

Chef and Harness compete in DevOps automation. Harness holds an advantage with its advanced continuous delivery capabilities and automated deployment intelligence.
Features: Chef offers configuration management, automation frameworks, and integration capabilities for infrastructure automation. Harness provides AI-powered deployment strategies, holistic monitoring, and a streamlined application release process.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Chef's mature deployment model and community resources ensure deployment ease and problem-solving. Harness offers an intuitive setup and proactive customer service, appealing to organizations needing time-efficient adoption.
Pricing and ROI: Chef’s lower setup costs with open-source options can provide a favorable ROI from customization and support. Harness, despite higher upfront costs, offers faster ROI with efficient deployments and operational savings.
The return has been far more hours saved than spent.
Chef has provided a return on investment, particularly in needing fewer employees, as the tool significantly reduces the amount of human work required for many tasks.
We have seen significant improvement in the time and the way we make changes to the infrastructure.
By adopting templates and various different pipelines across our own IDP platform, we have saved upwards of 30 to 40% of development time.
Time is saved because we now save engineering time. Before, it required two to three engineers actively monitoring production during deployments, but after starting to use Harness, there is zero or minimal manual monitoring.
With Harness, the release process decreased from three or four hours to one or two hours, making deployments much quicker.
We usually work with the Chef teams and community support, who are always willing to assist.
We have rarely faced issues with Harness tech support.
Harness customer support is really helpful anytime I try to reach out; they are available to assist with any issues I am facing.
We have been receiving incident reports whenever an incident occurs on Harness, and they are usually quick to respond.
We leverage both to achieve the best option possible for scaling.
Chef's scalability handles a large number of nodes easily, allowing us to manage hundreds of servers consistently using the same set of cookbooks.
Chef's scalability is evident as the public sector organization I work at serves a population of 5 million, and we have had no problems with scaling.
Our entire organization uses it with hundreds of applications, and it supports this scale effectively.
It is able to work on our infrastructure side, which is EKS, and we are able to handle our organization growth effectively for an enterprise use case.
When I integrated Harness to more than 20 applications in one place, it becomes less stable.
It is a good tool to work with, offering a strong developer experience and community support.
Chef is stable.
In my experience, Chef is quite stable most of the time.
We have rarely faced issues with Harness tech support.
Harness is decently stable.
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.
Self-healing infrastructure continuously verifies that the system matches the desired state and can auto-correct configuration changes during the next run.
To improve Chef, making an interface with another language such as Python or Java that is well understood, as capable as Ruby, and even more widely adopted would demystify it a bit.
There is not a lot of good support for pipeline as code, and I often find myself not using pipeline as code the way other platforms such as GitHub Actions or Jenkins integrate pipeline as code.
An improvement idea is better guided onboarding with more opinionated defaults and examples.
Previously, when deploying a version that had been deployed successfully before, it sometimes failed upon trying again, which seems to be an intermittent issue about stability.
Licensing looks reasonable compared to the manual work of managing whole data centers with even 10,000 servers.
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 organization.
From what I understand with respect to Harness, licensing and setup costs were relatively low for an enterprise, and the pricing was more catered toward enterprises who would invest in the technology.
Security is a key aspect that Chef can automate, monitor new features that are available, and even do patches without you getting involved.
Chef can manage hundreds or thousands of servers effortlessly, allowing for easy rollout of a single cookbook change to all machines.
When you have infrastructure as code and you already have everything apart from the environment-specific config, which you can specify in variables, then it is not only more repeatable and reliable, it is faster.
Harness uses AI to suggest errors in case of deployment failures.
Meantime to recovery (MTTR) improved from 30 to 60 minutes before Harness to 5 to 10 minutes now.
The best features in Harness are its user-friendliness and setup configuration.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Harness | 5.8% |
| Chef | 1.5% |
| Other | 92.7% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 3 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 7 |
| Large Enterprise | 19 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Large Enterprise | 7 |
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.
Harness offers a comprehensive toolset for automating deployment processes and enhancing software update efficiency. It's lauded for its CI/CD capabilities, feature flagging, and real-time deployment monitoring. Key features include an intuitive UI, secret management, and robust rollback functionalities, all contributing to improved productivity and reduced errors in DevOps environments.
We monitor all Build Automation reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.