AWS CodeBuild vs Chef comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Progress Software are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.1, while Progress Software is ranked #20 with an average rating of 7.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 1.3% mindshare in BA, compared to Progress Software’s 0.6% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Progress Software users who would recommend it.

AWS CodeBuild

Read 12 AWS CodeBuild reviews

525 Views
525 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Chef

Read 19 Chef reviews

1,314 Views
276 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

AWS CodeBuild

Chef

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Chef and AWS CodeBuild serve as competitive products within the domain of software automation and CI/CD pipelines. AWS CodeBuild seems to have the upper hand due to its seamless integration with AWS services and scalability benefits.

Features: Chef provides robust configuration management, advanced automation capabilities, and support for various platforms. AWS CodeBuild offers seamless integration with AWS services, automatic scaling, and full CI/CD integration.

Room for Improvement: Chef can improve by simplifying the deployment process, reducing the need for manual scripting, and enhancing support for AWS environments. AWS CodeBuild could enhance its feature set with more support for non-AWS environments, increase visibility in logging, and improve the flexibility of customization.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Chef’s deployment process may require more manual configuration and scripting expertise. In contrast, AWS CodeBuild provides an easy deployment experience with smooth integration into AWS environments. Chef offers comprehensive documentation and community support, whereas AWS CodeBuild benefits from AWS’s extensive customer service infrastructure.

Pricing and ROI: Chef involves upfront costs and may require specialized training, yet it can offer cost efficiencies in large-scale automation projects. AWS CodeBuild operates on a pay-as-you-go pricing model, providing immediate scalability and a higher ROI, especially for projects integrated within the AWS infrastructure.

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

Buyer's Guide

AWS CodeBuild vs. Chef

July 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 CodeBuild

Ranking in Build Automation

9th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

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

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

DevOps Engineer at Paydoh

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.

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Aaron P

DevOps Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution provides good integrations."

"CodeBuild supports various platforms and coding."

"The initial setup of CodeBuild is easy."

"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."

"The integration with other AWS services has streamlined our workflow."

"The integration is a good feature."

"It works seamlessly with AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR)."

"The integration is a good feature."

More AWS CodeBuild pros

"If you're handy enough with DSL and you can present your own front-facing interface to your developers, then you can actually have a lot more granular control with Chef in operations over what developers can perform and what they can't."

"The most valuable feature is automation."

"The product is useful for automating processes."

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

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

"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."

"The scalability of the product is quite nice."

"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."

More Chef pros

Cons

"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."

"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."

"While working on building images for multiple applications within a single script, I encountered an issue where looping functionality was not supported as expected."

"The front-end interface and the management are somewhat challenging, and there's a lot of space for improvement."

"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."

"There have been times when CodeBuild has shown some instability, like bugs or breakdowns."

"They can further improve the integration of the Bitbucket for CodeBuild."

"The deployment fails sometimes."

More AWS CodeBuild cons

"I would also like to see more analytics and reporting features. Currently, the analytics and reporting features are limited. I'll have to start building my own custom solution with Power BI or Tableau or something like that. If it came with built-in analytics and reporting features that would be great."

"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."

"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."

"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."

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

"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."

"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 AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."

More Chef cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"Despite the cost, it is worth the investment."

"We pay a monthly licensing fee."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Media Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

16%

University

Retailer

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).

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Chef?

Chef is priced based on the number of nodes.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

Comparisons

GitHub Actions vs AWS CodeBuild

Compared 41% of the time

Jenkins vs AWS CodeBuild

Compared 23% of the time

GitLab vs AWS CodeBuild

Compared 22% of the time

AWS CodePipeline vs AWS CodeBuild

Compared 15% of the time

More AWS CodeBuild Competitors

BigFix vs Chef

Compared 45% of the time

AWS Systems Manager vs Chef

Compared 13% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Chef

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Compared 8% of the time

More Chef Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

AWS CodeBuild

July 2025

Download AWS CodeBuild product report

Buyer's Guide

Chef

July 2025

Download Chef product report

Also Known As

CodeBuild

No data available

Overview

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy. With CodeBuild, you don’t need to provision, manage, and scale your own build servers. CodeBuild scales continuously and processes multiple builds concurrently, so your builds are not left waiting in a queue. You can get started quickly by using prepackaged build environments, or you can create custom build environments that use your own build tools. With CodeBuild, you are charged by the minute for the compute resources you use.

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 CodeBuild vs. Chef

July 2025

Free Report: AWS CodeBuild vs. Chef

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