Chef vs Tekton comparison

Chef and Google are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Chef is ranked #16 with an average rating of 7.0, while Google is ranked #2 with an average rating of 7.7. Chef holds a 0.5% mindshare in BA, compared to Google’s 12.0% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Chef users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of Google users who would recommend it.

Chef

Read 19 Chef reviews

284 Views
182 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Tekton

Read 36 Tekton reviews

5,445 Views
3,352 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Chef

Tekton

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Chef and Tekton 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. Tekton Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Tekton

January 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

Chef

Ranking in Build Automation

16th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Release Automation (6th), Configuration Management (16th)

Tekton

Ranking in Build Automation

2nd

Average Rating

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 0.5%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tekton is 12.0%, up from 10.3% 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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AjayKrishna

Senior Software Engineer at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

If you're dealing with many applications and need a reliable, scalable, and efficient system, I'd recommend this solution

Tekton's most important feature is its cloud-native nature. Unlike Jenkins, which may not scale as efficiently, Tekton's CI pipeline can automatically scale up to handle increased workload demands without needing manual adjustments. Another important aspect is the level of customization offered by Tekton. Each task in the CI pipeline can be customized independently, allowing developers to write code in various languages like shell scripting, Java, or Python and incorporate them into the pipeline as needed. This level of abstraction and customization greatly benefits developers in creating efficient CI pipelines. Also, it can be challenging to understand the logs and troubleshoot issues without clear guidance. It's not always easy to reach technical support and get immediate answers. In my opinion, improvement in this area would be beneficial.

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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

"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."

"This solution has improved my organization in the way that deployment has become very quick and orchestration is easy. If we have thousands of servers we can easily deploy in a small amount of time. We can deploy the applications or any kind of announcements in much less time."

"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."

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

"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."

"Manual deployments came to a halt completely. Server provisioning became lightning fast. Chef-docker enabled us to have fewer sets of source code for different purposes. Configuration management was a breeze and all the servers were as good as immutable servers."

"The product is useful for automating processes."

More Chef pros

"The feature that I like most about Tekton is that it is built for Kubernetes, so we can utilize our resources effectively."

"The most valuable features of Tekton include the reusability of tasks, the clean UI interface, and the binding of services and secrets."

"It scales automatically based on the number of tasks or pipelines running, which is efficient and effective for our development needs."

"Tekton's most important feature is its cloud-native nature. Unlike Jenkins, which may not scale as efficiently, Tekton's CI pipeline can automatically scale up to handle increased workload demands without needing manual adjustments."

"The 'promote' feature is beneficial as it simplifies deployment processes by allowing easy promotion of applications to different environments without needing to re-run CI/CD processes."

"You can isolate most Tekton assets in the Kubernetes namespace for your feature branch. This allows you to freely change Tekton assets and objects to adapt to your feature branch and requirements."

"Tekton is an orchestrator. It provides seamless integration for our pipelines. It offers robust support for executing tasks within the pipeline, allowing us to set up and run pipelines quickly."

"Tekton has a user interface that facilitates time savings, making it more user-friendly than Jenkins."

More Tekton pros

Cons

"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."

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

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

"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."

"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."

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

"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."

"I would rate this solution a nine because our use case and whatever we need is there. Ten out of ten is perfect. We have to go to IOD and stuff so they should consider things like this to make it a ten."

More Chef cons

"Initially, working with YAML configuration can be challenging using the solution."

"Tekton should include many features to integrate event-driven pipelines."

"It would be better if Tekton could show the YAML file while it is running, similar to GitHub pipelines, to provide more visibility on what's happening."

"When we started with Tekton around 2021 or early 2022, the community support was somewhat limited, which posed challenges when dealing with issues or debugging. We had to rely on Red Hat OpenShift support to overcome these challenges. However, I believe that these issues will naturally improve over timeas the developer community grows stronger. From a technical perspective, I haven't had the opportunity to deeply evaluate the product end-to-end, especially in the past year or so, when I've been less involved with it."

"The product's UI could be improved, as there are occasional latency issues. The triggering part, especially the CRD installation needs enhancement."

"It tends to occupy a significant amount of disk space on the node, which could potentially pose challenges."

"I'm a bit worried about scaling Tekton from the point of view of big CI/CD processes."

"Tekton lacks integration capabilities compared to other CI/CD tools like Jenkins and Travis."

More Tekton cons

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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

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

More Chef pricing and cost advice

"The product is free of cost."

"The tool is open-source and free to use."

"The solution is open-source."

"The product is free and open-source."

"Tekton is an open-source tool."

"It is entirely open source and free of charge."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

24%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

University

Financial Services Firm

23%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Computer Software Company

12%

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...

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What do you like most about Tekton?

Its seamless integration with Kubernetes, being built on top of it and utilizing Custom Resource Definitions, ensures a smooth experience within Kubernetes environments exclusively.

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What needs improvement with Tekton?

Regarding areas for improvement in Tekton, I have not encountered significant issues. It works well for our use case. However, incorporating AI could be a potential enhancement in the future.

See all answers

Comparisons

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AWS Systems Manager vs Chef

Compared 16% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Chef

Compared 13% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Compared 11% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 10% of the time

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GitHub Actions vs Tekton

Compared 34% of the time

GitLab vs Tekton

Compared 27% of the time

Harness vs Tekton

Compared 7% of the time

Bamboo vs Tekton

Compared 6% of the time

Jenkins vs Tekton

Compared 6% of the time

More Tekton Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

February 2025

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Tekton

January 2025

Download Tekton product report

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.

Chef

Tekton is a powerful yet flexible Kubernetes-native open-source framework for creating continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) systems. It lets you build, test, and deploy across multiple cloud providers or on-premises systems by abstracting away the underlying implementation details.

Google

Sample Customers

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

The Home Depot, PayPal, Target, HSBC, McKesson, Oncology Venture

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Tekton

January 2025

Free Report: Chef vs. Tekton

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