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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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.7
Chef enhances work efficiency and ROI by streamlining deployment, reducing manual labor, and supporting scalable infrastructure management.
Sentiment score
8.5
Jenkins provides excellent ROI by being free, enhancing satisfaction, streamlining deployment, reducing errors, and lowering costs.
The return has been far more hours saved than spent.
Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Chef has provided a return on investment, particularly in needing fewer employees, as the tool significantly reduces the amount of human work required for many tasks.
Site Reliability Engineer 2 at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
We have seen significant improvement in the time and the way we make changes to the infrastructure.
Principal Engineer at Wipro Limited
Using Jenkins returns a strong investment because it significantly helps our team and organization by reducing human error and the need for fewer employees.
Site Reliability Engineer 2 at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.8
Chef's customer support varies, with positive presales support, but challenges lead users to community forums and AWS for help.
Sentiment score
6.5
Jenkins relies on robust community support for answers, while CloudBees offers varying response times for additional assistance.
We usually work with the Chef teams and community support, who are always willing to assist.
Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom
customer support was really helpful, staying in touch until we received a permanent solution.
Site Reliability Engineer 2 at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Chef is praised for managing numerous nodes efficiently in diverse cloud environments despite some challenges with scaling.
Sentiment score
7.2
Jenkins is scalable and adaptable, effectively managing many jobs, with enhanced capabilities via Kubernetes and Docker integration.
We leverage both to achieve the best option possible for scaling.
Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom
Chef's scalability handles a large number of nodes easily, allowing us to manage hundreds of servers consistently using the same set of cookbooks.
Site Reliability Engineer 2 at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Chef's scalability is evident as the public sector organization I work at serves a population of 5 million, and we have had no problems with scaling.
Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Jenkins' scalability is really great based on our experience; it is very stable and reliable.
Site Reliability Engineer 2 at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Chef offers reliable performance, minimal disruptions, and effective scalability, with high stability ratings and strong community support.
Sentiment score
7.1
Jenkins is generally stable with occasional issues, but performance improves significantly with better hardware and recent updates.
It is a good tool to work with, offering a strong developer experience and community support.
Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom
Chef is stable.
Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
In my experience, Chef is quite stable most of the time.
Principal Engineer at Wipro Limited
 

Room For Improvement

Chef needs improved simplicity, integration, performance, documentation, better error messages, enhanced support, and usability for wider adoption.
Jenkins requires UI/UX enhancements, plugin stability, better integration, improved documentation, and more effective troubleshooting for user satisfaction.
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.
Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom
Self-healing infrastructure continuously verifies that the system matches the desired state and can auto-correct configuration changes during the next run.
Site Reliability Engineer 2 at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
To improve Chef, making an interface with another language such as Python or Java that is well understood, as capable as Ruby, and even more widely adopted would demystify it a bit.
Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Improvements are necessary for better cloud-native scaling, auto-scaling agents, performance optimizations, and easier distributed setups.
Site Reliability Engineer 2 at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find Chef's pricing flexible but complex, appreciating AWS Marketplace integration despite preferring cheaper open-source alternatives.
Jenkins is cost-effective and open-source, with additional costs for infrastructure and an enterprise edition offering extra features.
Licensing looks reasonable compared to the manual work of managing whole data centers with even 10,000 servers.
Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom
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 organization.
Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Jenkins' licensing cost is completely free under the open source MIT license and maintained by the Jenkins community, so there is no license fee, no per-user cost, and no subscription required.
Site Reliability Engineer 2 at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Valuable Features

Chef automates configuration management, supporting scalability, ease of use, and efficiency, ideal for large-scale cloud environments with community support.
Jenkins excels in automation, integration, and scalability with its robust ecosystem, enhancing collaboration, efficiency, and reliability.
Security is a key aspect that Chef can automate, monitor new features that are available, and even do patches without you getting involved.
Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom
Chef can manage hundreds or thousands of servers effortlessly, allowing for easy rollout of a single cookbook change to all machines.
Site Reliability Engineer 2 at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
When you have infrastructure as code and you already have everything apart from the environment-specific config, which you can specify in variables, then it is not only more repeatable and reliable, it is faster.
Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The best feature that truly makes it an invaluable tool for DevOps teams is its ability to treat pipelines as code, its massive plugin library, and its robust support for distributed builds.
Site Reliability Engineer 2 at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Chef
Ranking in Build Automation
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
25
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
93
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
ProductMarket Share (%)
Jenkins7.2%
Chef1.9%
Other90.9%
Build Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Walter Ochieng Odhiambo - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
KS
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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Comparison Review

it_user184734 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Retailer
8%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business28
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise57
 

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.
 

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: February 2026.
882,606 professionals have used our research since 2012.