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Chef vs Tekton 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
8.1
Chef improved deployment time, reduced human error, enhanced scalability, optimized resource use, and strengthened compliance and security management.
Sentiment score
6.9
Tekton provides significant cost and time savings, enhancing scalability and efficiency compared to Jenkins with cloud-native features.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.1
Customers commend Chef for its responsive support, active community, comprehensive documentation, and efficient issue resolution despite occasional delays.
Sentiment score
6.5
Tekton's support is effective with commendable Red Hat assistance, and many find community resources sufficient for issue resolution.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Chef is highly scalable, efficiently managing infrastructures of all sizes and accommodating numerous clients based on server capacity.
Sentiment score
6.8
Tekton excels in scalability within Kubernetes, but requires customization and improved resource allocation for seamless integration.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Users rate Chef's stability 8-9/10, comparing it favorably to competitors like Ansible, and find it stable for various use cases.
Sentiment score
7.0
Tekton is praised for stability and integration with Kubernetes, though configuration and resource management issues can affect performance.
Stability-wise, it is very stable, and we can seamlessly integrate.
 

Room For Improvement

Chef needs better support, pricing, role management, flexibility, documentation, integration, and improved automation to compete with Ansible.
Tekton needs better tool integration, flexible pipelines, improved UI, enhanced APIs, and comprehensive documentation for easier use.
Scalability means based on the load, it will automatically gain resources and run.
 

Setup Cost

Chef offers subscription plans with valuable automation features, but enterprise pricing is high and requires contacting sales for quotes.
Tekton is a cost-effective, open-source tool for Kubernetes environments, offering savings over licensed alternatives like Jenkins.
 

Valuable Features

Chef offers compliance, easy configuration management, and automation for IT infrastructure, integrating with CI processes and supporting multiple clouds.
Tekton excels in Kubernetes integration, scalability, and automation, streamlining CI/CD with flexibility and compatibility for diverse workflows.
A proper DevOps engineer can help once or twice, and development teams can easily adapt to that, make small shell script changes in the steps, understand the process, and work with it.
 

Categories and Ranking

Chef
Ranking in Build Automation
20th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Release Automation (11th), Configuration Management (18th)
Tekton
Ranking in Build Automation
2nd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 0.6%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tekton is 11.5%, up from 11.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Aaron  P - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Prasad Gupta - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficient CI/CD management with significant cost reduction and a user-friendly setup
One area for improvement is the number of CRDs created during installation. Tekton currently creates 10 to 11CRDs, which can be overwhelming. Instead, it would be better to have just one CRD that can handle all the information and create other necessary components automatically. Additionally, more integration capabilities for security, such as DAST, SAST, and IAST, should be directly built into Tekton to facilitate easier implementation of security features.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
15%
Retailer
9%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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.
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.
How does Tekton compare with Jenkins?
When you are evaluating tools for automating your own GitOps-based CI/CD workflow, it is important to keep your requirements and use cases in mind. Tekton deployment is complex and it is not very e...
What do you like most about Tekton?
Its seamless integration with Kubernetes, being built on top of it and utilizing Custom Resource Definitions, ensures a smooth experience within Kubernetes environments exclusively.
What needs improvement with Tekton?
I didn't get the intention of scalability. Scalability means based on the load, it will automatically gain resources and run. The question of pipeline scalability remains unclear. It's quite easy t...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap
The Home Depot, PayPal, Target, HSBC, McKesson, Oncology Venture
Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. Tekton and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.