Chef vs GitLab comparison

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Chef

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 7, 2025

Chef and GitLab are competing in software development and infrastructure automation. GitLab may have an edge with its comprehensive DevOps tool suite that enhances the entire software development cycle.

Features: Chef is valued for automation capabilities, scalability, and support for multiple environments, making it fit for infrastructure management. GitLab's integrated platform excels in source code management, CI/CD, and collaborative development, offering a comprehensive toolset for efficiency.

Room for Improvement: Chef could enhance its user interface for easier navigation and develop more intuitive rollback processes. Additionally, providing more integrations with third-party services could improve its usability. GitLab could focus on optimizing performance for large-scale repositories and invest in better customization options for different workflows. Expanding native integration with cloud services would strengthen its capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: GitLab's deployment is straightforward with extensive documentation and a supportive community, easing setup challenges. Chef also provides detailed documentation but requires complex configurations due to its focus on infrastructure. Both offer effective support channels, but GitLab's unified platform aids those seeking an integrated approach.

Pricing and ROI: Prices for Chef vary based on automation scale, often yielding high ROI by optimizing infrastructure management. GitLab's pricing reflects its extensive features and offers significant ROI by increasing development efficiency. Its integrated offerings could offer long-term value for organizations seeking an all-encompassing solution.

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

Chef vs. GitLab

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Helped 857,162 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

ROI

Sentiment score

8.1

Chef improved deployment time, reduced human error, enhanced scalability, optimized resource use, and strengthened compliance and security management.

Sentiment score

7.6

GitLab improves ROI by increasing efficiency, reducing deployment time, and enhancing DevOps through cost-saving, automation, and vulnerability management.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Chef report

We have saved time significantly, reducing deployment time from four hours to five minutes per deployment.

Andrea PICCININI

IT Software Architect at ANAC - Autorità Nazionale Anticorruzione

Migrating to GitLab is bringing time-saving benefits, and everything is easier to automate.

For more quotes and insights, download the GitLab report

IT Manager at a tech company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Customer Service

Sentiment score

6.1

Customers commend Chef for its responsive support, active community, comprehensive documentation, and efficient issue resolution despite occasional delays.

Sentiment score

6.8

GitLab's support varies by license; paid users praise responsiveness, while free version users rely on community forums and documentation.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Chef report

They utilize a severity and priority ticket system, with corresponding SLAs, to address our inquiries efficiently.

Manager, Engineering at 7-Eleven

I have had meetings where they taught me, explained things, and provided guidance for starting from scratch.

For more quotes and insights, download the GitLab report

IT Manager at a tech company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We have rarely needed to escalate issues to technical support since GitLab usually runs seamlessly.

Gaurav Chandel

AWS DevOps/ Site Reliability Engineer at Tata Consultancy

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

7.8

Chef is highly scalable, efficiently managing infrastructures of all sizes and accommodating numerous clients based on server capacity.

Sentiment score

7.4

GitLab's scalable container architecture supports diverse environments, flexible deployment, and smooth integration, despite some configuration and scaling challenges.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Chef report

It has all the features required for our coding and deployment needs, which makes it scalable to our changing requirements.

Sarfaraz Khan

Senior Application Developer at IBM

For scaling, other deployment options from GitLab's side need to be adopted.

For more quotes and insights, download the GitLab report

Manager, Engineering at 7-Eleven

In terms of scalability, GitLab in the cloud is easy to scale.

Andrew Schetinin

Chief Technology Officer at Acclym

Stability Issues

Sentiment score

7.7

Users rate Chef's stability 8-9/10, comparing it favorably to competitors like Ansible, and find it stable for various use cases.

Sentiment score

8.2

GitLab is highly stable and reliable, with minor issues mainly under heavy load or during updates.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Chef report

I have not encountered any performance or stability issues with GitLab so far.

Gaurav Chandel

AWS DevOps/ Site Reliability Engineer at Tata Consultancy

The updates are frequent and demanding, happening at least once a week due to security reasons.

Andrew Schetinin

Chief Technology Officer at Acclym

For more quotes and insights, download the GitLab report

Room For Improvement

Chef needs better support, pricing, role management, flexibility, documentation, integration, and improved automation to compete with Ansible.

GitLab users seek improved CI/CD automation, integrations, user interface, project management, security, pricing, and support for enhanced usability.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Chef report

It would be beneficial to have a user-friendly interface for setting up these configurations, instead of just writing YAML files.

