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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Jamshaid I

Principal Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Efficient resource allocation and robust workflow with autoscaling capabilities

In Kubernetes, we use node-based architecture with nodes and pods and follow practices like RBAC and rollback. Multiple pods can run concurrently. We benefit from Kubernetes' ability to autoscale pods and use horizontal pod autoscalers to adjust the number of pods based on metrics like CPU or memory usage, ensuring efficient resource allocation and stability under load.

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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

"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."

"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."

"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."

"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."

"The most valuable feature is automation."

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

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

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

More Chef pros

"The most valuable features of Jenkins are the ease of use and the information about how to use the features is readily available on the internet. Additionally, with the solution, I can use other reporting tools, such as Flow."

"We can schedule anything with Jenkins, which is useful for deployment or anything that requires scheduling. It also has multiple plugins we can use for Maven, JUnit, etc."

"It's very useful when you want to automate different processes from beginning to end."

"Having builds and test tasks triggered on commit helps not to break the product."

"With Jenkins, the pipeline will take your code from any versioning system like GitHub or Bitbucket. All the security scans can happen in one go and then all the tests also get run. You can just build one container in it and deploy it."

"Jenkins optimizes the CI/CD process, enhances automation, and ensures efficiency and management of our build and deployment pipeline."

"Jenkins is the most widely used development tool, so there are many plugins and it's easy to integrate. There is a large user base to provide community support, which I find very valuable. If I need to find a better way to do something, I can always get help from the community. Automation is about thinking outside of the box, and other users are constantly adding new plugins."

"Jenkins is particularly valuable since it saves time by automating manual tasks."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

"It is an old technology."

"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."

"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."

"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 terms of revenue, I have not observed much because it is holistically depending on the project."

"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."

"They could provide more features, so the recipes could be developed in a simpler and faster way. There is still a lot of room for improvement, providing better functionalities when creating recipes."

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

More Chef cons

"I sometimes face a bottleneck when installing the plugins on an offline machine. Mapping the dependencies and then installing the correct sequence of dependencies is a nightmare, and it took me two days to do it."

"The documentation is not helpful, as it is not user-friendly."

"Jenkins can improve by continuing to add additional plugins for all the new solutions that are coming out within the cloud sphere."

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

"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."

"The bug fix speed is very slow."

"The support for the latest Java Runtime Environment should be improved."

"They need to improve their documentation."

More Jenkins cons

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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

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

More Chef pricing and cost advice

"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."

"Some of the add-ons are too expensive."

"The solution is one of the lowest costs compared to competitors."

"Jenkins is an open-source platform."

"It could be cheaper because there are many solutions available in the market. We are paying yearly."

"Jenkins is open source and free."

"Jenkins is not expensive and reasonably priced."

"It is an open source."

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.

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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