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 #17 with an average rating of 9.0. Progress Software holds a 0.6% mindshare in BA, compared to GNU’s 0.7% 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

1,238 Views
248 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

GNU Make

Read 6 GNU Make reviews

250 Views
250 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: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. GNU Make

July 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 (18th)

GNU Make

Ranking in Build Automation

17th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 0.6%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of GNU Make is 0.7%, up from 0.5% 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.

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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

"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."

"The most valuable feature is automation."

"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."

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

"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."

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

"The solution is easy to use and learn, and it easily automates all the code and infrastructure."

"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."

More Chef pros

"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."

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

"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."

"The initial setup of GNU Make is straightforward."

"Setup is extremely 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."

Cons

"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."

"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."

"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."

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

"I would rate this solution a nine because our use case and whatever we need is there. Ten out of ten is perfect. We have to go to IOD and stuff so they should consider things like this to make it a ten."

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

"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."

"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."

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."

"GNU Make does not provide traditional customer support."

"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."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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 able to save in development time, deployment time, and it makes it easier to manage the environments."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

University

No data available

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.

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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.

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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 39% of the time

AWS CloudFormation vs Chef

Compared 10% of the time

AWS Systems Manager vs Chef

Compared 10% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Chef

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 7% of the time

More Chef Competitors

Jenkins vs GNU Make

Compared 68% of the time

Bazel vs GNU Make

Compared 32% of the time

More GNU Make Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

August 2025

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Build Automation

July 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

July 2025

Free Report: Chef vs. GNU Make

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