Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] vs Chef comparison

Broadcom and Progress Software are both solutions in the Release Automation category. Additionally, 86% of Broadcom users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Progress Software users who would recommend it.

Automic Continuous Delivery...

Read 13 Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] reviews

86% willing to recommend

Chef

Read 26 Chef reviews

4,001 Views
960 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Automic Continuous Delivery...

Chef

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] and Chef based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, GitLab, Red Hat and others in Release Automation.

To learn more, read our detailed Release Automation Report (Updated: June 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Release Automation

June 2026

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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

Automic Continuous Delivery...

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Chef

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Build Automation (13th), Release Automation (5th), Configuration Management (11th)

Featured Reviews

reviewer895359

Principal Project Engineer at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

Automatic installation for complex deployments and environments, with good workflow support

I like that really complex deployments are possible with it. It's very good. You have everything you need. You can design your workflows for your needs. You can do so much more, it's not just an automatic installation tool. It's a real deployment tool. I can do the complete deployment with everything that is possible.

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G Srivastava

Senior Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Agent setup and complexity have limited automation benefits but have reduced manual patching work

There are other automation tools, configuration management tools in the market, which offer many good functionalities compared to Chef. For Chef, we need to install those agents, the Chef client, on all those nodes. That is another heinous task to perform on those nodes. Compared with other tools, they do not require any agent; they simply push configurations to all the clients. Chef needs to improve on this agent installation on all those nodes. I would say that the agent configuration is required, and we need to manage the workstation, the Chef server, and then the Chef client. These two or three things are very difficult. It is a time-taking task compared with other configuration management tools. They need to compete with other tools, such as Ansible or Terraform. They should work on their agent part. If they can remove the agent installation on the nodes and combine both the Chef server and workstation into one server, that will provide a significant benefit in cost for the clients. They should aim for an agentless architecture rather than an agent-based architecture, which will help other customers. That is a very difficult thing because I have stopped using Chef. If you have very good developers who are skilled in Ruby language and can write codes in the Chef recipe, then those developers should start using Chef.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is a very stable solution and we can rely on pressing a button to perform a full-stack automatic installation that reliably finishes in eight hours instead of a problematic three-week manual installation."

"You can automate everything you want."

"In first pilot run, we achieved five times faster deployment without human work."

"Deployment workflow (WF) can be designed this way, so that it is not necessary to provide all applications (systems) artifacts of which an application consists."

"I would say our headwind, or our time to market, is reduced considerably. We get more consistent results out of it, because you write one time and once it's automated you expect it to behave the same way every time. And it cut down a lot of re-work for us."

"The agents are one of the solution's most valuable features, and I like agents for file transfers so you can transfer the files from agent to agent on the different platforms."

"It can support very complex environments and dependencies."

"The IT process automation is the most valuable aspect of this solution."

More Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] pros

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

"The scalability of the product is quite nice."

"Chef has created much faster procedures for system setup and rollout of infrastructure in my organization, as well as for scaling and ensuring that all servers are configured identically."

"The most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."

"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."

"Using Chef for automating infrastructure and applications in my organization has helped us reduce manual tasks by more than forty percent, thereby saving significant revenue for the client."

"All the Chef enthusiasts who come to us to learn and train improve their skillsets to get jobs."

"I would rate this solution a nine because it's simple, easy to use, more versatile, and most importantly, it can handle the hundred thousand servers at the same time very easily and almost in no time."

More Chef pros

Cons

"If you have a technical problem and need development of the tool, the support team is terrible, because they cannot help with the technical details."

"One of the biggest features I've been asked by my team to put in there is opening more scripting languages to be part of the platform. There is a little bit of a learning curve in learning how to code some of the workflows in Automic at this time. If widely used languages like Perl and Python were integrated, on top of what's already there, the proprietary language, it would make it easier to on-board new resources."

"We're a WebSphere shop so I would like to see more support for WebSphere, only because it's the platform that they seem to want to use the most."

"key thing is support for cloud-based deployment. That is lacking."

"There are some bugs. For example, during the design of a workflow, important information is lost, it vanishes."

