Chef vs GNU Make comparison

Progress Software and GNU are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Progress Software is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.3, while GNU is ranked #16 with an average rating of 9.0. Progress Software holds a 1.5% mindshare in BA, compared to GNU’s 1.5% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Progress Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 83% of GNU users who would recommend it.

Chef

Read 25 Chef reviews

1,630 Views
424 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

GNU Make

Read 6 GNU Make reviews

412 Views
396 Comparison Views

83% willing to recommend

Chef

GNU Make

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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: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. GNU Make

December 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

12th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Release Automation (5th), Configuration Management (12th)

GNU Make

Ranking in Build Automation

16th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 1.5%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of GNU Make is 1.5%, 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 (%)
Chef	1.5%
GNU Make	1.5%
Other	97.0%

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

Walter Ochieng Odhiambo

Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom

Automation has transformed daily infrastructure work and now frees teams to focus on new challenges

One thing that Chef needs to improve on is making it available in as many languages as possible. There should be a focus on how to make it understandable, not just to infrastructure people, but also to those working in monitoring. How can we ensure that it is part of their daily input? That is something that still has a small missing link. We are almost there, but it can help us achieve outcomes in the future in terms of objectives, not just workflows and visibility. How can we make real-time interactive dashboards more available? Look at what kind of tools can be integrated with them, not just working with the ones like Chef Kitchen and Habitat, but trying to make it even more flexible than what we have right now. On support, I think there should be more focus on how we can achieve AI automations in answering questions for beginners and addressing deep concerns without general manual management.

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Josh Call

Software Engineer 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…

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

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

"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 is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."

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

"I wanted to monitor a hybrid cloud environment, one using AWS and Azure. If I have to provision/orchestrate between multiple cloud platforms, I can use Chef as a one-stop solution, to broker between those cloud platforms and orchestrate around them, rather than going directly into each of the cloud-vendors' consoles."

"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."

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

"The most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."

More Chef pros

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

"The initial setup of GNU Make is straightforward."

"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."

"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."

"Setup is extremely 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."

Cons

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

"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."

"Other things would be the need to use Cinc if you want to use the open-source version because Progress Software's policy on copyright is confusing for new users and it puts a barrier in the way to adoption because many small, medium enterprises, startups, and non-profits who might want to use Chef would find the whole Cinc versus Chef situation confusing and the fact that there is not an easy path to install Chef and then go to a paid version without having to change from Cinc to Chef or Chef to Cinc."

"Chef has a very steep learning curve, especially for beginners."

"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."

"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."

"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

"GNU Make is free and open source software."

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

12%

Retailer

Comms Service Provider

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	19

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Chef?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that we sidestepped it by using Cinc because none of the functionality that is exclusive to the paid version was actually in use in the orga...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Chef?

I would add that Ruby is a domain-specific language in the Chef dialect, which is a learning curve, but so is Terraform and so is Ansible. The only feedback would be if they could come up with an i...

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What is your primary use case for Chef?

My main use case for Chef is configuration and deployments. We receive blank servers and use Chef to build predefined application or appliance servers. A quick specific example of how I use Chef to...

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

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Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

GitHub Actions vs Chef

Compared 7% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 41% of the time

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Compared 23% of the time

CloudBees vs GNU Make

Compared 19% of the time

TeamCity vs GNU Make

Compared 17% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

January 2026

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Build Automation

January 2026

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

December 2025

Free Report: Chef vs. GNU Make

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