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Chef vs Octopus Deploy comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 7, 2025

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
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (12th), Configuration Management (12th)
Octopus Deploy
Ranking in Release Automation
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Release Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 1.5%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Octopus Deploy is 2.0%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Release Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Chef1.5%
Octopus Deploy2.0%
Other96.5%
Release Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Walter Ochieng Odhiambo - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom
Automation has transformed daily infrastructure work and now frees teams to focus on new challenges
One thing that Chef needs to improve on is making it available in as many languages as possible. There should be a focus on how to make it understandable, not just to infrastructure people, but also to those working in monitoring. How can we ensure that it is part of their daily input? That is something that still has a small missing link. We are almost there, but it can help us achieve outcomes in the future in terms of objectives, not just workflows and visibility. How can we make real-time interactive dashboards more available? Look at what kind of tools can be integrated with them, not just working with the ones like Chef Kitchen and Habitat, but trying to make it even more flexible than what we have right now. On support, I think there should be more focus on how we can achieve AI automations in answering questions for beginners and addressing deep concerns without general manual management.
AbhishekSingh11 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."
"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."
"The product is useful for automating processes."
"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."
"Chef has impacted my organization positively by ensuring that consistent deployments across production and test environments help more effective testing and faster deployments mean that more work can be done in one release cycle."
"One thing that we've been able to do is a tiered permission model, allowing developers and their managers to perform their own operations in lower environments. This means a manager can go in and make changes to a whole environment, whereas a developer with less access may only be able to change individual components or be able to upgrade the version for software that they have control over."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"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 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

"Another area needing attention is better error messages, as we have found that Chef errors can sometimes be vague or too low-level to understand."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"One thing that Chef needs to improve on is making it available in as many languages as possible."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."
"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."
"Other things would be the need to use Cinc if you want to use the open-source version because Progress Software's policy on copyright is confusing for new users and it puts a barrier in the way to adoption because many small, medium enterprises, startups, and non-profits who might want to use Chef would find the whole Cinc versus Chef situation confusing and the fact that there is not an easy path to install Chef and then go to a paid version without having to change from Cinc to Chef or Chef to Cinc."
"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."
"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."
 

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."
"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."
"We are using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time."
"Chef is priced based on the number of nodes."
"Pricing for Chef is high."
"We are able to save in development time, deployment time, and it makes it easier to manage the environments."
"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
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Retailer
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
10%
Insurance Company
8%
Retailer
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise19
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Chef?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that we sidestepped it by using Cinc because none of the functionality that is exclusive to the paid version was actually in use in the orga...
What needs improvement with Chef?
I would add that Ruby is a domain-specific language in the Chef dialect, which is a learning curve, but so is Terraform and so is Ansible. The only feedback would be if they could come up with an i...
What is your primary use case for Chef?
My main use case for Chef is configuration and deployments. We receive blank servers and use Chef to build predefined application or appliance servers. A quick specific example of how I use Chef to...
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Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. Octopus Deploy and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.