Buildkite vs Chef comparison

Buildkite and Progress Software are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Buildkite is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.2, while Progress Software is ranked #20 with an average rating of 7.0. Buildkite holds a 1.6% mindshare in BA, compared to Progress Software’s 0.6% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Buildkite users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Progress Software users who would recommend it.

Buildkite

Read 14 Buildkite reviews

394 Views
394 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Chef

Read 19 Chef reviews

1,238 Views
248 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Buildkite

Chef

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Chef and Buildkite operate in the automation category, focusing on infrastructure management and CI pipelines, respectively. Buildkite appears to have an edge in continuous integration with its robust pipeline management, while Chef excels in configuration management and comprehensive support.

Features: Chef offers powerful configuration management, emphasizing compliance and infrastructure automation. Buildkite provides scalability in pipeline management, flexibility, and control in continuous integration systems. The difference lies in Chef's focus on infrastructure versus Buildkite's strength in pipeline automation.

Room for Improvement: Chef could enhance its deployment efficiency and rollback capabilities. Improved user interfaces for non-advanced users and more seamless integrations with third-party tools could add value. Buildkite would benefit from a more intuitive setup process and expanded documentation. Enhancing its initial learning curve and offering more detailed customer support would also support user adoption.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Chef enables easy integration with existing systems through its intuitive deployment model and extensive support resources. Buildkite provides a cloud-based deployment model, leveraging smaller support teams and encouraging self-reliance, while still offering adequate documentation and resources for configuration.

Pricing and ROI: Chef presents competitive pricing with a reasonable upfront cost, providing clear ROI in infrastructure management. Buildkite may have a higher initial investment but delivers significant ROI through its streamlined CI processes. Chef is attractive to businesses focused on cost-effective infrastructure automation, while Buildkite is ideal for those prioritizing advanced CI capabilities and scalability.

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

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite 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

Buildkite

Ranking in Build Automation

9th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

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 August 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Buildkite is 1.6%, up from 0.1% 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

Prabin Silwal

Senior Engineering Consultant at ASSURANCE IQ, INC.

Has an easy setup phase while also offering good documentation

The problem we are facing sometimes is that we have lots of unit testers, and we have to wait about ten minutes to complete all of those because we want to run or find a way. It's not directly due to the limitation of the tool as well, but when we are running the spec, we want to run those parallelly and decrease the downtime so that our deployment can be faster. I think that one is not possible only due to the it also depends upon the unit test framework as well we are using. When we tried with the multiple test cases in a parallel manner, there were some dependencies, and one over another kept failing. We make those sequential calls. The aforementioned area consists of the issues my company faced while using Buildkite.

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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

"Buildkite allows us to build automations and integration tasks effectively."

"The documentation is quite helpful."

"The solution can be considered as a very well-polished platform with a really great UI."

"It is a stable solution."

"Buildkite makes it easier to conduct deployment. When I merge a PR in Buildkite, it automatically starts the deployment process. It used to be challenging to shift code from the development branch to the testing branch because I had to follow up with multiple developers. Previously, I was dependent on the DevOps team and developers to handle deployments, but now it allows me to deploy the solutions myself.This has made it much easier for me to handle both non-production and production environments."

"The tool is simple and has no learning curve. If you know YAML, you can master it. It is simple to learn."

"What I like best about Buildkite is its workflow management. You define YAML files to specify what needs to be done. The jobs can run based on a schedule, like a cron job, where you set it to run every night or every week. Additionally, you can set up triggers, such as new pushes to a repository."

"If you join our team, it's very easy to learn Buildkite. We have our own boilerplate, so you can just clone it and add your configuration steps. Plus, we have documentation available to guide you through the process."

More Buildkite pros

"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."

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

"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."

"I wanted to monitor a hybrid cloud environment, one using AWS and Azure. If I have to provision/orchestrate between multiple cloud platforms, I can use Chef as a one-stop solution, to broker between those cloud platforms and orchestrate around them, rather than going directly into each of the cloud-vendors' consoles."

"The scalability of the product is quite nice."

"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."

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

"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

"My company has had problems with the tool's parallel running and execution time. The testing framework also has some limitations. The tool cannot do everything."

