs Microsoft Intune

Compared 5% of the time

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BigFix vs Chef

Compared 12% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 7% of the time

Jenkins vs Chef

Compared 6% of the time

AWS CloudFormation vs Chef

Compared 6% of the time

Red Hat Satellite vs Chef

Compared 4% of the time

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AWS Systems Manager vs Perforce Puppet

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Perforce Puppet

Compared 12% of the time

Red Hat Satellite vs Perforce Puppet

Compared 8% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Perforce Puppet

Compared 7% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Perforce Puppet

Compared 7% of the time

More Perforce Puppet Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Intune

January 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Chef

February 2026

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Perforce Puppet

January 2026

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

February 2026

Free Report: Chef vs. Perforce Puppet

Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. Perforce Puppet and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.

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