Chef vs CircleCI comparison

Progress Software and CircleCI are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Progress Software is ranked #20 with an average rating of 7.0, while CircleCI is ranked #13 with an average rating of 4.0. Progress Software holds a 0.6% mindshare in BA, compared to CircleCI’s 3.3% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Progress Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 66% of CircleCI users who would recommend it.

Chef

Read 19 Chef reviews

1,238 Views
248 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

CircleCI

Read 5 CircleCI reviews

1,010 Views
1,010 Comparison Views

66% willing to recommend

Chef

CircleCI

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Chef and CircleCI are competing products in the DevOps space, focusing on automation and CI/CD. CircleCI appears to have the upper hand in CI/CD capabilities, while Chef excels in infrastructure management.

Features: Chef provides powerful configuration management to ensure consistent environments, robust automated policy enforcement, and seamless integration with third-party tools. CircleCI delivers easy integration with development tools, automated testing capabilities, and a streamlined CI/CD process.

Room for Improvement: Chef could improve deployment processes and rollback capabilities, enhance user interfaces, and provide more intuitive customization tools. CircleCI might enhance its infrastructure management features, expand native support for more complex use cases, and offer deeper integration options for diverse environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: CircleCI facilitates a rapid setup with its cloud-based deployment model and seamless integration with various development platforms, focusing support on enhancing continuous deployment workflows. Chef's deployment demands more extensive customization and initial expertise, with its customer service geared toward effective infrastructure automation support.

Pricing and ROI: Chef involves a higher setup cost due to deeper integration needs and a steeper learning curve, but it brings considerable ROI with advanced infrastructure management. CircleCI’s pricing is optimized for CI/CD, offering a competitive ROI through swift deployment and improved efficiencies, appealing especially to those prioritizing deployment speed and process agility.

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

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. CircleCI

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

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)

CircleCI

Ranking in Build Automation

13th

Average Rating

6.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 0.6%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CircleCI is 3.3%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

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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reviewer0972521

Chief Technology Officer at Kyberlife

Unhelpful support, unclear billing, and has offers ability to track usage

We've had occasional connectivity issues with cloud resources and build failure due to its own internal system setup and environment. That costs us credits. Support engineers do not thoroughly read and understand issues when emailing them. They reply to me with a totally different context about the problem. Just yesterday, my web applications failed to 'yarn build' after I downgraded the resource class from extr-large to large. I contacted support and got no reply. Billing is a mess. There is duplicate information in the bill downloaded from their website and when I asked for a consolidated bill, they just answered that they didn't have it. There is no transparency on how many billed minutes and credits I spent each day both on their website and the monthly bill which makes it difficult to understand when the monthly bill contains many refill item charges. It is difficult or impossible to track usage and burndown of my subscription and to gain total outstanding refill amounts on a daily basis. Their website doesn't provide sufficient information on credits allocated/calculated for my extra-large resource class.

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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 product is useful for automating processes."

"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 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."

"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."

"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."

"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."

"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 its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."

More Chef pros

"The ability to automate the build process in a seamless way and run workflows effortlessly. It supports parallel builds so it can scale well. Also, it covers the basics of any build and integration tool, including email notifications (especially when tests are fixed), project insights, etc."

"Enables us to detect exactly which build failed and why, and to push multiple builds to our production environment at a very fast rate."

"Some of the most valuable features include container-based builds, integration with Bit Bucket and being able to store artifacts."

"It's a stable product."

"The automation workflow in CircleCI related to third-party applications is very good and allows standardization of applications."

"The solution offers continuous integration and continuous delivery."

Cons

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

"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."

"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."

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

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

"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."

"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

"The solution’s pricing could be better."

"Billing is a mess."

"Integration with Microsoft Azure is one area for improvement. Azure is growing in its user base, and supports various cloud infrastructure components such as Service Fabric, App Service, etc. Some of Azure’s deployment models (like Kudu) require a steep learning curve, but if CircleCI would come up with such features (deployment to App Service) out of the box, it would be amazing."

"There needs to be some improvement in the user interface of CircleCI."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

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

More Chef pricing and cost advice

"The price of CircleCI could be less expensive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

15%

Retailer

University

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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

What do you like most about CircleCI?

The solution offers continuous integration and continuous delivery.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CircleCI?

Beware of skyrocketing bills as CircleCI does not provide transparency into how they charge refills. Their monthly billing statement is almost unreadable and their online dashboard doesn't provide ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with CircleCI?

See all answers

Comparisons

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

Tekton vs CircleCI

Compared 22% of the time

TeamCity vs CircleCI

Compared 18% of the time

GitLab vs CircleCI

Compared 16% of the time

GitHub Actions vs CircleCI

Compared 13% of the time

Harness vs CircleCI

Compared 11% of the time

More CircleCI Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

August 2025

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Build Automation

July 2025

Download CircleCI product report

Overview

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

CircleCI is a leading platform for automating continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), valued for its capability to manage software updates efficiently. With an easy-to-configure system using YAML files and robust Docker support, CircleCI streamlines backend updates, frontend developments, and mobile app testing across devices. Its parallelism feature and insightful dashboard reduce processing times and improve workflow visibility, respectively, enhancing team collaboration and productivity while maintaining high-quality outputs across development stages.

CircleCI

Sample Customers

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

Shopify, Zenefits, Concur Technologies, CyberAgent

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. CircleCI

July 2025

Free Report: Chef vs. CircleCI

Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. CircleCI and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.

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