Chef vs GNU Make comparison

Progress Software and GNU are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Progress Software is ranked #20 with an average rating of 7.0, while GNU is ranked #18 with an average rating of 9.0. Progress Software holds a 1.0% mindshare in BA, compared to GNU’s 1.0% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Progress Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 83% of GNU users who would recommend it.

Chef

Read 19 Chef reviews

1,243 Views
286 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

GNU Make

Read 6 GNU Make reviews

304 Views
304 Comparison Views

83% willing to recommend

Chef

GNU Make

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Chef and GNU Make compete in the automation space within the software development lifecycle. Chef is perceived as having the upper hand due to its comprehensive configuration management tools and advanced features, while GNU Make is favored for its simplicity and performance in specific use cases.

Features: Chef provides robust infrastructure automation, allowing extensive customization and scalability. It excels in managing complex environments and continuous delivery pipelines. Its features align with professional environments demanding full-stack development. GNU Make's strengths lie in its simplicity, efficiency, and compatibility with various systems, especially for automating repetitive tasks within smaller projects. It offers optimized code compilation and can easily build targets by integrating with other utilities.

Room for Improvement: Chef could enhance its user interface and streamline deployment processes to be more user-friendly for smaller teams. Additionally, improving rollback capabilities would be beneficial. GNU Make could develop a more comprehensive customer support system and introduce a graphical interface to widen accessibility. Enhancing its integration features with other automation tools would also add value.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Chef offers structured deployment models with substantial enterprise-level support, appealing to businesses needing detailed configuration and customer assistance. GNU Make follows a straightforward, lightweight deployment strategy, ideal for smaller teams but provides limited customer support.

Pricing and ROI: Chef involves higher setup costs with significant ROI for large-scale operations due to expanded features and scalability. In contrast, GNU Make, being open-source, offers minimal setup costs, delivering substantial ROI for smaller projects thanks to its simplicity and low operational demands, making it financially appealing for teams with constrained budgets.

To learn more, read our detailed Chef vs. GNU Make Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. GNU Make

September 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

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Release Automation (11th), Configuration Management (19th)

GNU Make

Ranking in Build Automation

18th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 1.0%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of GNU Make is 1.0%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
GNU Make	1.0%
Chef	1.0%
Other	98.0%

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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reviewer2561757

Software at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

Enhances productivity with efficient dependency handling and a straightforward setup

GNU Make is used as a build system tool. Most people don't use GNU Make directly but utilize other systems like CMake to generate Make files, which are then run by GNU Make. This is common for tasks like compiling C++ code. In the industry, AI developers, for example, use GNU Make in their work…

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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

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

"Manual deployments came to a halt completely. Server provisioning became lightning fast. Chef-docker enabled us to have fewer sets of source code for different purposes. Configuration management was a breeze and all the servers were as good as immutable servers."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 product is useful for automating processes."

"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."

More Chef pros

"Makefiles are extremely easy to work with using any preferred editor. GNU Make can be run directly from the terminal, not requiring any time wasted on clicking."

"I have not encountered any scalability issues with GNU Make. It is as scalable as the project's structure is, and then some."

"Setup is extremely straightforward."

"The initial setup of GNU Make is straightforward."

"GNU Make is such an essential tool that it is almost impossible to imagine working without it. Not having it, developers would probably have to resort to doing everything manually or via shell scripts."

"Full-featured syntax allows building strategies as simple or as complex as one wishes, and declarative approach fits the task really well. Wide adoption also means that everybody knows what GNU Make is and how to use it."

Cons

"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."

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

"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."

"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."

"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."

"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."

"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."

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

More Chef cons

"GNU Make requires using the Tab symbol as the first symbol of command line for execution. In some text editors this can be problematic, as they automatically insert spaces instead of tabs."

"Vanilla GNU Make does not support any kind of colored output. A wrapper named colormake exists to work around this, but native (opt-in) support would be welcome."

"GNU Make does not provide traditional customer support."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

"We are using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

"There is no price for this product. No licensing. It’s open-source."

"GNU Make is free and open source software."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

15%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	12

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GNU Make?

GNU Make is a free solution that comes with Linux, which positively impacts operational costs by eliminating licensing fees.

See all answers

What needs improvement with GNU Make?

I am not familiar enough with it to suggest any specific new features or areas for improvement. It occupies its niche well.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for GNU Make?

See all answers

Comparisons

BigFix vs Chef

Compared 42% of the time

AWS CloudFormation vs Chef

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Compared 9% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 9% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Chef

Compared 9% of the time

More Chef Competitors

Jenkins vs GNU Make

Compared 63% of the time

Bazel vs GNU Make

Compared 37% of the time

More GNU Make Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

October 2025

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Build Automation

September 2025

Download GNU Make product report

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

Make is a tool which controls the generation of executables and other non-source files of a program from the program's source files.

GNU

Sample Customers

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

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. GNU Make

September 2025

Free Report: Chef vs. GNU Make

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