We performed a comparison between Chef and SaltStack based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Configuration Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Intune is having all our devices compliant with our policies."
"The conditional access policies that we set up are very useful."
"The features I found most valuable in Intune are its user visibility and troubleshooting options."
"We can securely manage both company-owned devices and personal devices enrolled in our BYOD program."
"The most valuable feature of Intune is the central dashboard for compliance and policy management."
"Configuration profiles, remediation, scripts, and auto-pilot features are very good."
"It's not working perfectly, but Microsoft's Autopilot offers great visibility into automated deployment solutions."
"This product works very well for companies already using the full Microsoft suite."
"It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"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."
"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 most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."
"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."
"The product’s most valuable feature is its ability to provide environmental security."
"It is a highly stable solution."
"I want to build automation that is intelligent, part of the fabric of our environment, and is somewhat self-sustaining. I think SaltStack can help me do this."
"The ability to programmatically describe the desired state of a single, or an entire fleet of servers, on-premises, and in a cloud environment."
"The automation functionality has been most valuable. With a click of a button, we are able to automate provisioning, the build of new hardware and apply patches. These are all extremely important and differentiated tasks that can be automated in SaltStack."
"SaltStack has given us the ability to deal with systems at scale and rectify issues at scale."
"We monitor the configurations against CIS standards. We run CIS benchmarks and maintain configurations with higher CIS values for each server."
"Microsoft Intune is not user-friendly to manage and has room for improvement."
"Additional application deployment options e.g. MSI deployment with more complex parameters or additional side-by-side files, and non-MSI deployment options."
"The reporting is subpar. That's the only issue we have with Intune. We use another solution for that purpose."
"Deploying an app can be a complex process due to dependencies."
"No option to do end-to-en macOS management. Slow implementation of policies."
"Microsoft Intune could improve by being more user-friendly and having it geared toward device management. The graphic interface is not very good."
"Intune's areas for improvement revolve around security and certificate management."
"The UI also needs improvements because it is complex for end-users. We have had feedback from a few users in our organization who found the UI is not feasible for tracking and analyzing all the processes and monitoring all the devices."
"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."
"It is an old technology."
"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."
"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 rate this solution a nine because our use case and whatever we need is there. Ten out of ten is perfect. We have to go to IOD and stuff so they should consider things like this to make it a ten."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"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."
"This solution could be integrated with more hardware for an improved offering."
"It is difficult to set up."
"SaltStack's features are minimal."
"Web UI."
"There is a little bit of pain when it comes to libraries and what is needed to run the product."
"A hardened set of tests would be much appreciated."
"Its configuration process could be better."
Chef is ranked 15th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews while SaltStack is ranked 14th in Configuration Management with 33 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while SaltStack is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Chef writes "Useful for large infrastructure, reliable, but steep learning cureve". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SaltStack writes "Orchestration tool that powers automation of processes with the click of a button". Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager and CFEngine Enterprise, whereas SaltStack is most compared with VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Configuration Manager, HashiCorp Terraform, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and BMC TrueSight Server Automation. See our Chef vs. SaltStack report.
See our list of best Configuration Management vendors.
We monitor all Configuration Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
