Chef vs GoCD comparison

Progress Software and Thoughtworks are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Progress Software is ranked #20 with an average rating of 7.0, while Thoughtworks is ranked #16 with an average rating of 7.3. Progress Software holds a 0.6% mindshare in BA, compared to Thoughtworks’s 1.6% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Progress Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of Thoughtworks users who would recommend it.

Chef

Read 19 Chef reviews

1,238 Views
248 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

GoCD

Read 7 GoCD reviews

881 Views
617 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Chef

GoCD

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 7, 2025

GoCD and Chef are both prominent in the continuous delivery and configuration management space. Chef has a distinct edge in automation capabilities, whereas GoCD leads with better pipeline visibility and integration ease.

Features: GoCD offers advanced pipeline management, visualization tools, and easy integration capabilities, making it ideal for seamless builds and deployments. In contrast, Chef provides robust automation features, a flexible infrastructure management approach through configuration scripts, and an extensive library of cookbooks.

Room for Improvement: GoCD could enhance its plugin diversity and increase the number of supported integrations. Better support for custom scripts and improved rollback capabilities would also be beneficial. Chef may improve by streamlining its deployment process, enhancing template usability, and providing more intuitive interfaces for non-technical users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Chef provides a mature deployment model, comprehensive documentation, and a vast community support network. On the other hand, GoCD is noted for its guided setup and simple architecture, offering a straightforward onboarding experience.

Pricing and ROI: GoCD offers a lower initial setup cost, delivering a significant return on investment through effective automation and integration features. Chef, while more expensive initially, achieves a high ROI with scalable automation and versatile infrastructure options, valuable for larger, more complex projects.

To learn more, read our detailed Chef vs. GoCD Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. GoCD

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

Ranking in Release Automation

11th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Configuration Management (18th)

GoCD

Ranking in Build Automation

16th

Ranking in Release Automation

10th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (15th)

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 GoCD is 1.6%, up from 1.6% 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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Nishant Narayan Singh

DevOps Architect at Cognizant

Simplifies the pipeline process, but the access control system needs enhancement

One area of product improvement is the access control system. It is difficult to assign different access levels because it relies on separate keys for developer and admin access, which could be simplified. The folder structure is another aspect that could be enhanced, as all jobs are displayed on a single page without the clear organization seen in Jenkins. Implementing a more structured approach to organizing jobs would improve user experience. AI could simplify job creation. For example, instead of manually editing pipelines as code, an AI tool could allow users to input variables and automatically generate the required jobs. It would help reduce human errors, such as issues that arise from incorrect edits in large code files.

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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

"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."

"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."

"The most valuable feature is automation."

"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."

"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."

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

"It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."

More Chef pros

"The UI is colorful."

"GoCD's open-source nature is valuable."

"The most notable aspect is its user interface, which we find to be user-friendly and straightforward for deploying and comprehending pipelines. We have the ability to create multiple pipelines, and in addition to that, the resource consumption is impressive."

"Permission separations mean that we can grant limited permissions for each team or team member."

Cons

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

"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."

"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

More Chef cons

"The tool must be more user-friendly."

"It is difficult to assign different access levels because it relies on separate keys for developer and admin access, which could be simplified."

"The documentation really should be improved by including real examples and more setup cases."

"The aspect that requires attention is the user management component. When integrating with BitLabs and authenticating through GitLab, there are specific features we desire. One important feature is the ability to import users directly from GitLab, along with their respective designations, and assign appropriate privileges based on that information. Allocating different privileges to users is a time-consuming process for us."

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

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

More Chef pricing and cost advice

"It's an open-source and free tool."

"This is an open-source solution and it is inexpensive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

15%

Retailer

University

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

Retailer

Recreational Facilities/Services Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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 do you like most about GoCD?

The UI is colorful.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GoCD?

The product is free of cost.

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What needs improvement with GoCD?

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 GoCD

Compared 28% of the time

GitLab vs GoCD

Compared 27% of the time

GitHub Actions vs GoCD

Compared 18% of the time

Tekton vs GoCD

Compared 9% of the time

BMC Release Lifecycle Management vs GoCD

Compared 9% of the time

More GoCD Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

August 2025

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites

August 2025

Download GoCD product report

Also Known As

No data available

Adaptive ALM, Thoughtworks Go

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

GoCD is an open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks. GoCD offers businesses a first-class build and deployment engine for complete control and visibility. It was designed for continuous delivery and the concepts essential to this practice are built in at the core.

Thoughtworks

Sample Customers

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

Ancestry.com, Barclay Card, AutoTrader, BT Financial Group, Gamesys, Nike, Vodafone, Haufe Lexware, Medidata, Hoovers

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. GoCD

July 2025

Free Report: Chef vs. GoCD

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