AWS Amplify vs Chef comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Progress Software are both solutions in the Release Automation category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #5 with an average rating of 7.0, while Progress Software is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 2.0% mindshare in RA, compared to Progress Software’s 1.5% mindshare. Additionally, 71% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Progress Software users who would recommend it.

AWS Amplify

Read 7 AWS Amplify reviews

735 Views
735 Comparison Views

71% willing to recommend

Chef

Read 25 Chef reviews

1,342 Views
349 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

AWS Amplify

Chef

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 7, 2025

Chef and AWS Amplify are tools in the application management and deployment category. AWS Amplify appears to have the upper hand due to its ease of use and seamless integration with AWS services.

Features: Chef offers automation capabilities, infrastructure as code, and integration with multiple cloud platforms. AWS Amplify provides swift deployment, comprehensive libraries for frontend frameworks, and backend support, including AI integration.

Room for Improvement: Chef could improve ease of use and reduce complexity in setup and operation. Better GUI interfaces and more comprehensive beginner guides would help. AWS Amplify could enhance its local development experience and expand offline capabilities. Providing more detailed customization options and extending support for more non-AWS environments would be beneficial.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Chef requires a steeper learning curve due to its complex setup but offers comprehensive control. AWS Amplify facilitates a user-friendly deployment model with the advantage of AWS's extensive support network and documentation.

Pricing and ROI: Chef may involve higher upfront costs due to its customization needs, offering significant ROI through scalable automation. AWS Amplify uses a pay-as-you-go model, aligning costs with usage and providing faster ROI through reduced time to market.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Amplify vs. Chef Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AWS Amplify vs. Chef

December 2025

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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

AWS Amplify

Ranking in Release Automation

5th

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Chef

Ranking in Release Automation

11th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Build Automation (18th), Configuration Management (18th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Release Automation category, the mindshare of AWS Amplify is 2.0%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Chef is 1.5%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Release Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Chef	1.5%
AWS Amplify	2.0%
Other	96.5%

Release Automation

Featured Reviews

Shrihari Haridas

DevOps Engineer at Burns & McDonnell

Amplify CLI acts as a single source of truth

The Amplify CLI acts as a single source of truth. You install the SDK from there, and using the Amplify API, you can talk to and manage AWS services directly from your code. You don't need to go to the GUI and click through menus - everything is manageable through the Amplify API at the code level. AWS Amplify integrates seamlessly with other services through AWS CloudFormation. Amplify first connects to the cloud for me. Whenever we write down the SDK, it's managed by CloudFormation. CloudFormation still happens on our cloud for your application because everything is updated with the help of cloud automation. Anything we need to change, we just add it to Amplify, and Amplify triggers the CloudFormation templates. Then it logs permission, updates the whole thing, or whatever you need it to ask.

Read full review

Walter Ochieng Odhiambo

Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom

Automation has transformed daily infrastructure work and now frees teams to focus on new challenges

One thing that Chef needs to improve on is making it available in as many languages as possible. There should be a focus on how to make it understandable, not just to infrastructure people, but also to those working in monitoring. How can we ensure that it is part of their daily input? That is something that still has a small missing link. We are almost there, but it can help us achieve outcomes in the future in terms of objectives, not just workflows and visibility. How can we make real-time interactive dashboards more available? Look at what kind of tools can be integrated with them, not just working with the ones like Chef Kitchen and Habitat, but trying to make it even more flexible than what we have right now. On support, I think there should be more focus on how we can achieve AI automations in answering questions for beginners and addressing deep concerns without general manual management.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I didn't host my application but have used their backend as a service. It was a complete package with authentication, AWS AppSync, DynamoDB, and GraphQL. AWS Amplify is great if you don't know backend development and don't want to struggle with other backend services like MongoDB. You don't have to worry about what backend language or database to use. If you're confused, enroll with AWS Amplify. I also recommend Google Firebase for similar purposes."

"One of the things I like best about AWS Amplify is its ease of use and strong integration with other AWS services, which enhances efficiency."

"The link with Figma is very nice. You can create your design in Figma, and then you can import it into AWS Amplify and use it. You can link it to your data source and data bindings."

"Typically, whenever we make changes and need to switch environments (e.g., dev to production), it's easy for our developers to maintain the state of each environment and make customizations as needed. They don't necessarily need to involve the cloud team for basic management."

"The only tricky part I experienced was during the initial installation. I followed the documentation, but it wasn't working for some reason. I had to modify some local files in the CLI-generated folder to get it to work. I had to dig deep to find the issue, and it wasn't mentioned in the docs. So, some issues could be better highlighted in the AWS CLI documentation, which would help developers integrate other services more easily. AWS needs to improve its support."

