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Chef vs Jenkins 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Chef
Ranking in Build Automation
20th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Release Automation (11th), Configuration Management (18th)
Jenkins
Ranking in Build Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
93
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 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 Jenkins is 10.5%, down from 12.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Aaron  P - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Mahdi Mallaki - PeerSpot reviewer
Has a community of plugin providers but needs improvement in Kubernetes integration
Integrating Jenkins with other tools or solutions has presented some challenges. For instance, when attempting to integrate Jenkins with Kubernetes, I encountered numerous errors, which took several days to resolve. In Jenkins, adding a feature typically involves incorporating the repository feature separately. Jenkins lacks built-in Git repository functionality, necessitating an external Git repository to store Jenkins manifests. In contrast, GitLab offers an integrated Git repository and pipeline runner, streamlining the process. One improvement for Jenkins could be integrating a Git server, simplifying the management of CI/CD pipelines. Currently, with Jenkins, modifying pipeline manifests requires navigating to a separate Git repository. In GitLab, however, manifest changes can be made directly within the repository.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."
"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."
"The solution is easy to use and learn, and it easily automates all the code and infrastructure."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"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."
"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."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"The most valuable features of Jenkins are its ease of use and good plugins available. You are able to connect to a lot of solutions."
"We really appreciate that this solution is plug and play. When coding in the version control system, this product completes the build process automatically."
"GitHub linking is pretty good. We have a deployment application where we can run our tests and add various variables to be passed as assertions to those tests. This is pretty fluid with Jenkins."
"It is very useful for us to be able to collect and manage automatic processing pipelines."
"Jenkins is very customizable."
"Jenkins is very user-friendly."
"We are using the open-source version and there is a lot of plugins and features that are available and it works on agents for free. In other solutions, it will cost extra to use them with the agent."
"Having builds and test tasks triggered on commit helps not to break the product."
 

Cons

"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 rate this solution a nine because our use case and whatever we need is there. Ten out of ten is perfect. We have to go to IOD and stuff so they should consider things like this to make it a ten."
"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."
"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."
"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."
"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."
"Jenkins can improve by continuing to add additional plugins for all the new solutions that are coming out within the cloud sphere."
"We would like to see the addition of mobile simulators support to this solution, as part of its open-source offering. We currently have to carry out manual testing for these platforms."
"Performance-wise. This needs to be improved. Not only performance-wise, some functionality or some features can be added to Jenkins."
"It can be improved by including automated mobile reporting integrations."
"The documentation could be more friendly, and more examples of how to use it."
"The support for the latest Java Runtime Environment should be improved."
"I would like to have an integrated dashboard on top of it and a better UX to look at. The dashboard could be better in terms of integration with other tools. We should be able to have a single pane of glass across all the tools that we use where Jenkins is the pipeline. This can be a very good upgrade to it."
"Some kind of SaaS product would be helpful in providing organizational structure."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"We are able to save in development time, deployment time, and it makes it easier to manage the environments."
"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 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."
"Chef is priced based on the number of nodes."
"We are using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time."
"We use the tool's open-source version which is free. There is an enterprise version which is expensive but comes with better support."
"We are using the freeware version of Jenkins."
"Some of the add-ons are too expensive."
"Jenkins is an open-source platform."
"In our company, we do pay for the licensing of the solution."
"​It is free.​"
"The tool is open-source."
"Jenkins is not expensive and reasonably priced."
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Comparison Review

it_user184734 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 22, 2015
I generally find TeamCity a lot more intuitive than Jenkins.
Moving to TeamCity from Jenkins At work, we’re slowly migrating from Jenkins to TeamCity in the hope of ending some of our recurring problems with continuous integration. My use of Jenkins prior to this job has been almost strictly on a personal basis, although I pretty much only use Travis…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
15%
University
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Government
7%
 

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.
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.
How does Tekton compare with Jenkins?
When you are evaluating tools for automating your own GitOps-based CI/CD workflow, it is important to keep your requirements and use cases in mind. Tekton deployment is complex and it is not very e...
What do you like most about Jenkins?
Jenkins has been instrumental in automating our build and deployment processes.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Jenkins?
Jenkins is used in many companies to save money, especially within R&D divisions, by avoiding the expenses of proprietary tools.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap
Airial, Clarus Financial Technology, cubetutor, Metawidget, mysocio, namma, silverpeas, Sokkva, So Rave, tagzbox
Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. Jenkins and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,687 professionals have used our research since 2012.