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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 0.5% mindshare in BA, compared to Digital.ai’s 0.9% 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
  • 277 Views
  • 154 Comparison Views
95% willing to recommend
Digital.ai Release
Read 5 Digital.ai Release reviews
  • 453 Views
  • 196 Comparison Views
100% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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.

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To learn more, read our detailed Chef vs. Digital.ai Release Report (Updated: June 2025).
Buyer's Guide
Chef vs. Digital.ai Release
June 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
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (18th)
Digital.ai Release
Ranking in Build Automation
15th
Ranking in Release Automation
10th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
DevSecOps (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 0.5%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Digital.ai Release is 0.9%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Aaron P - PeerSpot reviewer
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 - PeerSpot reviewer
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 streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."
"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."
"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."
"The most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."
"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."
"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."
"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
More Chef pros
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"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."
"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."
"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."
"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."
"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."
"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."
"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."
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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution is a little bit expensive."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"We are able to save in development time, deployment time, and it makes it easier to manage the environments."
"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."
"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."
"Pricing for Chef is high."
"Chef is priced based on the number of nodes."
"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."
More Chef pricing and cost advice
"Overall, the price is just too high; especially considering we're in the middle of a pandemic."
"The solution's license includes all features."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
15%
University
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
Educational Organization
34%
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
5%
 

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
 

Comparisons

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VMware Aria Automation vs Chef Logo
VMware Aria Automation vs Chef
Compared 11% of the time
Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef Logo
Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef
Compared 10% of the time
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef Logo
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef
Compared 10% of the time
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Jenkins vs Digital.ai Release Logo
Jenkins vs Digital.ai Release
Compared 63% of the time
GitLab vs Digital.ai Release Logo
GitLab vs Digital.ai Release
Compared 38% of the time
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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
Chef
June 2025
Chef reportDownload Chef product report
Buyer's Guide
Digital.ai Release
June 2025
Digital.ai Release reportDownload 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
June 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: June 2025.
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