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AWS CodeBuild vs Chef comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

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 CodeBuild
Ranking in Build Automation
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Chef
Ranking in Build Automation
20th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Release Automation (11th), Configuration Management (18th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of AWS CodeBuild is 1.3%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Chef is 0.6%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Mahadev Metre - PeerSpot reviewer
Integration with diverse environments boosts productivity and automation
AWS CodeBuild's support for a wide range of programming languages and build environments benefits development teams significantly in terms of productivity and ease of use. There are extensive libraries of code structures available, making it a universal pipeline. All programming languages I have worked with are supported in AWS CodeBuild, eliminating the need for alternative deployment services. The service supports iOS builds, Kotlin, Java, NodeJS, and ReactJS. AWS has made it accessible to all languages, allowing developers to simply open the console and trigger builds. AWS manages all the background server operations for building or deploying code. For standard builds such as ReactJS or Java, a Linux or Ubuntu server suffices. AWS provides its own operating system for these purposes. For builds requiring physical servers, such as Apple macOS server, AWS rents Mac minis specifically for iOS and SwiftUI builds. While this incurs higher charges, it demonstrates AWS's commitment to providing comprehensive solutions for all use cases.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"One of the main features I value in CodeBuild compared to previous experiences, like using Jenkins, is its ability to handle tasks automatically with AWS, requiring only proper setup of the check file."
"The initial setup of CodeBuild is easy."
"The tool is used to build and test code. I find its biggest advantages are elasticity and reliability. We can easily assign as many computing resources as needed to build our code, which is much simpler than traditional methods that require server upgrades. It's a serverless tool, so it's very flexible and elastic."
"The integration is a good feature."
"CodeBuild supports various platforms and coding."
"A valuable feature is the support for third-party repositories such as Bitbucket, GitLab, or GitHub."
"It works seamlessly with AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR)."
"The most important thing is that it's self-contained in an AWS account, and it's all linked to the customer's AWS account."
"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."
"Stable and scalable configuration management and automation tool. Installing it is easy. Its most valuable feature is its compliance, e.g. it's very good."
"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."
"Chef can be scaled as needed. The Chef server itself can scale but it depends on the available resources. You can upgrade specific resources to meet the demand. Similarly, with clients, you can add as many clients as you need. Again, this depends on the server resources. If the server has enough resources, it can handle the number of servers required to manage the infrastructure. Chef can be scaled to meet the needs of the infrastructure being managed."
"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."
"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."
"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 solution is easy to use and learn, and it easily automates all the code and infrastructure."
 

Cons

"They can further improve the integration of the Bitbucket for CodeBuild."
"Multiple clients have faced issues with pricing. After migrating from Azure to EC2, they were unexpectedly charged 100,000 rupees because the pricing details were not clearly visible."
"We had integration issues with a tool called Octopus Deploy while using CodeBuild. AWS support helped us resolve it, however, it could be better."
"While working on building images for multiple applications within a single script, I encountered an issue where looping functionality was not supported as expected."
"There is no persistent storage or preservation of workspace between the builds."
"One of the main challenges is that if the environment is not set up properly, it will result in issues such as image errors."
"For improvement, I'd suggest more build instance-type options. There's a big jump from 15 gigabytes of RAM to 150, and I'd like something in between as the larger option is too expensive for our needs."
"Notifications could be added, or SNS integration could be included so that notifications can be received on every build, whether the build fails or succeeds."
"There appears to be no effort to fix the command line utility functionality, which is definitely broken, provides a false positive for a result when you perform the operation, and doesn't work."
"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."
"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."
"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."
"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."
"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Despite the cost, it is worth the investment."
"We pay a monthly licensing fee."
"AWS CodeBuild is free. We only pay for our code's compute resources during the build process. For example, if our code takes ten minutes to build, we only pay for those ten minutes of computing time. CodeDeploy and CodePipeline are free because they're serverless and don't require computing resources. CodeCommit has minimal costs for storing code."
"Pricing for Chef is high."
"Chef is priced based on the number of nodes."
"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."
"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."
"We are using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Media Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
15%
University
7%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about AWS CodeBuild?
It works seamlessly with AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR).
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS CodeBuild?
Issues with pricing have been mentioned, especially for new clients who might not realize the cost implications initially, such as leaving servers on for too long and incurring unexpectedly high bi...
What needs improvement with AWS CodeBuild?
There is room for improvement in making AWS CodeBuild available on Windows servers in the Mumbai region. Multiple clients have faced issues with pricing. After migrating from Azure ( /products/micr...
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.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

CodeBuild
No data available
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS CodeBuild vs. Chef and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,170 professionals have used our research since 2012.