We performed a comparison between Chef and CircleCI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Build Automation solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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."
"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."
"The scalability of the product is quite nice."
"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."
"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."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"The most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."
"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."
"Some of the most valuable features include container-based builds, integration with Bit Bucket and being able to store artifacts."
"Enables us to detect exactly which build failed and why, and to push multiple builds to our production environment at a very fast rate."
"It's a stable product."
"The solution offers continuous integration and continuous delivery."
"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."
"The automation workflow in CircleCI related to third-party applications is very good and allows standardization of applications."
"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"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."
"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."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"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."
"There needs to be some improvement in the user interface of CircleCI."
"The solution’s pricing could be better."
"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."
"Billing is a mess."
Chef is ranked 15th in Build Automation with 18 reviews while CircleCI is ranked 11th in Build Automation with 5 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while CircleCI is rated 6.6. The top reviewer of Chef writes "Useful for large infrastructure, reliable, but steep learning cureve". On the other hand, the top reviewer of CircleCI writes "Unhelpful support, unclear billing, and has offers ability to track usage". Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager and SaltStack, whereas CircleCI is most compared with TeamCity, Tekton, Jenkins, GitHub Actions and AWS CodeBuild. See our Chef vs. CircleCI report.
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