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Chef vs UrbanCode Deploy comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Chef
Ranking in Release Automation
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (17th), Configuration Management (17th)
UrbanCode Deploy
Ranking in Release Automation
12th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Release Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 0.8%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of UrbanCode Deploy is 3.9%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Release Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Arun S . - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
reviewer887301 - PeerSpot reviewer
Versatile solution with the powerful functionality to automate the execution of deployments
The technical support of the solution could definitely be improved as PMRs take a long to resolve. The cost of the solution is high. It would be good to have the support of public cloud services like Azure. My team has also had some concerns around security when using this solution.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The scalability of the product is quite nice."
"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."
"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."
"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 product is useful for automating processes."
"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."
"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."
"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."
"The most valuable functionality is the ability to define the deployment process, schedule the deployment and automatically execute the deployments to different environments."
"The solution handles complex deployments very efficiently."
"The most valuable feature is the snapshot functionality, which allows us to access previous versions of the artifacts."
"The stability is good. I haven't experienced any issues."
"Stable solution that's good for automating the CI/CD pipeline: from development to production."
"It is very easy to make a software release. It used to take us at least a couple of hours to make a release, now we went to production with a new one last night. This new release took me five minutes."
 

Cons

"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"The interface allows access in a number of ways but that can be confusing."
"The technical support of the solution could definitely be improved as PMRs take long to resolve."
"I certainly would like to have a better way to pass information between deployment steps using UrbanCode Deploy because that's really difficult to do."
"I would like to see more reporting for container architecture."
"I would like to have the agent up and running at all times, as opposed to only while it is in the DevOps pipeline."
"The scalability of this application needs improvement. Changes and variations in the application become bottlenecks as they need to be more seamless and comfortable."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Chef is priced based on the number of nodes."
"Considering COVID-19, the price is too high."
"The cost of the solution is high but it offers great ROI."
"The licensing fees for this solution are based on the number of servers that are being deployed and the number of agents that you have."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Retailer
6%
Educational Organization
66%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Insurance Company
5%
Computer Software Company
3%
 

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.
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.
Ask a question
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Also Known As

No data available
uDeploy
 

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap
As policy, IBM does not release customer names on non-IBM web sites.  However, public DevOps and UrbanCode Deploy case studies can be found here. IBM's UrbanCode Deploy customers span Small-Medium Businesses to Fortune 500 companies across all industries worldwide.
Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. UrbanCode Deploy and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
824,067 professionals have used our research since 2012.