Chef vs Digital.ai Release comparison

Progress Software and Digital.ai are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Progress Software is ranked #20 with an average rating of 7.0, while Digital.ai is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.0. Progress Software holds a 0.6% mindshare in BA, compared to Digital.ai’s 1.0% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Progress Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Digital.ai users who would recommend it.

Chef

Read 19 Chef reviews

1,238 Views
248 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Digital.ai Release

Read 5 Digital.ai Release reviews

614 Views
411 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Chef

Digital.ai Release

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 7, 2025

Chef and Digital.ai Release are products in the competitive DevOps automation market. Digital.ai Release has the upper hand due to its extensive feature set and perceived value, despite a higher price point.

Features: Chef is known for its robust automation capabilities, strong integration with cloud platforms, and effective infrastructure management. Digital.ai Release provides comprehensive release management, supports complex deployment pipelines, and offers advanced analytics for insightful decision-making.

Room for Improvement: Chef could improve deployment processes, customer interface usability, and enhance rollback features. Digital.ai Release could benefit from reducing initial setup complexity, refining user training materials, and integrating more seamlessly with other DevOps tools.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Chef offers flexibility with its open-source nature, aiding in customization and integration, along with reliable customer support. Digital.ai Release provides a more structured deployment model with streamlined onboarding and excellent customer service, simplifying adoption.

Pricing and ROI: Chef offers a cost-effective pricing model appealing to enterprises seeking lower initial investment and swift ROI. Digital.ai Release, with higher setup costs, ensures greater long-term ROI through its rich features and efficiency in the release process.

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

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Digital.ai Release

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

Ranking in Release Automation

11th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Configuration Management (18th)

Digital.ai Release

Ranking in Build Automation

15th

Ranking in Release Automation

9th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

DevSecOps (8th)

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 Digital.ai Release is 1.0%, up from 0.9% 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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Jeanne-Mari Chandran

Software Configuration Specialist at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

Experience seamless project management and integration with robust tools

The features I find most valuable in Digital.ai Release are the integration with MS Teams, because we have MS Teams channels that publish or push notifications to that. When we start deployments, it sends a notification to the people that we are doing a deployment to their environment. It notifies them when the deployment is started, completed, or if attention is required. I also appreciate the fact that it has plugins for Bamboo and I use lots of Gradle and JSON scripts, and we do SQL upgrades as well, triggering Flyway scripts via Bamboo, along with the integration with XLD and Jira; it's all Atlassian software. Regarding environment management capabilities, Digital.ai Release is mostly useful for me, as it is more application related and that is managed via my XLD dictionary. We have one artifact that is environment agnostic, which has placeholders that correspond to my XLD keys and values, and at deployment time, it substitutes the placeholders with those environment specific values. We don't need to make a specific deployment artifact for dev, test, or production; it is all the same artifact using environment variables, ensuring what we take to production is what was tested.

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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

"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."

"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."

"The solution is easy to use and learn, and it easily automates all the code and infrastructure."

"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."

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

"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."

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

"The scalability of the product is quite nice."

More Chef pros

"Overall, I would give Digital.ai Release a rating of nine out of ten; there's always room for improvement, but it's really good."

"The orchestration, building the release, and then just executing it and managing that pipeline — the orchestration capabilities are great for that."

"The time is also reduced because the manual work has tremendously decreased. We just have to click one button, and it will create everything for us."

"The solution can apply one template across multiple applications."

"The most valuable feature of Digital.ai Release is its ability to communicate with various deployment systems, such as XLD and batch deployments, as well as integrate with tools, such as Flyway and Bamboo. We use Bamboo as our build orchestrator, and Digital.ai Release also integrates with Jira, another Atlassian solution. These capabilities make it a powerful tool for managing workflow, test automation, and other processes."

Cons

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Chef cons

"Currently, we put artifact details manually. What we could improve, in our case, is the deployment instruction base. Developers input all the information, including which artifact and where it needs to be deployed. What Digital.ai could do is automatically go to the deployment instruction page, take those artifact details, and implement them."

"I would like to improve Digital.ai Release by exploring its cloud capabilities as we are currently in the middle of migrating to the cloud, but I actually have no idea what Digital.ai's cloud capabilities are."

"The solution is a little bit expensive."

"The backfill could be improved, we could automate that. Right now it's subjective — it's up to the lead developer's memory to remember to backfill."

"Digital.ai Release could improve by having a better plugin that works with Guardian that we use for mainframe migrations. If there could be an interface or plugin for Guardian that would be beneficial."

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."

"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."

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

"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 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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

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

More Chef pricing and cost advice

"The solution's license includes all features."

"Overall, the price is just too high; especially considering we're in the middle of a pandemic."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

15%

Retailer

University

Financial Services Firm

36%

Computer Software Company

18%

Government

Healthcare Company

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 Digital.ai Release ?

The time is also reduced because the manual work has tremendously decreased. We just have to click one button, and it will create everything for us.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Digital.ai Release ?

Based on my experience, I would like to improve Digital.ai Release by exploring its cloud capabilities as we are currently in the middle of migrating to the cloud, but I actually have no idea what ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Digital.ai Release ?

My use case for Digital.ai Release is that I work for an insurance company on a very big project that develops multiple different pieces of software. We use Digital.ai Release to move our software ...

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

August 2025

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Digital.ai Release

August 2025

Download Digital.ai Release product report

Also Known As

No data available

XL Release, XebiaLabs XL Release

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

Automate, orchestrate, and gain visibility into your release pipelines at scale using Digital.ai Release, a release management tool that is designed for enterprises. Control and track releases, standardize processes, and bake compliance and security into your software release pipelines.

Digital.ai

Sample Customers

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

3M, GE, John Deere, Deutsche Telekom, Cable & Wireless, Xerox, and Société Générale, Liberty Mutual, EA, Rabobank

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Digital.ai Release

July 2025

Free Report: Chef vs. Digital.ai Release

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

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