Chef vs Spinnaker comparison

Progress Software and Spinnaker are both solutions in the Release Automation category. Progress Software is ranked #12 with an average rating of 7.0, while Spinnaker is ranked #8 with an average rating of 7.3. Progress Software holds a 1.2% mindshare in RA, compared to Spinnaker’s 1.5% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Progress Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 75% of Spinnaker users who would recommend it.

Chef

Read 19 Chef reviews

318 Views
75 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Spinnaker

Read 4 Spinnaker reviews

362 Views
118 Comparison Views

75% willing to recommend

Chef

Spinnaker

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Spinnaker

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)

Spinnaker

Ranking in Release Automation

8th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

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 Spinnaker is 1.5%, up from 0.6% 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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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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

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

"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."

"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 product is useful for automating processes."

"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."

"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."

More Chef pros

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

"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."

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

Cons

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

"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."

"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."

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

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

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

"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."

"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."

More Chef cons

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"Pricing for Chef is high."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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 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."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

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

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

"The solution is open-source."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

15%

University

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

19%

Retailer

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.

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

What do you like most about Spinnaker?

The most valuable feature of Spinnaker is the rollback.

See all answers

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

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

Octopus Deploy vs Spinnaker

Compared 41% of the time

GitLab vs Spinnaker

Compared 24% of the time

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Spinnaker

Compared 20% of the time

UrbanCode Deploy vs Spinnaker

Compared 15% of the time

More Spinnaker Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

June 2025

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Release Automation

June 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

June 2025

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