Chef vs Jenkins comparison

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Chef

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Chef and Jenkins are both solutions in the automation domain, typically viewed as complementary. Jenkins appears to have an upper hand due to its feature robustness.

Features: Chef offers significant flexibility in infrastructure automation, focusing on easy configuration management and system operation simplification. Jenkins is recognized for its expansive plugin ecosystem, which facilitates diverse integrations and supports continuous integration along with automation pipeline capabilities. Chef offers powerful functionalities tailored for managing infrastructure, while Jenkins supports multiple programming languages with ease.

Room for Improvement: Chef could improve its integration and inventory management to be more streamlined like other market options, enhance rollback processes during deployment, and better support for smaller-scale operations. Jenkins, while robust, would benefit from modernizing its default UI, improving handling of YAML manifesting and GitOps, and enhancing clarity in documentation for new users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Jenkins provides a straightforward deployment model backed by a large community. It tends to be favored for ease of implementation in CI processes. Chef demands more infrastructure knowledge for deployment but offers more personalized customer assistance. Jenkins’ community-driven support contrasts with Chef’s dedicated service, which adds value in complex infrastructure setups.

Pricing and ROI: Chef generally involves higher initial setup costs but offers substantial ROI for complex infrastructure management. Jenkins, as an open-source solution, reduces initial investment thanks to its strong community support. Although Chef may justify its pricing with comprehensive assistance in managing infrastructure, Jenkins presents cost-efficient benefits by minimizing expenses from its user community.

To learn more, read our detailed Chef vs. Jenkins Report (Updated: February 2026).

Chef vs. Jenkins

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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)

Jenkins

Ranking in Build Automation

4th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 1.9%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 7.2%, down from 11.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Jenkins	7.2%
Chef	1.9%
Other	90.9%

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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Kumar Shivam

Site Reliability Engineer 2 at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Automation has transformed our delivery pipeline and saves time by removing manual deployment work

While Jenkins is powerful, many teams face pain points and limitations. The biggest area where Jenkins could improve, based on real DevOps use cases, is messy plugin management, which is one of the biggest complaints. Jenkins relies heavily on plugins, which is both its strength and its weakness. The problem is there are too many plugins, and version conflicts can arise between them. Updates sometimes break pipelines, which is a real pain point. For instance, if you update a Docker plugin, the pipeline could suddenly fail. Many times, using tools such as Docker or Kubernetes leads to plugin compatibility issues. Here, improvements are needed for better plugin stability, automatic compatibility checks, and a simpler update process. The second pain point is that the UI is outdated and complex. Jenkins' UI feels old compared to modern DevOps tools, making it not very user-friendly for beginners, and difficult to find settings. Job configuration is also confusing, and the dashboard looks outdated. Improvements are needed for a modern, cleaner interface, easier navigation, and better pipeline visualization. Additionally, scaling Jenkins is difficult in large companies running many pipelines, causing the Jenkins master to become slow with high CPU and memory usage, leading to build queue delays. Agent management becomes complex, and teams using cloud solutions such as AWS often require extra configuration for scaling. Improvements are necessary for better cloud-native scaling, auto-scaling agents, performance optimizations, and easier distributed setups.

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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

"The solution is easy to use and learn, and it easily automates all the code and infrastructure."

"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."

"If you're handy enough with DSL and you can present your own front-facing interface to your developers, then you can actually have a lot more granular control with Chef in operations over what developers can perform and what they can't."

"Chef can be scaled as needed. The Chef server itself can scale but it depends on the available resources. You can upgrade specific resources to meet the demand. Similarly, with clients, you can add as many clients as you need. Again, this depends on the server resources. If the server has enough resources, it can handle the number of servers required to manage the infrastructure. Chef can be scaled to meet the needs of the infrastructure being managed."

"Chef offers valuable features in infrastructure as code, where it uses cookbooks and recipes written in Ruby language for detailed and flexible configuration of systems and applications."

"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."

"Chef has given us an easy time doing all that automation, security, and monitoring by automating the processes across all those servers so that we don't do manual work, going one place at a time to install updates."

"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."

More Chef pros

"The most valuable feature is its ability to connect with different tools and technologies."

"The most valuable feature of Jenkins is its continuous deployment. We can deploy to multi-cluster and multi-regions in the cloud."

"This is a great integration tool and very powerful."

"We really appreciate that this solution is plug and play. When coding in the version control system, this product completes the build process automatically."

"Automation of chores like deployment, frequent manual tasks (like running scripts on test and production systems) reduced the time used and the number of errors made by engineers, freeing them to do meaningful work instead."

"We used it for all continuous integration parts, like automation testing, deployment, etc."

"I like that you can find a wide range of plugins for Jenkins."

"Continuous Integration. Jenkins can integrate with almost any systems used for application development and testing, with its plugins."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."

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

"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."

"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."

"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."

"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."

"Chef has a very steep learning curve, especially for beginners."

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

More Chef cons

"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."

"A more user-friendly UI for creating pipelines would be helpful."

"Upgrading and maintaining plugins can be painful, as sometimes upgrading a plugin can break functionality of another plugin that a job is dependent on."

"Jenkins is an old product, and we encounter performance issues and slow response. Also, some of the plugins are not stable."

"The enterprise version is less stable than the open-source version."

"It can be improved by including automated mobile reporting integrations."

"Jenkins could improve by adding the ability to edit test automation and make time planning better because it is difficult. It should be easier to do."

"I do not have any notes for improvement."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

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

"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."

"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."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

"We are using the free version of Jenkins. There are no costs or licensing."

"The tool is open-source."

"In our company, we do pay for the licensing of the solution."

"Jenkins is not expensive and reasonably priced."

"The open-source version is free, but small companies would not be able to afford the cloud-based version."

"Jenkins is open-source, so it is free."

"We use the tool's open-source version which is free. There is an enterprise version which is expensive but comes with better support."

"This is an open-source solution for the basic features. However, if an organization wishes to include specific functionality, outside of the basic package, there are extra costs involved."

More Jenkins pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user184734

Systems Administrator at Facebook

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…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

19%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	28
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	57

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...

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.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

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Product Reports

Chef

Download Chef product report

Download Jenkins product report

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

Jenkins is an award-winning application that monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron.

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

Chef vs. Jenkins