We performed a comparison between AWS Systems Manager and Chef based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Configuration Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Fortunately, now everything is streamlined into a single, unified platform."
"The best feature is that we don't need to worry about downtime. We don't need to worry about the network connections of our office or the virtual private network. Everything is being done through the internet. Using Intune Autopilot, we can configure and deploy everything to the devices."
"The product has eased the deployment of Microsoft apps to the devices. We can manage it properly. We can control it and push the updates. Another company helped us with the deployment. However, we can do it internally."
"It's easy to deploy a configuration or policy to a system, especially when you don't have Azure AD. Now we are talking to all these small and medium-sized customers who don't necessarily have an on-premise Windows Active Directory. If they have invested in Office 365 Premium, this functionality becomes available to them."
"The policy and compliance monitoring of devices and the software deployment are most valuable."
"The features I found most valuable in Intune are its user visibility and troubleshooting options."
"We have found the solution is capable of scaling."
"The aspects I find most valuable are the managing the data and applications. I can also restrict the users to install any applications. I can also wipe the data if the phone was missplaced or stolen. These are the basics for me."
"The solution is user-friendly"
"The solution's ability to scale is good."
"Systems Manager has a feature where it analyzes the logs and gives us a performance overview in the form of a graph. We know when it's taking up more resources and when there are spikes, so we can predict the usability."
"Has a variety of automation options."
"With AWS Systems Manager, our company can patch our systems directly from it, so we don't need to patch our systems manually."
"When we do the automation in the cloud, we use the SSM agent. This helps us to test our automation and documents, and monitor the cloud."
"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."
"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."
"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 most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"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."
"It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."
"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."
"Additional application deployment options e.g. MSI deployment with more complex parameters or additional side-by-side files, and non-MSI deployment options."
"The solution could improve its flexibility."
"There's quite a lot of development that they can do within their Intune dashboard. I think there are too many lines hyperlinked to move you around. Others, in contrast, give you a simple dashboard and an intuitive administrative walkthrough."
"Could benefit from user having more control over devices."
"Reporting could be improved. It needs to be more expensive and robust."
"It would help if administrators could pinpoint the exact location of a stolen device to help law enforcement retrieve it and apprehend the suspect."
"China blocks Google and Google Play Store, which makes installation challenging. Microsoft Intune is a company software, which has to be installed to the app portal or Microsoft Software Center."
"A new Intune feature allows application packaging, but it incurs additional licensing costs for a significant number of applications."
"The fact that AWS Systems Manager takes time to complete the patching process, makes it an area where improvements are required."
"The current challenge is that we can't pull any incidents from other accounts."
"We formerly used third-party products to analyze the log, give us information, and find bottlenecks. Systems Manager could provide more tools that conduct this analysis, so we don't have to do it ourselves."
"Additional features can be added as per customer requirements."
"Lacks sufficient integrations."
"The AWS UIs are not the most intuitive. Also, the usability needs room for improvement."
"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."
"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."
"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."
"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."
AWS Systems Manager is ranked 7th in Configuration Management with 6 reviews while Chef is ranked 15th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews. AWS Systems Manager is rated 8.2, while Chef is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of AWS Systems Manager writes "Offers a variety of automation options; simplifies governance and administration ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Chef writes "Useful for large infrastructure, reliable, but steep learning cureve". AWS Systems Manager is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Red Hat Satellite, AWS CloudFormation and SaltStack, whereas Chef is most compared with Jenkins, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager, BigFix and SaltStack. See our AWS Systems Manager vs. Chef report.
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We monitor all Configuration Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
