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Automic Automation vs Chef comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.0
Automic Automation boosts efficiency by automating workflows, reducing human interaction, cutting costs, and improving compliance and task alignment.
Sentiment score
8.1
Chef improved deployment time, reduced human error, enhanced scalability, optimized resource use, and strengthened compliance and security management.
Automic Automation has helped reduce workload failure rates by fifty percent.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.1
Automic Automation's support is knowledgeable but inconsistent; transition to Broadcom affected availability, despite positive user feedback on improvements.
Sentiment score
6.1
Customers commend Chef for its responsive support, active community, comprehensive documentation, and efficient issue resolution despite occasional delays.
They react quickly when it is urgent.
They are highly knowledgeable in their product area and very easy to work with.
If you put the tickets in for which you need help right away, they get back to you right away.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
Automic Automation excels in scalability, efficiently managing diverse workloads and environments, with high user satisfaction in performance and flexibility.
Sentiment score
7.8
Chef is highly scalable, efficiently managing infrastructures of all sizes and accommodating numerous clients based on server capacity.
We have small clients running a thousand tasks per day and big enterprises running one million or two million tasks per day.
The solution effectively supports our existing user base and is equipped to scale further.
It does not perform real-time scalability in our environment, but because of the way we have built it, it can scale well past any thresholds with no issues.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Automic Automation provides reliable stability with minimal disruptions, high user ratings, and quick resolution of issues in well-tuned environments.
Sentiment score
7.7
Users rate Chef's stability 8-9/10, comparing it favorably to competitors like Ansible, and find it stable for various use cases.
The stability of the solution is excellent.
In a well-tuned environment, it runs very smoothly.
So far, I have not encountered any issues related to instability such as lagging, crashing, or downtime.
 

Room For Improvement

Users seek improved reporting, stability, UI, compatibility, and documentation in Automic Automation, citing complexity and integration challenges.
Chef needs better support, pricing, role management, flexibility, documentation, integration, and improved automation to compete with Ansible.
It does not work as well for activities that require real-time input/output, but it works very well for batch, ETL, or similar cases.
Pricing is a major issue for some clients due to changes in Broadcom's pricing model, causing some to seek alternative solutions.
A feature that provides a dependency chart or tree diagram would be very helpful.
 

Setup Cost

Automic Automation's pricing flexibility is praised, yet Broadcom's licensing model and rising costs prompt consideration of alternatives.
Chef offers subscription plans with valuable automation features, but enterprise pricing is high and requires contacting sales for quotes.
Broadcom decided to change the way of licensing by moving to the number of jobs runs and then they say that clients have to pay three million because they run one million jobs per day.
Due to the increased pricing, some of them are thinking of reducing tasks in Automic to have fewer executions.
The pricing has been increasing significantly over the years, raising operational costs instead of reducing them.
 

Valuable Features

Automic Automation offers a user-friendly interface, cross-platform integration, robust scalability, and flexible workflow automation with real-time notifications.
Chef offers compliance, easy configuration management, and automation for IT infrastructure, integrating with CI processes and supporting multiple clouds.
A standout feature is the comprehensive versioning, allowing easy rollback to previous states.
Designing workflows is made easier by the graphical user interface, simplifying complex tasks.
It supports high availability by operating multiple servers concurrently, which means users do not experience outages or the need to log in again, even if some servers are updated.
 

Categories and Ranking

Automic Automation
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
103
Ranking in other categories
Workload Automation (2nd)
Chef
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (20th), Release Automation (11th), Configuration Management (18th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Automic Automation and Chef aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Automic Automation is designed for Workload Automation and holds a mindshare of 7.2%, up 6.1% compared to last year.
Chef, on the other hand, focuses on Configuration Management, holds 1.7% mindshare, up 1.4% since last year.
Workload Automation
Configuration Management
 

Featured Reviews

Peter Grundler - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps to move away from manual tasks and offers wide platform support and web-based interface
Customers want to move away from manual monitoring and checking processes. Automating these processes helps in time-saving and reduces human error. When you automate business processes, it reduces mistakes. It eliminates the risk of manual errors such as typos. There is a 20% to 30% reduction in human error. It fulfills all the needs when it comes to visibility and control across various operating platforms. It is the perfect product for managing processes that span multiple operating platforms. Automic Automation has the widest platform support compared to other products, such as Control-M, Tivoli from IBM, or Stonebranch. It definitely helps with compliance processes. We have had a lot of customers for two years with a focus on compliance, and it works. They were successful. Due to the fact that our customers can automate a lot of things, it reduces operating costs. It is hard to give a number because the savings are different for each customer. If a customer never had any automation, there could be about 80% savings after implementing Automic Automation, whereas for a customer who already has automated tasks, the difference will be less by adding Automic Automation. They might see 5% to 10% more savings. Automic Automation helps improve our ability to meet SLAs. In the recent versions, SLA management has been integrated, which previously was an external component. Because a lot of customers used it and asked Broadcom to implement SLA management into the workload engine, Broadcom included it. We see more and more customers running their SLA management via the Automic Automation product.
Aaron  P - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation
In terms of improvement, Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation. There is also an issue with shared resources like cookbooks lacking context, which could lead to problems when multiple companies use them. Chef should aim for wider availability, better flexibility, clearer documentation, and improved management of shared resources to prevent conflicts. Many companies are now moving to Ansible, so I would recommend better documentation, easier customer use, and simpler integration. I have concerns about the complexity of migrating to different servers and would prefer a simpler process.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Computer Software Company
12%
Insurance Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
17%
University
6%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Automic Workload Automation?
It is easy to manage complex workloads and use electronic workflow automation.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Automic Workload Automation?
The pricing was client-wise, but they are changing it to execution-wise pricing. So, we are in negotiation.
What needs improvement with Automic Workload Automation?
The support and knowledge of incident management could be enhanced. There have been unresolved issues persisting for years, affecting customer satisfaction. Improvement is needed in both the respon...
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.
 

Also Known As

Automic Dollar Universe
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Adidas, 84.51, ESB
Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC, Broadcom, Redwood Software and others in Workload Automation. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.