Chef vs Digital.ai Agility comparison

Progress Software and Digital.ai are both solutions in the Release Automation category. Progress Software is ranked #11 with an average rating of 7.0, while Digital.ai is ranked #6 with an average rating of 9.0. Progress Software holds a 1.1% mindshare in RA, compared to Digital.ai’s 1.1% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Progress Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 71% of Digital.ai users who would recommend it.

Chef

Read 19 Chef reviews

371 Views
231 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Digital.ai Agility

Read 5 Digital.ai Agility reviews

225 Views
161 Comparison Views

71% willing to recommend

Chef

Digital.ai Agility

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 7, 2025

Chef and Digital.ai Agility compete in the software development and automation category, with Chef often having an edge in automation capabilities, while Digital.ai Agility excels in comprehensive project management features.

Features: Chef offers robust automation capabilities, a strong focus on infrastructure as code, and seamless integration with third-party tools using Ohai inventory. Digital.ai Agility provides superior project management capabilities, including team room features, "what if" forecasting, and multiple planning levels adaptable for enterprise needs.

Room for Improvement: Chef could improve in handling rollbacks and enhancing its user interface experience as it heavily relies on command line interactions. Digital.ai Agility could benefit from reducing its initial learning curve and optimizing the cost of its comprehensive package to be more competitive.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Chef enables efficient deployment with an active support community that aids users in resolving issues. Digital.ai Agility offers a structured deployment model that pairs well with strong customer service, ensuring seamless project execution with enterprise-level features.

Pricing and ROI: Chef provides a strategic costing model designed for quick returns on automation-focused projects, making it attractive for budget-conscious teams. Digital.ai Agility, with higher initial setup costs, justifies its investment with extensive features and integration possibilities that lead to promising long-term returns.

To learn more, read our detailed Chef vs. Digital.ai Agility Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Digital.ai Agility

April 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 Release Automation

11th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Build Automation (20th), Configuration Management (18th)

Digital.ai Agility

Ranking in Release Automation

6th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (14th), Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (9th), Value Stream Management Software (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Release Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 1.1%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Digital.ai Agility is 1.1%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Release 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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Debbie Brey

Technical Fellow at Boeing

A scalable, full-package solution with a tech support team that bends over backwards to help

There is room for improvement in getting the analytics portion of the solution more integrated with the rest of it. The feature I would like to see is already in their newer licensing structure, and that's the live integration between Agility, Jira and Azure DevOps. That's the piece that I think is really valuable.

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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."

"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."

"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 scalability of the product is quite nice."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."

More Chef pros

"For visualization capabilities, the automation capabilities make it possible to support the different personas. The features and capabilities are excellent and come with excellent support."

"Agility is highly flexible. It can do much more than what our client is doing with it. They use it in a defined way. Some at that company have a much broader knowledge of agile and SAFe, but they're given applications and a mandated way to work. We had to work within their parameters and provide an accurate transition so the data would be mapped and pushed through."

"It can generate reports showing a burndown chart, burnup chart, and the planned vs actual velocity."

"With some of the other tools, you have to buy 20 different plugins to get to the same capability that comes with the basic Agility capability."

"It allows my clients to have one central tool to manage their agile projects."

Cons

"The time that it takes in terms of integration. Cloud integration is comparatively easy, but when it comes to two-link based integrations - like trying to integrate it with any monitoring tools, or maybe some other ticketing tools - it takes longer. That is because most of the out-of-the-box integration of the APIs needs some revisiting."

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

"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."

"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."

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

"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."

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

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

More Chef cons

"There is room for improvement in getting the analytics portion of the solution more integrated with the rest of it."

"The user interface can be improved by adding Save, Edit, Add, Cancel, and Return buttons to the popup windows that are displayed when you click on a child item."

"The machine learning features are a new capability but could be improved. This is being worked by Digital.ai currently. Multicolor simulation, specifically, could be improved."

"In my work as a contractor, it's always frustrating when a client has multiple software applications that don't talk to each other and they all perform the same function. That presents a huge challenge between their IT groups."

"Improve how to create and track releases. Currently, I have to create child projects."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing for Chef is high."

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

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

"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."

"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."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

"You get what you pay for. Don't let your development teams dictate what the portfolio management team should use as the main tool."

"Comparing the pricing to other products, I think this solution is in the middle."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

17%

University

Healthcare Company

Manufacturing Company

19%

Insurance Company

18%

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

11%

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

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Comparisons

BigFix vs Chef

Compared 33% of the time

AWS Systems Manager vs Chef

Compared 15% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Compared 11% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Chef

Compared 11% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 9% of the time

More Chef Competitors

Jira vs Digital.ai Agility

Compared 54% of the time

Jira Align vs Digital.ai Agility

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Digital.ai Agility

Compared 12% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Digital.ai Agility

Compared 6% of the time

OpenText Deployment Automation vs Digital.ai Agility

Compared 6% of the time

More Digital.ai Agility Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

April 2025

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Digital.ai Agility

April 2025

Download Digital.ai Agility product report

Also Known As

No data available

VersionOne Lifecycle, VersionOne, CollabNet VersionOne, Digital.ai Continuum

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

Enterprise business agility rests on agile planning that scales and has the flexibility needed to meet the needs of customers and the market. Digital.ai Agility enables organizations to scale up agile from the team level across the product portfolio, improve collaboration and efficiency, and deliver software that provides more value.

Digital.ai

Sample Customers

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

Siemens Health Services (HS), Cerner Corporation, Aaron's, Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta, Kelley Blue Book, AOL, Axway, Tideworks, bwin Interactive Entertainment, AG, Intergraph, Eos Group, PeopleCube, Liquid Machines

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Digital.ai Agility

April 2025

Free Report: Chef vs. Digital.ai Agility

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