We performed a comparison between Chef and GitLab 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."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."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."
"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."
"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."
"Stable and scalable configuration management and automation tool. Installing it is easy. Its most valuable feature is its compliance, e.g. it's very good."
"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."
"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."
"GitLab offers a good interface for doing code reviews between two colleagues."
"It scales well."
"GitLab is very useful for pipelines, continuous integration, and continuous deployment. It is also stable."
"The SaaS setup is impressive, and it has DAST solutioning."
"GitLab's best features are maintenance, branch integration, and development infrastructure."
"I have had no problem with the stability of the solution."
"A user friendly solution."
"It is scalable."
"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."
"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."
"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."
"Perhaps the integration could be better."
"Atlassian offers more products than GitLab. GitLab offers source control management, version control and collaboration between developers. Atlassian offers features on top of this as well as more integration points for developers."
"Some of the scripts that we encountered in GitLab were not fully functional and threw up errors."
"The solution does not have many built-in functions or variables so scripting is required."
"GitLab could improve the patch repository. It does not have support for Conan patch version regions. Additionally, better support for Kubernetes deployment is needed as part of the package."
"The price of GitLab could improve, it is high."
"The solution could be faster."
"I'm new to GitLab, so I would appreciate more documentation about the code and commands."
Chef is ranked 15th in Build Automation with 18 reviews while GitLab is ranked 1st in Build Automation with 70 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while GitLab is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Chef writes "Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of GitLab writes "Powerful, mature, and easy to set up and manage". Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager and SaltStack, whereas GitLab is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Bamboo, SonarQube, AWS CodePipeline and Tekton. See our Chef vs. GitLab report.
See our list of best Build Automation vendors and best Release Automation vendors.
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