Chef vs Spinnaker comparison

Progress Software and Spinnaker are both solutions in the Release Automation category. Progress Software is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.3, while Spinnaker is ranked #9 with an average rating of 6.5. Progress Software holds a 1.5% mindshare in RA, compared to Spinnaker’s 1.8% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Progress Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 75% of Spinnaker users who would recommend it.

Chef

Read 25 Chef reviews

1,630 Views
424 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Spinnaker

Read 4 Spinnaker reviews

505 Views
505 Comparison Views

75% willing to recommend

Chef

Spinnaker

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 7, 2025

Chef and Spinnaker compete in the software deployment automation category. Chef holds the upper hand in configuration management, while Spinnaker leads in continuous delivery and deployment capabilities.

Features: Chef supports infrastructure as code, providing a flexible approach to configuration management and automation. It allows for integration with third-party tools using its rich inventory collection capabilities. Spinnaker offers multi-cloud deployment management, emphasizing its robust continuous delivery features and ease of integration with major cloud providers, enhancing the deployment process and scalability.

Room for Improvement: Chef could improve its deployment capabilities, especially in rollback functionality, to match other tools in the market. Its processes might benefit from a more intuitive, human-readable interface for smaller scale operations. Spinnaker can enhance its support ecosystem by offering more comprehensive customer service options. Simplifying integration within existing diverse environments could further increase its appeal despite the initial setup complexity.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Chef supports both on-premises and cloud deployments and offers extensive documentation to meet a variety of infrastructure needs. Its comprehensive customer service is a notable strength. Spinnaker, optimized for cloud environments, provides an intuitive deployment strategy and plugin-support for major cloud providers, bolstered by community-driven support and additional assistance from third-party service providers.

Pricing and ROI: Chef's moderate setup cost focuses on long-term infrastructure efficiency and cost savings, making it a cost-effective option for configuration management. Spinnaker might involve higher setup costs due to integration complexities but the potential ROI can justify these expenses for large-scale operations seeking seamless deployment processes.

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

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Spinnaker

December 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

5th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Build Automation (12th), Configuration Management (12th)

Spinnaker

Ranking in Release Automation

9th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

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 Spinnaker is 1.8%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Release Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Chef	1.5%
Spinnaker	1.8%
Other	96.7%

Release Automation

Featured Reviews

Walter Ochieng Odhiambo

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.

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Anurag Bandyopadhyay

Product Development Engineer at Razorpay

Useful to create custom pipelines

Regarding areas for improvement, one significant issue is the lack of maker-checker flows to ensure that newly created pipelines are accurate and tested. We currently use an in-house abstraction over Spinnaker to verify pipeline specs, environment variables, etc. It would be beneficial if Spinnaker could offer this functionality within their product.

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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

"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."

"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 automation."

"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."

"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."

"Chef offers valuable features in infrastructure as code, where it uses cookbooks and recipes written in Ruby language for detailed and flexible configuration of systems and applications."

"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."

"All the use cases—configurations, deployment, compliance, and other common situations—demonstrate how helpful Chef is, and we found it very beneficial, which is why both my past organization and my current organization are using it."

More Chef pros

"The most valuable feature of Spinnaker is the rollback."

"Spinnaker is used for automating a variety of deployment tasks, infrastructure, provisioning tasks, and all kinds of things."

"The tool's most valuable feature is its intuitive interface for converting existing Kubernetes specs into working pipelines. It's easy for anyone to deploy anything on any environment when they need to test or deploy for a specific merchant or use case. Instead of going into the specs and changing different variables, they can do it through the UI, which is very useful."

"There is a good community around the product that makes troubleshooting possible."

Cons

"One thing that Chef needs to improve on is making it available in as many languages as possible."

"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."

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

"Chef has a very steep learning curve, especially for beginners."

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

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

"The learning curve is steep due to Chef's Ruby-based DSL and the complex components of cookbooks and recipes, which can be challenging for new users, especially those without programming backgrounds."

More Chef cons

"Spinnaker's configuration setup is too complicated and should be made easy."

"Log-wise, we need to understand why something has failed so that we can understand and try to fix it the moment the issue is reported. The solution could use more robust monitoring."

"Regarding areas for improvement, one significant issue is the lack of maker-checker flows to ensure that newly created pipelines are accurate and tested. We currently use an in-house abstraction over Spinnaker to verify pipeline specs, environment variables, etc. It would be beneficial if Spinnaker could offer this functionality within their product."

"Every time it goes to run a pipeline, it just generates a lot of data, and its database is not exactly tuned out of the box, meaning it is not tuned for high scalability."

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

"Spinnaker is an open-source product. The tool is completely free for users."

"The solution is open-source."

"Spinnaker is a free-to-use, open-source solution."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

12%

Retailer

Comms Service Provider

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	19

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...

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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...

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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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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Spinnaker?

The solution is open-source.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Spinnaker?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Spinnaker?

Spinnaker's main use case is deployment. We use it to create custom pipelines instead of manually deploying our HAN files. This allows us to deploy different services for staging, production, and o...

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

January 2026

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Release Automation

December 2025

Download Spinnaker 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

Spinnaker provides application management and deployment to help you release software changes with high velocity and confidence. Spinnaker is an open-source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform that combines a powerful and flexible pipeline management system with integrations to the major cloud providers. If you are looking to standardize your release processes and improve quality, Spinnaker is for you.

Spinnaker

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. Spinnaker

December 2025

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