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Chef vs Harness comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.7
Chef enhances work efficiency and ROI by streamlining deployment, reducing manual labor, and supporting scalable infrastructure management.
Sentiment score
9.0
Harness streamlines deployments, boosting efficiency, reducing errors, and lowering costs, validating its licensing investment through automation.
The return has been far more hours saved than spent.
Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
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.
Site Reliability Engineer at Granicus Inc.
We have seen significant improvement in the time and the way we make changes to the infrastructure.
Principal Engineer at Wipro Limited
By adopting templates and various different pipelines across our own IDP platform, we have saved upwards of 30 to 40% of development time.
Technical Associate at ZS
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.
Site Reliability Engineer at Granicus Inc.
With Harness, the release process decreased from three or four hours to one or two hours, making deployments much quicker.
Software Engineer at Citi
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.8
Chef's customer support varies, with positive presales support, but challenges lead users to community forums and AWS for help.
Sentiment score
7.8
Users appreciate Harness support's responsiveness and effectiveness, praising timely incident reports, proactive notifications, and helpful communication.
We usually work with the Chef teams and community support, who are always willing to assist.
Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom
We have rarely faced issues with Harness tech support.
Senior AWS Consultant at Quantum Integrators
Harness customer support is really helpful anytime I try to reach out; they are available to assist with any issues I am facing.
Site Reliability Engineer at Granicus Inc.
We have been receiving incident reports whenever an incident occurs on Harness, and they are usually quick to respond.
Technical Associate at ZS
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Chef is praised for managing numerous nodes efficiently in diverse cloud environments despite some challenges with scaling.
Sentiment score
7.7
Harness excels in scalability, supporting extensive applications, though performance may drop with over 20 integrations in enterprise settings.
We leverage both to achieve the best option possible for scaling.
Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom
Chef's scalability handles a large number of nodes easily, allowing us to manage hundreds of servers consistently using the same set of cookbooks.
Site Reliability Engineer at Granicus Inc.
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.
Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Our entire organization uses it with hundreds of applications, and it supports this scale effectively.
Senior Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
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.
Technical Associate at ZS
When I integrated Harness to more than 20 applications in one place, it becomes less stable.
Software Engineer at Citi
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Chef offers reliable performance, minimal disruptions, and effective scalability, with high stability ratings and strong community support.
Sentiment score
7.2
Harness is stable and reliable, with minor integration issues and proactive communication during occasional downtime enhancing user experience.
It is a good tool to work with, offering a strong developer experience and community support.
Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom
Chef is stable.
Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
In my experience, Chef is quite stable most of the time.
Principal Engineer at Wipro Limited
We have rarely faced issues with Harness tech support.
Senior AWS Consultant at Quantum Integrators
Harness is decently stable.
Technical Associate at ZS
 

Room For Improvement

Chef needs improved simplicity, integration, performance, documentation, better error messages, enhanced support, and usability for wider adoption.
Harness needs streamlined setup, better security, improved automation, and flexible pricing to enhance efficiency and user experience.
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.
Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom
Self-healing infrastructure continuously verifies that the system matches the desired state and can auto-correct configuration changes during the next run.
Site Reliability Engineer at Granicus Inc.
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.
Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
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.
Technical Associate at ZS
An improvement idea is better guided onboarding with more opinionated defaults and examples.
Site Reliability Engineer at Granicus Inc.
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.
Software Engineer at Citi
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find Chef's pricing flexible but complex, appreciating AWS Marketplace integration despite preferring cheaper open-source alternatives.
Licensing looks reasonable compared to the manual work of managing whole data centers with even 10,000 servers.
Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom
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.
Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
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.
Technical Associate at ZS
 

Valuable Features

Chef automates configuration management, supporting scalability, ease of use, and efficiency, ideal for large-scale cloud environments with community support.
Harness simplifies deployment with automation, AI-driven error handling, and intuitive design, enhancing safety, visibility, and efficiency for microservices.
Security is a key aspect that Chef can automate, monitor new features that are available, and even do patches without you getting involved.
Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom
Chef can manage hundreds or thousands of servers effortlessly, allowing for easy rollout of a single cookbook change to all machines.
Site Reliability Engineer at Granicus Inc.
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.
Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Harness uses AI to suggest errors in case of deployment failures.
Senior Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Meantime to recovery (MTTR) improved from 30 to 60 minutes before Harness to 5 to 10 minutes now.
Site Reliability Engineer at Granicus Inc.
The best features in Harness are its user-friendliness and setup configuration.
Senior AWS Consultant at Quantum Integrators
 

Categories and Ranking

Chef
Ranking in Build Automation
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Release Automation (5th), Configuration Management (12th)
Harness
Ranking in Build Automation
7th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (16th), Cloud Cost Management (9th), Feature Management (2nd)
 

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 Harness is 5.8%, up from 5.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Harness5.8%
Chef1.5%
Other92.7%
Build Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Walter Ochieng Odhiambo - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
reviewer2787357 - PeerSpot reviewer
Site Reliability Engineer at Granicus Inc.
Automated delivery has made production releases safer and has reduced deployment incidents
The first point for improvement is the steep learning curve, where concepts such as services, environment, pipelines, and templates take time to understand. New users often need training before becoming productive, resulting in slower initial onboarding compared to simpler CD tools. An improvement idea is better guided onboarding with more opinionated defaults and examples. The second improvement can be on UI complexity and navigation; the UI can feel cluttered with many options and finding past executions, logs, or specific settings sometimes takes extra clicks, leading to small but noticeable productivity loss. Simplified UI views for common workflows and improved search and filtering could help. I also see cost and licensing as potential areas for improvement, as pricing can feel high for small teams and advanced features are tied to higher tiers, which may limit adoption for startups or smaller organizations. Flexible pricing models and more essential features in lower tiers could address this issue.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Retailer
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
29%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Large Enterprise7
 

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...
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...
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...
What do you like most about Harness?
It's a highly customizable DevOps tool.
What needs improvement with Harness?
The first point for improvement is the steep learning curve, where concepts such as services, environment, pipelines, and templates take time to understand. New users often need training before bec...
What is your primary use case for Harness?
My main use case for Harness is continuous deployment (CD), specifically for safe, automated deployment to production, especially in Kubernetes and cloud environments. For continuous deployment in ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

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Armory
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap
Linedata, Openbank, Home Depot, Advanced
Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. Harness and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.