We performed a comparison between Chef and Jenkins 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."The scalability of the product is quite nice."
"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 recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"The most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."
"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."
"Stable and scalable configuration management and automation tool. Installing it is easy. Its most valuable feature is its compliance, e.g. it's very good."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"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 is very useful for us to be able to collect and manage automatic processing pipelines."
"With Jenkins, the pipeline will take your code from any versioning system like GitHub or Bitbucket. All the security scans can happen in one go and then all the tests also get run. You can just build one container in it and deploy it."
"It's very easy to learn."
"Having builds and test tasks triggered on commit helps not to break the product."
"It is a stable solution."
"We used it for all continuous integration parts, like automation testing, deployment, etc."
"The auto-schedule feature is valuable. Another valuable feature is that Jenkins does not trigger a build when there is no change in any of the systems. Jenkins also supports most of the open-source plug-ins."
"We really appreciate that this solution is plug and play. When coding in the version control system, this product completes the build process automatically."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"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."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."
"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."
"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."
"The learning curve is quite steep at the moment."
"This solution would be improved with the inclusion of an Artifactory (Universal artifact repository manager)."
"Logging could be improved to offer a clearer view."
"We cannot change the ownership of any directory or file or any kind of directory."
"Jenkins can be improved, but it's difficult for me to explain. The initial setup could be more straightforward. If you connect Jenkins with bookings and lockouts, it can be challenging."
"Better and easy-to-use integration with Docker would be an improvement."
"And I don't care too much for the Jenkins user interface. It's not that user-friendly compared to other solutions available right now. It's not a great user experience. You can do just fine if you are a techie, but it would take a novice some time to learn it and get things done."
"The documentation could be more friendly, and more examples of how to use it."
Chef is ranked 15th in Build Automation with 18 reviews while Jenkins is ranked 2nd in Build Automation with 83 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while Jenkins is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Chef writes "Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Jenkins writes "A highly-scalable and stable solution that reduces deployment time and produces a significant return on investment". Chef is most compared with AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager, SaltStack and BigFix, whereas Jenkins is most compared with GitLab, Bamboo, AWS CodePipeline, IBM Rational Build Forge and AWS CodeBuild. See our Chef vs. Jenkins report.
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