We performed a comparison between Chef and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Configuration Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The Autopilot feature is fantastic. It is a Microsoft product, so it deals best with Microsoft operating systems, but it can integrate with iOS, Mac OS, Linux, and Android."
"It is helpful for managing devices anytime and any place without requiring dependency on the local networks."
"The standout features of Intune are its excellent mobile device management and highly effective application management capabilities."
"We have one MDM that works with Windows, iOS, and Android."
"The feature I like the most is that we can perform remote tasks. If we want to retire or wipe out personal data or corporate data from a device, we can use Microsoft Intune remotely, and with the click of a button, data is removed automatically. Nothing needs to be done from the end-user side."
"The most valuable includes managing everything from a single console."
"Intune's feature that I have found most valuable is its auto-pilot feature."
"The tool's most valuable feature is Autopilot."
"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 most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."
"Automation is everything. Having so many servers in production, many of our processes won't work nor scale. So, we look for tools to help us automate the process, and Chef is one of them."
"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."
"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"Managing our inventory is a big pain point. Right now, we have Satellite, but we can tie it in with Satellite, so we can actually manage things and automate the entire deployment stack, instead of trying to grab things from tickets, then generating Kickstart, and using that to get things in Satellite. That doesn't work well. We can do the whole deployment stack using the inventory share between Tower and Satellite."
"The solution is very simple to use."
"One of the most valuable features is automation. We are doing automation infrastructure, which allows us to automate regular tasks. This solution provides us with a service catalog, like building new services and automating daily tasks."
"Feature-wise, the solution is a good open-source software offering broad support. Also, it's reliable."
"This solution allows us to stitch a lot of different parts of the workflow together."
"The solution is capable of integrating with many applications and devices in comparison to BigFix."
"The Organizations feature, where I can give clear silos and hand them over to different teams, that's amazing; everybody says that it's their own Tower. It's like they have their own Tower out there."
"Installing it is a PIP command. So, it's pretty easy. It is a one liner."
"The mobile and tablet-based versions need improvement because they are not completely user-friendly, compared to the web version. Also, data synchronization with our existing asset manager, the synchronization between multiple assets and multiple devices, takes a lot of time due to the security scanning. It should be reduced."
"There should be more focus on mobile device security and integration."
"It just doesn't handle software updates well at all by itself. You need to be a scripting wizard to make those happen properly, or you use third-party tools. The Windows feature updates are very difficult to implement. I would like to see a proprietary built-in remote control tool. I know that they have Team Viewer integrated, but it is not seamless. It would be nice if they had a seamless remote desktop capability directly from the Intune console."
"There are items that require improvements. One is the controls from iOS."
"There is no catalog for mobile access management (MAM) security."
"Lacking in features such as Wi-Fi and network security."
"We would like to see support for Chrome and/or devices for Chromebooks."
"Onboarding of endpoint devices is not straightforward. The onboarding process was a little heavier than I thought it would be. That's the key improvement area. Obviously, the more control you have over the devices, the better it is."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."
"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."
"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."
"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"We are not using the Dashboard a lot because we have higher expectations from it. The default Dashboard from Tower doesn't give that much information. We really want to get down into more than if the job succeeded or what was the percentage of success. We want to get down to task-level success. If, in a job, there are ten tasks, we want to see this task was a success, and this was not, and how many were not. That's the kind of granularity we are looking for, that Tower does not give right now."
"If we have a problem with some file and we need to get Red Hat to analyze the issue and the file is 100GBs, we'll have an issue since we need to provide a log file for them to analyze. If it is around 12GB or 13GB, we can easily upload it to the Red Hat portal. With more than 100GBs, it will fail. I heard it should cover up to 250GB for an upload, however, I find it fails. Therefore, Red Hat needs to provide a way to handle this."
"What I'm trying to figure out, personally, is, when doing mass updates, how I can parallelize that a little bit better. It seems right now - and maybe, it's a shortcoming on my end - that I run through one set of servers, and then another set of servers, ad then another set of servers, but it seems like I could throw a lot of these checks out. Different types of servers, like web servers and DB servers, if I could parallelize that a little bit to make everything run a little bit more efficiently, that would help."
"It is a little slow on the network side because every time you call a module, it's initiating an SSH or an API call to a network device, and it just slows things down."
"The solution must be made easier to configure."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is not the best at server provisioning. Terraform is better."
"On the Dashboard, when you view a template run, it shows all the output. There is a search filter, but it would be nice to able to select one server in that run and then see all that output from just that one server, instead of having to do the search on that one server and find the results."
"The solution is slightly expensive, and its pricing could be improved."
More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
Chef is ranked 16th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 58 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6. 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 Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Capable of broad integrations with easy-to-operate infrastructure and user controls". Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager and Nolio Release Automation, whereas Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, Microsoft Configuration Manager, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps and BMC TrueSight Server Automation. See our Chef vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform report.
See our list of best Configuration Management vendors and best Release Automation vendors.
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