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Chef vs LaunchDarkly comparison

Progress Software and LaunchDarkly are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Progress Software is ranked #20 with an average rating of 7.0, while LaunchDarkly is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.0. Progress Software holds a 0.5% mindshare in BA, compared to LaunchDarkly’s 0.4% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Progress Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of LaunchDarkly users who would recommend it.
Chef
Read 19 Chef reviews
  • 277 Views
  • 154 Comparison Views
95% willing to recommend
LaunchDarkly
Read 7 LaunchDarkly reviews
  • 174 Views
  • 38 Comparison Views
100% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Chef and LaunchDarkly compete in the software development and deployment category. Chef tends to have the upper hand due to its cost-effective solutions and robust support, whereas LaunchDarkly excels in delivering advanced features.

Features: Chef offers automation, infrastructure management, and cloud integration with extensive configuration capabilities. LaunchDarkly provides feature flagging, real-time updates, and experimentation options for seamless deployment without service interruption.

Room for Improvement: Chef's complexity in initial setup could be simplified, especially for less experienced users. Enhancing the rollback process would also be beneficial. LaunchDarkly might improve by offering more flexible pricing and enhancing its integration capabilities with third-party tools. Improvements in offline support could further enhance user experience for both products.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Chef’s script-based deployment requires experienced personnel and offers comprehensive support. LaunchDarkly’s cloud-focused deployment is easier and faster, with streamlined service and proactive online resources, facilitating efficient management for teams.

Pricing and ROI: Chef provides a competitive, transparent pricing model appealing to budget-conscious businesses. Its strong support network contributes to ROI through reduced downtime. LaunchDarkly’s advanced features justify its potential higher setup costs, offering substantial ROI gains by improving delivery speed and feature management efficiencies.

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Buyer's Guide
Chef vs. LaunchDarkly
June 2025
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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
20th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Release Automation (12th), Configuration Management (18th)
LaunchDarkly
Ranking in Build Automation
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 0.5%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of LaunchDarkly is 0.4%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Aaron P - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation
In terms of improvement, Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation. There is also an issue with shared resources like cookbooks lacking context, which could lead to problems when multiple companies use them. Chef should aim for wider availability, better flexibility, clearer documentation, and improved management of shared resources to prevent conflicts. Many companies are now moving to Ansible, so I would recommend better documentation, easier customer use, and simpler integration. I have concerns about the complexity of migrating to different servers and would prefer a simpler process.
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James Bayhylle - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
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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

"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."
"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."
"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."
"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."
"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 solution is easy to use and learn, and it easily automates all the code and infrastructure."
"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"The most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."
More Chef pros
"From the development side, it allows us to manage multiple things."
"I appreciate that we can release any feature in production and maintain control over it."
"The initial setup is very easy."
"I like that it offers the ability to control the flags."
"The setup is easy."
"The ability to turn off a flag is crucial when a task is not complete, especially if there is an error in a commit."
"It has really helped during the series of product lines and faster deployment and faster development."
 

Cons

"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."
"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."
"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"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."
"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."
"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."
More Chef cons
"I have used LaunchDarkly for around two and a half years and I haven't faced any issues with it."
"Right now, no improvements are needed."
"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."
"Fetching information about multiple flags in a single action would be beneficial."
"We need experience to use it, and the initial setup can be difficult. Also, sometimes it has breakdowns."
"The feature where one feature flag is dependent on another could be explored more for our usage."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."
"Chef is priced based on the number of nodes."
"We are using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time."
"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."
"Pricing for Chef is high."
"We are able to save in development time, deployment time, and it makes it easier to manage the environments."
More Chef pricing and cost advice
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
15%
University
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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.
See all answers
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Chef?
Chef is priced based on the number of nodes.
See all answers
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.
See all answers
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for LaunchDarkly?
I consider the pricing to be high.
See all answers
What needs improvement with LaunchDarkly?
We need experience to use it, and the initial setup can be difficult. Also, sometimes it has breakdowns. I would rate LaunchDarkly a seven out of ten.
See all answers
What is your primary use case for LaunchDarkly?
We use LaunchDarkly for managing feature flags. It helps manage the keys to control what users view on our screens.
See all answers
 

Comparisons

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VMware Aria Automation vs Chef Logo
VMware Aria Automation vs Chef
Compared 11% of the time
Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef Logo
Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef
Compared 10% of the time
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef Logo
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef
Compared 10% of the time
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Harness vs LaunchDarkly Logo
Harness vs LaunchDarkly
Compared 100% of the time
More LaunchDarkly Competitors
 

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
Chef
June 2025
Chef reportDownload Chef product report
Buyer's Guide
Build Automation
June 2025
LaunchDarkly reportDownload LaunchDarkly 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

LaunchDarkly is acclaimed for its feature flag management, enabling safer, high-velocity code deployment and precise control over rollouts. Organizations use it to test, deploy, and manage features across user segments, performing canary releases and quick rollbacks without new code deployment. Users praise its robust flag system, real-time updates, detailed targeting, comprehensive analytics, and strong integration capabilities, significantly enhancing development efficiency and productivity.

LaunchDarkly
 

Sample Customers

Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap
Information Not Available
Buyer's Guide
Chef vs. LaunchDarkly
June 2025
Free Report: Chef vs. LaunchDarkly
Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. LaunchDarkly and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
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