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AWS Config vs Chef comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 16, 2024

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

Microsoft Intune
Sponsored
Ranking in Configuration Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
304
Ranking in other categories
Remote Access (1st), Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) (1st), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (1st)
AWS Config
Ranking in Configuration Management
16th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Chef
Ranking in Configuration Management
19th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (20th), Release Automation (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Configuration Management category, the mindshare of Microsoft Intune is 9.4%, down from 9.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Config is 2.2%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Chef is 2.1%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Configuration Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Microsoft Intune9.4%
AWS Config2.2%
Chef2.1%
Other86.3%
Configuration Management
 

Featured Reviews

AkashKamble - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables management of multiple operating systems with a single license
The best feature is that it's a Microsoft product, so if anything goes wrong, we get quick support for anything required. Remote system functionality allows us to sit anywhere and take control of any device via remote management. We can enhance security for clients' laptops with built-in Microsoft Defender, which is available with the Microsoft Intune license. We use it for reporting purposes through endpoint analytics. When pushing scripting, there are two types available: remediation script and reservation script. Through endpoint analytics, you can push defender policies to clients. It helps with reporting, inventory updates, and monitoring tenant status health.
Dineshkumar Thulasiraman - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful for vulnerability scanning and data encryption
AWS Config's dashboard improved our company's security as it helps with the vulnerability scanning of resources. AWS Config integrates with the existing security infrastructure of our company, and it is an easy process that is not at all complicated. AWS Config is a security product. The tool protects its users' resources and data from unauthorized access, security breaches, and threats. The product helps with data encryption. You can have your data on AWS KMS, which helps with data encryption. For areas like SSL/TLS encryption, the tool offers data protection between AWS services and endpoints. As I need to learn the components of the product, I rate the overall tool a seven out of ten.
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

"The biggest benefits of Intune are the ability to push changes and the added security. When we moved forward with Defender, we onboarded all those machines automatically. That helps dramatically. For a while, we were left with machines that weren't protected. We could see where people had done things they shouldn't have done, and Defender saved our skins a few times. It didn't happen a lot, but it happened enough that it made us glad we made that decision."
"Microsoft Intune is best for Windows devices and security in Office 365 and Microsoft-related enterprise environments. It's a nice platform for endpoint management."
"I like the group policy management feature, which performs application monitoring and device enrollment."
"The best part of Intune is device control. If we need to block a user from opening something in their organization's system, we can do it from Intune. If we want to restrict the movement of an organization's data to prevent users from copying the data into Outlook, WhatsApp, or their personal Gmail, we can limit that via Intune. It secures all corporate data."
"The most valuable feature of Intune is the central dashboard for compliance and policy management."
"It has helped with compliance. It has helped to ensure that devices comply with the organization's policy. If they are not compliant and secure, they cannot access the resources."
"The key benefit of Intune is its integration with the Microsoft ecosystem."
"The most important thing for me is the autopilot feature."
"The initial setup is super easy, it takes like two minutes. Literally a one-click deployment."
"Installing the instances and performing upgrades is smooth and clean."
"AWS Config's dashboard improved our company's security as it helps with the vulnerability scanning of resources."
"The tool protects its users' resources and data from unauthorized access, security breaches, and threats."
"The scalability is a ten out of ten."
"The solution is scalable and provides over 100 rules."
"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."
"Automation is everything. Having so many servers in production, many of our processes won't work nor scale. So, we look for tools to help us automate the process, and Chef is one of them."
"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."
"The scalability of the product is quite nice."
"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."
"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."
"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."
 

Cons

"Microsoft Intune is not as fast and extensive as traditional solutions such as SCCM and others."
"I'm still playing around with it and haven't had any issues with the product yet, but support can definitely be improved."
"When somebody has a customized application or their own company's application, we cannot deploy that application."
"No option to do end-to-en macOS management. Slow implementation of policies."
"Intune should improve its software inventory to provide better metering of which software is used throughout the company. This is especially needed for reporting third-party software solutions."
"I would like to see Intune improve its handling of hybrid domain joins. We continue to experience issues with machines losing their hybrid domain join status."
"Unfortunately, Intune’s management extension does not provide the same level of logging, and I lack the visibility in Intune that I had with SCCM."
"Intune should improve the management of non-Microsoft devices. It would be better to manage Mac, Android, and other non-Microsoft operating system devices within the same Intune interface."
"There is room for improvement in built-in tools, they are not up to the mark."
"The reboot process for AWS instances could be improved. Microsoft Azure does not have this problem, so AWS could consider making their instances more robust. You would not need to reboot your instances frequently to replace the hardware and stuff. They can look for a better approach or mechanism to improve in the future. The concern is that you need to plan for the outage when you reboot an instance. You need to have a maintenance window where you can properly reboot the instance without affecting your application. When Amazon announces that you need to reboot an instance and are not ready, this becomes a problem."
"The solution is missing a configuration that can assist us when writing our programming languages."
"Improvements are needed as per customer requirements."
"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."
"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."
"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."
"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."
"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."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is not expensive."
"Intune is moderately expensive. You can get the license bundled with Office 365 E3 or E5 licenses. The E5s are a bit expensive, but you get some cheaper solutions with Intune."
"Microsoft Intune's pricing is reasonable."
"I don't have any problem as far as cost is concerned. It is bundled with our license."
"Microsoft Intune is not cost-effective as a standalone product."
"It is average. Some of the costs are quite high depending on what the customer currently uses, but overall, it is not bad. I would not say that I would not recommend Intune based on the cost. I definitely would, but they can definitely improve on the cost. So overall, its cost is not bad."
"Intune is included with our F3 and E5 licenses."
"I have no comment on pricing of the solution."
"The solution charges us per hour. There's no license."
"It is a very expensive tool. AWS pricing for Config is not fixed and depends on your organization's size and complexity."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
24%
Photography Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
15%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business116
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise152
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

How does Microsoft Intune compare with VMware Workspace One?
Microsoft Intune is a great tool for managing a mobile device fleet while keeping access control. The solution makes ...
What are the pros and cons of Microsoft Intune?
Microsoft Intune is a great configuration management tool and has a lot of good things going for it. Here are some of...
How does Google Cloud Identity compare with Microsoft Intune?
Microsoft Intune offers not only an easy-to-deploy data protection and productivity management solution, but also ...
What do you like most about AWS Config?
The initial setup is super easy, it takes like two minutes. Literally a one-click deployment.
What needs improvement with AWS Config?
Improvements are needed as per customer requirements.
What is your primary use case for AWS Config?
I use the solution in my company to check the vulnerabilities for all the resources, including tools like S3, EC2 Ins...
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...
 

Also Known As

Intune, MS Intune, Microsoft Endpoint Manager
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Mitchells and Buzzers, Callaway
Flatiron, Prezi, iZettle, British Gas, Burt, Autodesk, FanDuel
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 Config vs. Chef and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.