Chef vs IBM Rational Build Forge comparison

Progress Software and IBM are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Progress Software is ranked #20 with an average rating of 7.0, while IBM is ranked #24. Progress Software holds a 0.5% mindshare in BA, compared to IBM’s 0.8% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Progress Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Chef

Read 19 Chef reviews

277 Views
154 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

IBM Rational Build Forge

Read 2 IBM Rational Build Forge reviews

408 Views
285 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Chef

IBM Rational Build Forge

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

IBM Rational Build Forge and Chef are competitive products in automation and continuous integration. Chef has a slight edge with flexibility and scalability, appealing to organizations seeking configuration management solutions, while IBM Rational Build Forge integrates well with existing systems, ideal for enterprises with legacy systems.

Features: IBM Rational Build Forge automates build and release processes, ensuring a seamless workflow across platforms. It excels in tool integration and provides comprehensive management for existing systems. Chef focuses on infrastructure as code, facilitating advanced automation and management of cloud environments. Chef efficiently manages systems, applications, and services, offering a versatile environment for modern infrastructure needs.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Rational Build Forge is known for strong enterprise-level support and integration, aiding deployment in complex environments. Chef provides extensive documentation and community support for ease of deployment. While Chef benefits from community resources, IBM Rational Build Forge is advantageous for enterprises needing detailed support and legacy system compatibility.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Rational Build Forge may have higher initial setup costs due to its enterprise focus and integration capabilities, but it can deliver solid ROI with productivity in existing infrastructures. Chef's open-source nature offers a lower initial setup cost, appealing to cost-conscious organizations. Chef provides cost-effective solutions with lower operational costs, whereas IBM Rational Build Forge offers strong ROI for companies seeking detailed integrations.

To learn more, read our detailed Chef vs. IBM Rational Build Forge Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. IBM Rational Build Forge

June 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 (12th), Configuration Management (18th)

IBM Rational Build Forge

Ranking in Build Automation

24th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 0.5%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Rational Build Forge is 0.8%, down from 1.3% 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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it_user1330545

CRM Program Release Manager at Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center

Great reporting features and very functional

The solution could be more user friendly. Trying to train somebody on it can be difficult. If you're in this field, you kind of learn the tools, but trying to show a PM how to find report sheets to pull data was difficult. I had to show them how to write the queries and pull the data that they needed. It's not a layman's solution. If you're working with a programmer or with an architect, you won't have issues trying to relay how to utilize the tool. It was for those who cut the checks where there were problems enabling them to pull the data they required. I guess the answer is DevOps, but it depends on your environment. Just being able to sign into dashboards and get accurate results was my biggest thing with my PMs on my projects. They like charts and pie graphs, the ability to see things at a glance data where they could make decisions on the fly.

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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

"I wanted to monitor a hybrid cloud environment, one using AWS and Azure. If I have to provision/orchestrate between multiple cloud platforms, I can use Chef as a one-stop solution, to broker between those cloud platforms and orchestrate around them, rather than going directly into each of the cloud-vendors' consoles."

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

"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."

"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."

"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."

"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."

"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."

"This solution has improved my organization in the way that deployment has become very quick and orchestration is easy. If we have thousands of servers we can easily deploy in a small amount of time. We can deploy the applications or any kind of announcements in much less time."

More Chef pros

"All features are useful. Our customer doesn't have any complaints about the tool. It works pretty well for what they want and what they need to do."

"Very good reporting features."

Cons

"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."

"There appears to be no effort to fix the command line utility functionality, which is definitely broken, provides a false positive for a result when you perform the operation, and doesn't work."

"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."

"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."

"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."

"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 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."

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

More Chef cons

"Its logging can be improved. When something goes wrong, it is not always very easy to find the problem. It is hard to identify whether the problem is because of low memory in the server or some configuration in Rational Build Forge. The error logs are not very detailed, and they should provide more information. It should also have more integration with third-party tools. It would be great to have more integration with third-party tools."

"Not user friendly for the layman."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

15%

University

Healthcare Company

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.

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

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Comparisons

BigFix vs Chef

Compared 45% of the time

AWS Systems Manager vs Chef

Compared 15% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Chef

Compared 11% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 10% of the time

More Chef Competitors

Jenkins vs IBM Rational Build Forge

Compared 100% of the time

More IBM Rational Build Forge Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

June 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Build Automation

June 2025

Download IBM Rational Build Forge product report

Also Known As

No data available

Rational Build Forge

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

IBM Rational Build Forge is an adaptive execution framework that helps automate and standardize the software assembly process. Rational Build Forge helps teams standardize repetitive tasks, improve software quality and manage compliance mandates. This software scales to 25 seats. Rational Build Forge delivers:
Flexibility - gives developers self-service access to preconfigured build processes from within their integrated development environment (IDE). You can add IBM Rational software products to further enhance automation, reporting and integration.
Productivity - accelerates build and release cycles through iterative development, parallel processes and efficient use of hardware.
Compliance - simplifies compliance management with self-documenting audit trails and role-based security.
Compatibility - increases team efficiency with centralized build and release management using the tools you have today.

IBM

Sample Customers

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

Cars.com

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. IBM Rational Build Forge

June 2025

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