Chef vs UrbanCode Deploy comparison

Chef and IBM are both solutions in the Release Automation category. Chef is ranked #6 with an average rating of 7.0, while IBM is ranked #11. Chef holds a 0.9% mindshare in RA, compared to IBM’s 4.3% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Chef users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Chef

Read 19 Chef reviews

470 Views
303 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

UrbanCode Deploy

Read 27 UrbanCode Deploy reviews

2,792 Views
1,247 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Chef

UrbanCode Deploy

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 7, 2025

Chef and UrbanCode Deploy compete in the DevOps automation tools arena. Chef is popular for its pricing and support, while UrbanCode Deploy is favored for its comprehensive feature set that many users feel justifies its cost.

Features: Chef provides strong infrastructure automation, configuration management, and integration capabilities, enabling it to manage complex tasks efficiently and support infrastructure as code. UrbanCode Deploy excels in deployment automation, advanced release management, and seamless application delivery with extensive integration capabilities, making it ideal for complex environments.

Room for Improvement: Chef could enhance deployment capabilities and rollback support, improve ease of use, and further develop its community support. UrbanCode Deploy might benefit from simplifying its learning curve, expanding its documentation for new users, and offering more flexibility in pricing for various enterprise sizes.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Chef offers quick deployment and flexible infrastructure management, ideal for rapid iterations and varying environments. UrbanCode Deploy features a detailed deployment model suitable for enterprises needing intricate release processes, with strong customer service and comprehensive documentation, catering to complex enterprise deployment scenarios.

Pricing and ROI: Chef is known for its cost-effective solutions with low initial setup costs and efficient infrastructure automation maximizing ROI. UrbanCode Deploy, though more expensive, offers significant ROI for extensive deployment infrastructures with feature-rich offerings that justify the investment for those prioritizing advanced deployment automation.

To learn more, read our detailed Chef vs. UrbanCode Deploy Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. UrbanCode Deploy

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 Release Automation

6th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Build Automation (17th), Configuration Management (17th)

UrbanCode Deploy

Ranking in Release Automation

11th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Release Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 0.9%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of UrbanCode Deploy is 4.3%, up from 4.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Release 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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it_user587571

Solution Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

It offers OOTB plugins for middleware.

By standardizing the automated deployment application process, reducing the amount of errors due to manual steps and by providing visibility into the release cycles of various teams/applications, we've improved our global efficiency by at least 25% and still counting, since we've only used the product for a short period of time.

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 product is useful for automating processes."

"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 its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."

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

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

"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."

"I wanted to monitor a hybrid cloud environment, one using AWS and Azure. If I have to provision/orchestrate between multiple cloud platforms, I can use Chef as a one-stop solution, to broker between those cloud platforms and orchestrate around them, rather than going directly into each of the cloud-vendors' consoles."

"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

"The most valuable feature is the snapshot functionality, which allows us to access previous versions of the artifacts."

"Stable solution that's good for automating the CI/CD pipeline: from development to production."

"The solution handles complex deployments very efficiently."

"The most valuable functionality is the ability to define the deployment process, schedule the deployment and automatically execute the deployments to different environments."

"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."

"The stability is good. I haven't experienced any issues."

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."

"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."

"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."

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

"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."

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

"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."

More Chef cons

"The scalability of this application needs improvement. Changes and variations in the application become bottlenecks as they need to be more seamless and comfortable."

"I would like to see more reporting for container architecture."

"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."

"The interface allows access in a number of ways but that can be confusing."

"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 technical support of the solution could definitely be improved as PMRs take long to resolve."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

"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."

"Considering COVID-19, the price is too high."

"The cost of the solution is high but it offers great ROI."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

University

Educational Organization

68%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

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

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Comparisons

BigFix vs Chef

Compared 27% of the time

AWS Systems Manager vs Chef

Compared 16% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Chef

Compared 15% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Compared 13% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 11% of the time

More Chef Competitors

GitLab vs UrbanCode Deploy

Compared 30% of the time

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs UrbanCode Deploy

Compared 19% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs UrbanCode Deploy

Compared 18% of the time

Octopus Deploy vs UrbanCode Deploy

Compared 9% of the time

BMC Release Lifecycle Management vs UrbanCode Deploy

Compared 8% of the time

More UrbanCode Deploy Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

February 2025

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

UrbanCode Deploy

January 2025

Download UrbanCode Deploy product report

Also Known As

No data available

uDeploy

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

IBM UrbanCode Deploy orchestrates and automates the deployment of applications, middleware configuration, and database changes into development, test, and production environments—local, dedicated or shared cloud environments—accelerating time to market and reducing cost by shrinking manual efforts from days to minutes with automation, while reducing risk by cutting deployment errors by up to 90 percent.

IBM

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.

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. UrbanCode Deploy

January 2025

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