We performed a comparison between Chef and GNU Make based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about GitLab, Jenkins, Google and others in Build Automation."The scalability of the product is quite nice."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"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."
"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."
"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 recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."
"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."
"Setup is extremely straightforward."
"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."
"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."
"I have not encountered any scalability issues with GNU Make. It is as scalable as the project's structure is, and then some."
"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."
"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"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."
"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."
"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."
"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."
"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."
"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."
Earn 20 points
Chef is ranked 13th in Build Automation with 18 reviews while GNU Make is ranked 26th in Build Automation. Chef is rated 8.0, while GNU Make is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Chef writes "Useful for large infrastructure, reliable, but steep learning cureve". On the other hand, the top reviewer of GNU Make writes "Full-featured syntax allows building strategies as simple or as complex as needed". Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager and BigFix, whereas GNU Make is most compared with Jenkins and Bazel.
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