Chef vs IBM Rational Build Forge comparison

Progress Software and IBM are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Progress Software is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.3, while IBM is ranked #23. Progress Software holds a 1.5% mindshare in BA, compared to IBM’s 1.6% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Progress Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Chef

Read 25 Chef reviews

1,630 Views
424 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

IBM Rational Build Forge

Read 2 IBM Rational Build Forge reviews

470 Views
465 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Chef

IBM Rational Build Forge

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. IBM Rational Build Forge

December 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

12th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Release Automation (5th), Configuration Management (12th)

IBM Rational Build Forge

Ranking in Build Automation

23rd

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

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 IBM Rational Build Forge is 1.6%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Chef	1.5%
IBM Rational Build Forge	1.6%
Other	96.9%

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

Walter Ochieng Odhiambo

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.

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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

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

"Using Chef for automating infrastructure and applications in my organization has helped us reduce manual tasks by more than forty percent, thereby saving significant revenue for the client."

"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."

"The most valuable feature is automation."

"Chef benefited my organization by definitely reducing time because we were provisioning tens of thousands of servers."

"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."

"The product is useful for automating processes."

"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."

More Chef pros

"Very good reporting features."

"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."

Cons

"The learning curve is steep due to Chef's Ruby-based DSL and the complex components of cookbooks and recipes, which can be challenging for new users, especially those without programming backgrounds."

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

"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."

"Another area needing attention is better error messages, as we have found that Chef errors can sometimes be vague or too low-level to understand."

"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."

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

"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."

"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

12%

Retailer

Comms Service Provider

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	19

No data available

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...

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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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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Comparisons

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Compared 14% of the time

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Compared 12% of the time

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Compared 11% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

January 2026

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Build Automation

January 2026

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

December 2025

Free Report: Chef vs. IBM Rational Build Forge

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