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Chef vs LaunchDarkly comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Chef
Ranking in Build Automation
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Release Automation (8th), Configuration Management (16th)
LaunchDarkly
Ranking in Build Automation
17th
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

Arun S . - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 14, 2023
Useful for large infrastructure, reliable, but steep learning cureve
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. The solution is good to manage multiple large infrastructures. We can have 10 to 10,000 users using this solution and it manages them well.
James Bayhylle - PeerSpot reviewer
Jul 10, 2024
Provides risk-free releases with control access and A/B testing
It allowed us to deploy faster. Despite having a rigorous code review process that slowed things down, once the code was reviewed, LaunchDarkly enabled safe deployments. If there was ever an issue, we could easily roll back a particular release by simply turning off the feature flag. When configuring and setting this up, begin with feature sets that are relatively small in scope. This helps build the necessary skills to leverage the product effectively while maintaining control over the blast radius, thus reducing risk to your customers and application in case of misconfiguration. As you gain more experience with the solution, it's crucial to have a process to manage feature flag sprawl, as mentioned earlier. Implementing a life cycle management system for your feature flags is essential. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten because of its intuitiveness and ease of use.

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."
"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."
"This solution has improved my organization in the way that deployment has become very quick and orchestration is easy. If we have thousands of servers we can easily deploy in a small amount of time. We can deploy the applications or any kind of announcements in much less time."
"It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."
"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."
"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."
"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"The initial setup is very easy."
"It has really helped during the series of product lines and faster deployment and faster development."
"From the development side, it allows us to manage multiple things."
 

Cons

"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."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"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."
"It is an old technology."
"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."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"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."
"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 strongly believe they need to develop a strategy for handling situations where LaunchDarkly goes down."
"When the system has an excessive number of feature flags, managing them can become cumbersome."
"The feature where one feature flag is dependent on another could be explored more for our usage."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Chef is priced based on the number of nodes."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Pricing for Chef is high."
"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."
"We are using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for LaunchDarkly?
I am not sure about the pricing or setup costs. It is all handled by our organization.
What needs improvement with LaunchDarkly?
As of now, I do not see much room for improvement. The feature where one feature flag is dependent on another could be explored more for our usage.
What is your primary use case for LaunchDarkly?
Our developers are using LaunchDarkly. I am using it to turn on features.
 

Comparisons

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap
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Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. LaunchDarkly and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
813,418 professionals have used our research since 2012.