"The solution should offer more options for installing an agent and give users the option of having a separate self-hosted or provisioned agent."

"Most of our projects involve both front-end and back-end development. We write the code and then create a file to set up our process, including specifying the tests we want to run. Before deploying to production, we need to install and configure certain things. We need something like Docker Pro, but I'm unsure about that. I'm familiar with the steps for using Buildkite for this process. We start by defining which tests to run."

"The way Buildkite represents workflows can be challenging. It uses Directed Acyclic Graphs, and there's a trade-off between abstraction and understanding what goes wrong when something fails. When a layer of jobs breaks down, it can be difficult to identify the issue at first glance. Additionally, logging can be cumbersome. I prefer GitHub Workflows."

"Since we were using Buildkite for the first time, we had a lot of difficulty understanding how it worked. We didn't find any documentation from third parties; only Buildkite provided documentation. As a result, we faced a steep learning curve. After some time, it became much easier to use. Initially, understanding certain features, like the R integration, was challenging."

"There is a need for rework occasionally, and issues like syntax errors can occur multiple times, especially when manual changes are made in AWS or Amazon Connect that are not captured in the code."

"As a newbie, I think BuildKite has several issues. For example, it can't get the status of a PR once it's closed. The syntax is easy to use, but updating a pipeline requires administrator settings, and viewing pipelines for others isn't straightforward."

"Compared to market leaders like Azure DevOps and Jenkins, Buildkite's community is smaller, but they do have some documentation."

More Buildkite cons

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

"I would rate this solution a nine because our use case and whatever we need is there. Ten out of ten is perfect. We have to go to IOD and stuff so they should consider things like this to make it a ten."

"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."

"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."

"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."

"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."

"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."

More Chef cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Buildkite is known to be cheaper than GitHub Workflows, which is considered a standard in the industry. It can be cost-effective, especially for organizations that heavily utilize Docker and containerization, because every code change triggers a new build. Its integration with AWS, particularly with ECR, and its caching capabilities with layers are powerful features."

"The self-hosted option is pretty cheap."

"The solution's per-user pricing model suits huge enterprises but is expensive for small to medium businesses."

"We used the solution’s free version."

"I don't think the tool is expensive."

"I find Buildkite cost-effective as it has definitely increased my productivity, especially on the deployment side. It saved a lot of my time and improved data management because I can handle different environments myself now."

"For a business plan, it was 19 USD per month per user."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"Pricing for Chef is high."

"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."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

15%

Retailer

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Buildkite?

One area that needs improvement in Buildkite is the requirement for rework of the code. There can be syntax errors when running the Buildkite pipeline, especially if someone has made manual changes...

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What is your primary use case for Buildkite?

I use Buildkite for deployment tasks related to building AMI images and deploying routing profile queues into Amazon Connect. This involves using Buildkite in conjunction with GitHub. We create fil...

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What advice do you have for others considering Buildkite?

With two years of experience on Buildkite, I would recommend it to others due to its manageable pipeline and the support team available for big issues. I am satisfied with it, rating its stability ...

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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.

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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 Buildkite

Compared 34% of the time

Harness vs Buildkite

Compared 16% of the time

Tekton vs Buildkite

Compared 15% of the time

GitLab vs Buildkite

Compared 13% of the time

Nx vs Buildkite

Compared 12% of the time

More Buildkite Competitors

BigFix vs Chef

Compared 39% of the time

AWS CloudFormation vs Chef

Compared 10% of the time

AWS Systems Manager vs Chef

Compared 10% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Chef

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 7% of the time

More Chef Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite

August 2025

Download Buildkite product report

Buyer's Guide

Chef

August 2025

Download Chef product report

Overview

Buildkite is a powerful CI/CD tool praised for its scalability and flexibility in automating and managing complex workflows across multiple platforms. Its integration capabilities with various systems and supports for secure, customizable environments enhance development efficiency and data privacy. The feedback highlights significant boosts in productivity and operational cost reduction, making Buildkite a strategic asset for businesses aiming to streamline development tasks and align with organizational goals.

Buildkite

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

Information Not Available

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

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. Chef

July 2025

Free Report: Buildkite vs. Chef

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