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 1.0% mindshare in BA, compared to LaunchDarkly’s 1.0% 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

1,243 Views
286 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

LaunchDarkly

Read 8 LaunchDarkly reviews

401 Views
401 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Chef

LaunchDarkly

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.

To learn more, read our detailed Chef vs. LaunchDarkly Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. LaunchDarkly

September 2025

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Helped 871,688 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

20th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Release Automation (11th), Configuration Management (19th)

LaunchDarkly

Ranking in Build Automation

12th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 1.0%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of LaunchDarkly is 1.0%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
LaunchDarkly	1.0%
Chef	1.0%
Other	98.0%

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

Aaron P

DevOps Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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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Ramya Nallamsetty

Associate at Cognizant

Enables us to target users and control what needs to be visible on their screens but it sometimes breaks down

We use LaunchDarkly for managing feature flags. It helps manage the keys to control what users view on our screens By managing the feature flags, we can target users and control what needs to be visible on their screens. I like that it offers the ability to control the flags. We need experience…

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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

"I wanted to monitor a hybrid cloud environment, one using AWS and Azure. If I have to provision/orchestrate between multiple cloud platforms, I can use Chef as a one-stop solution, to broker between those cloud platforms and orchestrate around them, rather than going directly into each of the cloud-vendors' consoles."

"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."

"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."

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

"The most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."

"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."

"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."

More Chef pros

"It has really helped during the series of product lines and faster deployment and faster development."

"The setup is easy."

"These features in my current project have helped my team because they allow us to specifically target users to start turning on functionality, we can monitor the behavior and make sure that it's behaving as expected when the feature toggle is turned on, and then we can increase the usage."

"I appreciate that we can release any feature in production and maintain control over it."

"The ability to turn off a flag is crucial when a task is not complete, especially if there is an error in a commit."

"From the development side, it allows us to manage multiple things."

"The initial setup is very easy."

"I like that it offers the ability to control the flags."

Cons

"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."

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

"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features 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."

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

"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."

"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."

"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."

More Chef cons

"The feature where one feature flag is dependent on another could be explored more for our usage."

"When the system has an excessive number of feature flags, managing them can become cumbersome."

"Right now, no improvements are needed."

"Managing team members and access to those team members was challenging. We could add team members through Terraform and do it programmatically, and then modify it through the user interface. However, once we started modifying things through the interface, we weren't able to go back to using any configuration programmatically for the team members."

"I strongly believe they need to develop a strategy for handling situations where LaunchDarkly goes down."

"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."

"I have used LaunchDarkly for around two and a half years and I haven't faced any issues with it."

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"Pricing for Chef is high."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

15%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	12

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	5

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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Compared 42% of the time

AWS CloudFormation vs Chef

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Compared 9% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Chef

Compared 8% of the time

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Harness vs LaunchDarkly

Compared 100% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

October 2025

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Build Automation

September 2025

Download 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

September 2025

Free Report: Chef vs. LaunchDarkly

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