"One of the biggest features I've been asked by my team to put in there is opening more scripting languages to be part of the platform."

"There is an issue with the stability in the tool. The process of agent will stop, then the monitoring agent can't be recognized because the process is running, but you can talk with the system."

"File transfer is not very efficient. It takes a bit longer than some other methods and when you send the file from one platform to another, especially from the mainframe, the results consumption is quite high compared to other methods."

More Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] cons

"It is an old technology."

"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."

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

"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."

"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."

"Chef has a very steep learning curve, especially for beginners."

"Other things would be the need to use Cinc if you want to use the open-source version because Progress Software's policy on copyright is confusing for new users and it puts a barrier in the way to adoption because many small, medium enterprises, startups, and non-profits who might want to use Chef would find the whole Cinc versus Chef situation confusing and the fact that there is not an easy path to install Chef and then go to a paid version without having to change from Cinc to Chef or Chef to Cinc."

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

More Chef cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Customers often complain about the price."

"If you have a fixed contract, it has limits to spreading out. If you have a flexible enterprise license contract, then you have a lot of scalability for this tool."

"I can save time and money more quickly."

"We increased our quality and reduced our time costs."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

16%

Comms Service Provider

14%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Marketing Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	9

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	20

Questions from the Community

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Chef?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that we sidestepped it by using Cinc because none of the functionality that is exclusive to the paid version was actually in use in the orga...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Chef?

I do not have anything in mind at this time for how Chef could be improved.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Chef?

My main use case for Chef is configuration management to set up systems, provision software, and keep configurations up to date. I create Chef recipes for setup and install needed software from a c...

See all answers

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Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL]

June 2026

Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] report

Download Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

Chef

June 2026

Download Chef product report

Also Known As

CA Continuous Delivery Automation, Automic Release Automation, Automic ONE Automation, UC4 Automation Platform

No data available

Overview

Deliver apps at pace with agile development and let customer satisfaction soar.

Today, the pressure is on to transform how you deliver applications to market. Get release agility and speed without compromising quality and stability with CA Continuous Delivery Automation. Deliver apps reliably on demand from development through production—mobile to mainframe. Agilely scale as the cadence, volume and complexity of your apps grow. It’s DevOps-ready release management and automation for your dynamic enterprise.

Broadcom

Chef is a powerful automation tool designed for efficient infrastructure management across varied environments. With its environment-as-code model, Chef provides predictability and reliability in deployments, enhancing security compliance and reducing manual intervention.

Chef focuses on automating deployments and configurations, ensuring server consistency, managing scalable environments, and orchestrating service deployments. Its versatile recipe-writing and Ruby-based flexibility cater to large-scale operational needs. Chef’s integration with services like AWS and Azure enhances its versatility, while its idempotent deployments assure reliability. Despite its prowess, Chef requires improvements in feature offerings, especially regarding container orchestration and cloud technologies.

What are Chef's Key Features?

Automation: Streamlines infrastructure management across diverse environments.
Environment-as-Code: Offers predictability and efficiency in management.
Idempotency: Ensures reliable deployments by maintaining the same outcome no matter how often applied.
Cloud Integration: Seamlessly integrates with AWS and Azure.
Security Compliance: Enhances security measures across infrastructures.
Ruby-Based Flexibility: Provides versatile recipe-writing and flexible configurations.
Scalability: Suitable for large-scale operational needs.

What Benefits Should Users Consider?

Consistency: Automated deployments reduce errors and manual efforts.
Efficiency: Decrease in manual intervention enhances team productivity.
Reliability: Idempotent deployments ensure consistent outcomes.
Scalability: Supports expanding infrastructures effectively.
Security: Maintains compliance with enhanced security features.

Chef is implemented across industries to automate application deployments, manage CI/CD pipelines, provision infrastructure, and maintain compliance. Its recipes and cookbooks streamline workflows in application deployment, system updates, and orchestration of services, reducing errors and manual intervention in a variety of sectors.

Progress Software

Sample Customers

BET365, Charter Communications, TASC

Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, GitLab, Red Hat and others in Release Automation. Updated: June 2026.

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