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).

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Chef vs. Jenkins

February 2026

Helped 881,515 peers since 2012

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"All the use cases—configurations, deployment, compliance, and other common situations—demonstrate how helpful Chef is, and we found it very beneficial, which is why both my past organization and my current organization are using it."

"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."

"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."

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

"Manual deployments came to a halt completely. Server provisioning became lightning fast. Chef-docker enabled us to have fewer sets of source code for different purposes. Configuration management was a breeze and all the servers were as good as immutable servers."

More Chef pros

"The solution is scalable and has a large number of plugins that can help you scale it to your needs."

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

"The initial setup is pretty simple."

"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."

"This solution has helped us in automating the build and test process, reducing time."

"I like the business logs. It's a very useful tool. Client-server communication is also very fast."

"Jenkins is a very mature product."

"I can install Jenkins for integration from multiple developers and automate application delivery, staging, and production environments."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."

"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."

"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."

"One thing that Chef needs to improve on is making it available in as many languages as possible."

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

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

"It is an old technology."

"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."

More Chef cons

"The user interface could be improved, and its reporting capabilities need enhancement. The plugins could be more effective."

"Tasks such as deployment, cloning, database switchover, and all other database missions and tasks are being done through Jenkins. If a job does not go through, at times the error message does not clearly indicate what caused the failure. I have to escalate it to the Jenkins DevOps team just to see what caused the failure. If the error message is clear, then I wouldn't have to escalate the issue to different teams."

"Jenkins is an open-source solution, and people tend to stay on the same version for a long time. When you look for an answer on Google, you often find something that doesn't relate to your implementation. The plugins are both the aspect of Jenkins and also one of the worst because the plugins can have different versions, so it's hard to figure out how to solve the problems."

"The UI must be more user-friendly."

"Sometimes you have Jenkins restarting because of OOM errors."

"Jenkins should adopt the Pipeline as Code approach by building a deployment pipeline using the Jenkins file."

"The major drawback with Jenkins is the lack of support."

"Jenkins could improve by allowing more scripting languages. We need to use Groovy scripting and it is difficult to debug and it is not ideal for creating file scripts. We tried to search for assistance but we did not find much help."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

"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."

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

More Chef pricing and cost advice

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

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

"The pricing for Jenkins is free."

"It is a free product."

"It's free software with a big community behind it, which is very good."

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

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

"Jenkins is not expensive and reasonably priced."

More Jenkins pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

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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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

12%

Retailer

Comms Service Provider

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	56

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

Download Chef product report

Chef

January 2026

Download Jenkins product report

January 2026

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

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