Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] vs Chef comparison

Why PeerSpot?

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

6,460 Views
1,680 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, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Release Automation.

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Buyer's Guide

Release Automation

November 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 (14th), Release Automation (8th), Configuration Management (8th)

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

"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."

"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."

"It can support very complex environments and dependencies."

"I like that really complex deployments are possible with it."

"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."

"I think on a day-to-day basis, it has increased the capacity to deploy. We don't have to wait for someone to do something."

"You can design your workflows for your needs."

"It provides a wonderful user interface which is easy to use."

More Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] pros

"This solution has improved my organization in the way that deployment has become very quick and orchestration is easy. If we have thousands of servers we can easily deploy in a small amount of time. We can deploy the applications or any kind of announcements in much less time."

"The scalability of the product is quite nice; we have deployed it across six to seven organizations."

"The features are good in Chef, especially its compliance feature; it's very good and it's what I found most valuable in the tool."

"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 product is useful for automating processes."

"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."

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

"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."

More Chef pros

Cons

"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."

"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 hope that we can integrate the new CD Directive into our portfolio, so we can bring the deployment and release management closer together."

"Not a perfect ten because the user interface is brand new and it needs improvement."

"It would be very beneficial for us to see integrations into cloud environments, especially into the Google Cloud environment because we are heading towards cloud."

"Stability-wise I think it still needs to be improved; performance-wise. It crashes from time to time."

"There needs to be better error handling and error descriptions. It should be more clear what the errors are and what we can do to fix them."

"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."

More Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] cons

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

"It is an old technology."

"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."

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

"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."

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

More Chef cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"Customers often complain about the price."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

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

"Chef is priced based on the number of nodes."

"We are using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Outsourcing Company

15%

Construction Company

12%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Healthcare Company

Outsourcing Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

12%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing 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

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Chef?

The licensing cost is zero for Chef if you are using the free version. They have developed other versions, such as SaaS-based and self-managed. For the SaaS-based version, it is $59 per node per ye...

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What needs improvement with Chef?

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What is your primary use case for Chef?

We used Chef, the automation tool, as an Infrastructure as Code tool for configuration deployment, such as deploying patches on numerous servers, first on the development box, then on QA, and then ...

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Comparisons

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Compared 18% of the time

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Compared 15% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL]

Compared 11% of the time

GitLab vs Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL]

Compared 10% of the time

Plutora vs Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL]

Compared 10% of the time

More Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] Competitors

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 9% of the time

Jenkins vs Chef

Compared 7% of the time

AWS CloudFormation vs Chef

Compared 6% of the time

GitHub Actions vs Chef

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Chef

Compared 5% of the time

More Chef Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL]

November 2026

Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] report

Download Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

Chef

November 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, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Release Automation. Updated: November 2026.

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