IT Manager at a tech company with 5,001-10,000 employees

It is essential to conduct proper testing, such as unit tests and code coverage, within the SDLC pipelines.

For more quotes and insights, download the GitLab report

Manager, Engineering at 7-Eleven

Improvements are needed for stability, as the system tends to degrade over a few days and often requires a restart.

Andrew Schetinin

Chief Technology Officer at Acclym

Setup Cost

Chef offers subscription plans with valuable automation features, but enterprise pricing is high and requires contacting sales for quotes.

GitLab provides flexible pricing with open-source access and paid tiers, catering to different enterprise needs and budgets.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Chef report

The pricing of GitLab is reasonable, aligning with what I consider to be average compared to competitors.

IT Manager at a tech company with 5,001-10,000 employees

The cost depends on the subscription plan adopted, such as premium or ultimate, typically charged per user.

For more quotes and insights, download the GitLab report

Manager, Engineering at 7-Eleven

Even when working in other small organizations, we opted for GitLab as it was cost-efficient.

Sarfaraz Khan

Senior Application Developer at IBM

Valuable Features

Chef offers compliance, easy configuration management, and automation for IT infrastructure, integrating with CI processes and supporting multiple clouds.

GitLab excels in UI, CI/CD, code management, and integration, offering user-friendly, efficient, and scalable development and deployment features.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Chef report

The Ultimate version offers enhanced features for security scanning through DAST and SAST analysis, which have greatly benefitted our project workflow.

Andrea PICCININI

IT Software Architect at ANAC - Autorità Nazionale Anticorruzione

By integrating GitLab as a DevOps platform, we have enhanced agility, improved our time to market, and different teams can work collaboratively on various projects.

For more quotes and insights, download the GitLab report

Manager, Engineering at 7-Eleven

As we implement automated testing and DevSecOps, it speeds up the process by forty to sixty percent.

Mikhael Ibrahim

Platform Engineer & Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

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

Ranking in other categories

Configuration Management (18th)

GitLab

Ranking in Build Automation

1st

Ranking in Release Automation

2nd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Security Tools (9th), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (6th), Rapid Application Development Software (11th), Software Composition Analysis (SCA) (5th), Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (2nd), Fuzz Testing Tools (3rd), DevSecOps (1st)

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 GitLab is 15.4%, down from 18.2% 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.

Read full review

Improved agility and time to market with CI/CD enhancements

Manager, Engineering at 7-Eleven

The CI/CD pipelines in GitLab ( /products/gitlab-reviews ) are highly valuable. Another important feature is the single source of repository, allowing efficient repository management and source code management. GitLab provides manageability by allowing us to manage source code effectively through separate repositories. Additionally, GitLab enables the creation of individual CI/CD pipelines for each repository, making software more agile. By integrating GitLab as a DevOps platform, we have enhanced agility, improved our time to market, and different teams can work collaboratively on various projects.

Read full review

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857,162 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

15%

University

Healthcare Company

Educational Organization

15%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Chef?

Chef is priced based on the number of nodes.

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.

What do you like most about GitLab?

I find the features and version control history to be most valuable for our development workflow. These aspects provide us with a clear view of changes and help us manage requests efficiently.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GitLab?

The pricing and cost are on par with other tools and are neither too expensive nor cheap.

What needs improvement with GitLab?

One significant feature we lack is the configuration that enforces code reviews, which simplifies the development life cycle. Unfortunately, this is available only at a higher license level than we...

AWS Systems Manager vs Chef

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Product Reports

Chef

Download Chef product report

Download GitLab product report

Also Known As

No data available

Fuzzit

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

GitLab is a complete DevOps platform that enables teams to collaborate and deliver software faster.

It provides a single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle, from planning and development to testing, deployment, and monitoring.

With GitLab, teams can streamline their workflows, automate processes, and improve productivity.

Sample Customers

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

1. NASA 2. IBM 3. Sony 4. Alibaba 5. CERN 6. Siemens 7. Volkswagen 8. ING 9. Ticketmaster 10. SpaceX 11. Adobe 12. Intuit 13. Autodesk 14. Rakuten 15. Unity Technologies 16. Pandora 17. Electronic Arts 18. Nordstrom 19. Verizon 20. Comcast 21. Philips 22. Deutsche Telekom 23. Orange 24. Fujitsu 25. Ericsson 26. Nokia 27. General Electric 28. Cisco 29. Accenture 30. Deloitte 31. PwC 32. KPMG

Chef vs. GitLab