Chef vs Octopus Deploy comparison

Progress Software and Octopus Deploy are both solutions in the Release Automation category. Progress Software is ranked #12 with an average rating of 7.0, while Octopus Deploy is ranked #13. Progress Software holds a 1.2% mindshare in RA, compared to Octopus Deploy’s 2.8% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Progress Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Octopus Deploy users who would recommend it.

Chef

Read 19 Chef reviews

318 Views
75 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Octopus Deploy

Read 3 Octopus Deploy reviews

837 Views
187 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Chef

Octopus Deploy

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 7, 2025

Chef and Octopus Deploy compete in IT automation and deployment. Octopus Deploy stands out for ease of deployment and feature set, while Chef offers better customization and integration capabilities.

Features: Chef provides robust automation frameworks, extensive integrations, and scalability. Octopus Deploy focuses on streamlined deployment processes, strong suite of release management tools, and automation of complex deployment workflows. Chef emphasizes automation and configuration, whereas Octopus Deploy highlights deployment management and orchestration.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Octopus Deploy offers a straightforward deployment model with user-focused experience and support, enhancing ease of deployment. Chef has a more complex deployment process with a steeper learning curve, requiring deeper technical expertise. Octopus Deploy tends to deliver faster implementations with responsive support.

Pricing and ROI: Chef's pricing includes substantial upfront costs but offers long-term ROI through flexibility and configuration options. Octopus Deploy has competitive initial pricing models, delivering quicker ROI due to efficient deployment capabilities and reduced setup time. Chef focuses on initial investment and customization, while Octopus Deploy emphasizes cost-effectiveness and speed to ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Chef vs. Octopus Deploy Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Octopus Deploy

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 Release Automation

12th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Build Automation (20th), Configuration Management (18th)

Octopus Deploy

Ranking in Release Automation

13th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Release Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 1.2%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Octopus Deploy is 2.8%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Release 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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AbhishekSingh11

Infrastructure Solutions Architect at a real estate/law firm with 10,001+ employees

Easy to set up with intuitive UI and good reliability

I haven't used support. Since it is on-prem, our tech support would manage to troubleshoot. There might have been instances where there have been some issues with the on-prem version that I don't know of. Our tech support may have touched base with the. However, I don't have that level of visibility.

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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

"The solution is easy to use and learn, and it easily automates all the code and infrastructure."

"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."

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

"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."

"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 scalability of the product is quite nice."

"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."

More Chef pros

"The UI is very intuitive."

"The rollback feature has been most valuable. We can write scripts from scratch. Octopus maintains an independent package for every deployment."

"Deployment is valuable. It deploys well."

Cons

"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."

"It is an old technology."

"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

More Chef cons

"You've got to jump through a few hoops to get some things configured, but if set up, you can do so many different things in it. So, there is complexity."

"There could be scope for more integration with other platforms."

"This solution could be improved by making it easier to divide variables in YAML file or JSON files."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

"We are using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time."

"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."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

"I don't know the exact cost, but it's not exorbitant. It may be a couple of thousand dollars a year or something like that. I'm not sure, but it's reasonable. We get value for money out of it."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

15%

University

Healthcare Company

Educational Organization

24%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

13%

Insurance Company

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.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Chef?

Chef is priced based on the number of nodes.

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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

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Comparisons

BigFix vs Chef

Compared 46% of the time

AWS Systems Manager vs Chef

Compared 15% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Chef

Compared 11% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 10% of the time

More Chef Competitors

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Octopus Deploy

Compared 24% of the time

Spinnaker vs Octopus Deploy

Compared 24% of the time

UrbanCode Deploy vs Octopus Deploy

Compared 19% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Octopus Deploy

Compared 15% of the time

AWS CodeDeploy vs Octopus Deploy

Compared 11% of the time

More Octopus Deploy Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

June 2025

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Release Automation

June 2025

Download Octopus Deploy 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

Octopus Deploy is the most popular deployment automation tool in the world. Our software is used by teams to deploy .NET, Java, Node, and database applications, to hundreds and thousands of servers in the cloud and on-premises.

Octopus Deploy

Sample Customers

Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap

Microsoft, NASA, Cisco, Domain, HP, Symantec, 3M, Philips

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Octopus Deploy

June 2025

Free Report: Chef vs. Octopus Deploy

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