Chef vs Spinnaker comparison

Progress Software and Spinnaker are both solutions in the Release Automation category. Progress Software is ranked #11 with an average rating of 7.0, while Spinnaker is ranked #9 with an average rating of 7.3. Progress Software holds a 1.1% mindshare in RA, compared to Spinnaker’s 1.3% 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

371 Views
231 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Spinnaker

Read 4 Spinnaker reviews

348 Views
201 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: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Spinnaker

April 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)

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 May 2025, in the Release Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 1.1%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spinnaker is 1.3%, 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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"The scalability of the product is quite nice."

More Chef pros

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

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

"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."

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

Cons

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

"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."

"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."

"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."

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

"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."

"I would like them to add database specific items, configuration items, and migration tools. Not necessarily on the builder side or the actual setup of the system, but more of a migration package for your different database sets, such as MongoDB, your extenders, etc. I want to see how that would function with a transition out to AWS for Aurora services and any of the RDBMS packages."

"It is an old technology."

More Chef cons

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

"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."

"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."

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

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

23%

Computer Software Company

17%

University

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

22%

Retailer

14%

Healthcare 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 33% of the time

AWS Systems Manager vs Chef

Compared 15% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Compared 11% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Chef

Compared 11% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 9% of the time

More Chef Competitors

Octopus Deploy vs Spinnaker

Compared 45% of the time

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Spinnaker

Compared 22% of the time

UrbanCode Deploy vs Spinnaker

Compared 18% of the time

GitLab vs Spinnaker

Compared 16% of the time

More Spinnaker Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

April 2025

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Release Automation

April 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

April 2025

Free Report: Chef vs. Spinnaker

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