"The most valuable feature of AWS Amplify is authentication."

"The most valuable feature is user management, which includes authentication and authorization."

"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."

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

"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."

"Chef has impacted my organization positively by ensuring that consistent deployments across production and test environments help more effective testing and faster deployments mean that more work can be done in one release cycle."

"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."

"It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."

"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."

"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."

More Chef pros

Cons

"I like AWS Amplify's documentation. It's comprehensive and includes many examples, so you don't need to ask for help much - you can refer to the docs. It's easy to use. I also appreciate the cost structure. You only pay for what you use. For example, if you use 100 GB, you're charged for that, but if you don't use it, you pay the maintenance cost."

"AWS can implement multiple web applications, and cross-platform applications, like iOS."

"AWS Amplify could improve in the deployment. It would be beneficial to have more methods, such as automation."

"AWS Amplify can be improved in some areas, particularly in providing more robust documentation and easier customization options."

"I don't think there are major issues, but there is room for improvement in the UI/UX of AWS Amplify. The UI still needs to be more polished and user-friendly. It's currently a bit like drag-and-drop initially, but there should be more options to customize the UI based on our needs."

"Its capability to handle big projects needs to be improved. If you generate a user interface in Figma and import everything where all components are in one directory, currently, it is complicated. It isn't able to cope with that. For small projects, it is not an issue, but if you have big projects and you want to use AWS Amplify, then it gets more difficult. That is the most important point for me. It should be improved to cope better with bigger projects."

"The documentation needs improvement, as it is not user-friendly and can be challenging for novices."

"Another area needing attention is better error messages, as we have found that Chef errors can sometimes be vague or too low-level to understand."

"The time that it takes in terms of integration. Cloud integration is comparatively easy, but when it comes to two-link based integrations - like trying to integrate it with any monitoring tools, or maybe some other ticketing tools - it takes longer. That is because most of the out-of-the-box integration of the APIs needs some revisiting."

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

"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."

"One thing that Chef needs to improve on is making it available in as many languages as possible."

"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."

"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 only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."

More Chef cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing depends on what your use case is and whether you're an existing AWS customer. It's a pay-as-you-go model, so not expensive."

"When you're just starting, it is free. You have to pay only when you reach a certain amount of usage. I'm still at the early stage. So, I don't have to pay a lot. At the moment, it is not too expensive for me. It is worth the money."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

"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."

"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

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Construction Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	1

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	19

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about AWS Amplify?

Typically, whenever we make changes and need to switch environments (e.g., dev to production), it's easy for our developers to maintain the state of each environment and make customizations as need...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Amplify?

I find the pricing of AWS Amplify reasonable, considering the value it provides, although opinions may vary based on usage.

See all answers

What needs improvement with AWS Amplify?

AWS Amplify can be improved in some areas, particularly in providing more robust documentation and easier customization options.

See all answers

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 would add that Ruby is a domain-specific language in the Chef dialect, which is a learning curve, but so is Terraform and so is Ansible. The only feedback would be if they could come up with an i...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Chef?

My main use case for Chef is configuration and deployments. We receive blank servers and use Chef to build predefined application or appliance servers. A quick specific example of how I use Chef to...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 21% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

AWS Amplify

December 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Chef

December 2025

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Overview

AWS Amplify is a set of purpose-built tools and features that lets frontend web and mobile developers quickly and easily build full-stack applications on AWS, with the flexibility to leverage the breadth of AWS services as your use cases evolve. With Amplify, you can configure a web or mobile app backend, connect your app in minutes, visually build a web frontend UI, and easily manage app content outside the AWS console. Ship faster and scale effortlessly—with no cloud expertise needed.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Chef, is the leader in DevOps, driving collaboration through code to automate infrastructure, security, compliance and applications. Chef provides a single path to production making it faster and safer to add value to applications and meet the demands of the customer. Deployed broadly in production by the Global 5000 and used by more than half of the Fortune 500, Chef develops 100 percent of its software as open source under the Apache 2.0 license with no restrictions on its use. Chef Enterprise Automation Stack™, a commercial distribution, is developed solely from that open source code and unifies security, compliance, infrastructure and application automation with observability. Chef provides an unequaled developer experience for the Coded Enterprise by enabling users to express infrastructure, security policies and the application lifecycle as code, modernizing development, packaging and delivery of any application to any platform. For more information, visit http://chef.io and follow @chef.

Progress Software

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers

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

Buyer's Guide

AWS Amplify vs. Chef

December 2025

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