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Chef vs TeamCity comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.7
Chef enhances work efficiency and ROI by streamlining deployment, reducing manual labor, and supporting scalable infrastructure management.
Sentiment score
8.0
TeamCity enhances build efficiency and deployment across time zones, supporting automation for optimized resource allocation and ROI evaluation.
The return has been far more hours saved than spent.
Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Chef has provided a return on investment, particularly in needing fewer employees, as the tool significantly reduces the amount of human work required for many tasks.
Site Reliability Engineer at Granicus Inc.
We have seen significant improvement in the time and the way we make changes to the infrastructure.
Principal Engineer at Wipro Limited
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.8
Chef's customer support varies, with positive presales support, but challenges lead users to community forums and AWS for help.
Sentiment score
7.6
TeamCity's customer service is praised for professionalism, responsive support, comprehensive documentation, and effective community resources despite time zone challenges.
We usually work with the Chef teams and community support, who are always willing to assist.
Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Chef is praised for managing numerous nodes efficiently in diverse cloud environments despite some challenges with scaling.
Sentiment score
7.3
TeamCity enables scalable deployments with multiple agents, requiring regular maintenance, effectively supporting large-scale projects and numerous users.
We leverage both to achieve the best option possible for scaling.
Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom
Chef's scalability handles a large number of nodes easily, allowing us to manage hundreds of servers consistently using the same set of cookbooks.
Site Reliability Engineer at Granicus Inc.
Chef's scalability is evident as the public sector organization I work at serves a population of 5 million, and we have had no problems with scaling.
Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Chef offers reliable performance, minimal disruptions, and effective scalability, with high stability ratings and strong community support.
Sentiment score
7.7
TeamCity offers high reliability and stability, with minimal disruptions and effective resource management, despite occasional minor lags.
It is a good tool to work with, offering a strong developer experience and community support.
Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom
Chef is stable.
Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
In my experience, Chef is quite stable most of the time.
Principal Engineer at Wipro Limited
 

Room For Improvement

Chef needs improved simplicity, integration, performance, documentation, better error messages, enhanced support, and usability for wider adoption.
TeamCity's complex setup, poor UI navigation, and integration issues hinder efficiency, with needs for API, reporting, and alert improvements.
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.
Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom
Self-healing infrastructure continuously verifies that the system matches the desired state and can auto-correct configuration changes during the next run.
Site Reliability Engineer at Granicus Inc.
To improve Chef, making an interface with another language such as Python or Java that is well understood, as capable as Ruby, and even more widely adopted would demystify it a bit.
Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find Chef's pricing flexible but complex, appreciating AWS Marketplace integration despite preferring cheaper open-source alternatives.
TeamCity offers a developer-focused solution with scalable costs but requires an initial server setup expense despite a free version.
Licensing looks reasonable compared to the manual work of managing whole data centers with even 10,000 servers.
Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom
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 organization.
Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

Chef automates configuration management, supporting scalability, ease of use, and efficiency, ideal for large-scale cloud environments with community support.
TeamCity excels in build step flexibility, plugin support, cross-platform capabilities, Git integration, and intuitive usability for efficient pipeline management.
Security is a key aspect that Chef can automate, monitor new features that are available, and even do patches without you getting involved.
Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom
Chef can manage hundreds or thousands of servers effortlessly, allowing for easy rollout of a single cookbook change to all machines.
Site Reliability Engineer at Granicus Inc.
When you have infrastructure as code and you already have everything apart from the environment-specific config, which you can specify in variables, then it is not only more repeatable and reliable, it is faster.
Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Chef
Ranking in Build Automation
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Release Automation (5th), Configuration Management (12th)
TeamCity
Ranking in Build Automation
11th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 1.5%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of TeamCity is 6.1%, down from 7.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
TeamCity6.1%
Chef1.5%
Other92.4%
Build 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.
RG
IT Professional at NatWest Group
Versatile agent support boosts builds but UI and setup costs need refinement
TeamCity's user interface could be improved; specifically, the tree structure on the homepage is not clear, making it difficult to search for projects. Moreover, there are some limitations related to the version we were using. For instance, there were issues with agent specifications for particular build jobs and a timeout issue where jobs running longer than three hours would fail automatically.
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Comparison Review

it_user184734 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Administrator at Facebook
Jan 22, 2015
I generally find TeamCity a lot more intuitive than Jenkins.
Moving to TeamCity from Jenkins At work, we’re slowly migrating from Jenkins to TeamCity in the hope of ending some of our recurring problems with continuous integration. My use of Jenkins prior to this job has been almost strictly on a personal basis, although I pretty much only use Travis…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Retailer
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
 

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...
What do you like most about TeamCity?
One of the most beneficial features for us is the flexibility it offers in creating deployment steps tailored to different technologies.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for TeamCity?
Compared to new technologies, TeamCity is more expensive and is an older tool compared to tools like GitLab.
What needs improvement with TeamCity?
TeamCity's user interface could be improved; specifically, the tree structure on the homepage is not clear, making it difficult to search for projects. Moreover, there are some limitations related ...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap
Toyota, Xerox, Apple, MIT, Volkswagen, HP, Twitter, Expedia
Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. TeamCity and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.