Chef vs Octopus Deploy comparison

Progress Software and Octopus Deploy are both solutions in the Release Automation category. Progress Software is ranked #11 with an average rating of 7.0, while Octopus Deploy is ranked #12. 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

1,238 Views
272 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Octopus Deploy

Read 3 Octopus Deploy reviews

726 Views
726 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: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Octopus Deploy

July 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

11th

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

12th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Release Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 1.2%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Octopus Deploy is 2.8%, up from 1.7% 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

"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."

"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."

"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."

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

"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."

"Manual deployments came to a halt completely. Server provisioning became lightning fast. Chef-docker enabled us to have fewer sets of source code for different purposes. Configuration management was a breeze and all the servers were as good as immutable servers."

"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."

"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."

More Chef pros

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

"The UI is very intuitive."

"Deployment is valuable. It deploys well."

Cons

"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."

"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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."

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

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

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing for Chef is high."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

18%

Computer Software Company

15%

Retailer

University

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

14%

Insurance Company

Retailer

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.

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

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Comparisons

BigFix vs Chef

Compared 39% of the time

AWS CloudFormation vs Chef

Compared 10% of the time

AWS Systems Manager vs Chef

Compared 10% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Chef

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 7% of the time

More Chef Competitors

Spinnaker vs Octopus Deploy

Compared 21% of the time

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Octopus Deploy

Compared 21% of the time

UrbanCode Deploy vs Octopus Deploy

Compared 19% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Octopus Deploy

Compared 17% of the time

AWS CodeDeploy vs Octopus Deploy

Compared 13% of the time

More Octopus Deploy Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

August 2025

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Release Automation

July 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

July 2025

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