Chef vs Tekton comparison

Progress Software and Google are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Progress Software is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.3, while Google is ranked #2 with an average rating of 7.9. Progress Software holds a 1.5% mindshare in BA, compared to Google’s 7.9% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Progress Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of Google users who would recommend it.

Chef

Read 25 Chef reviews

1,630 Views
424 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Tekton

Read 37 Tekton reviews

3,473 Views
3,473 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Chef

Tekton

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Chef and Tekton are prominent solutions in automation and CI/CD pipelines. Chef appears advantageous in configuration management owing to its mature ecosystem, while Tekton's robust capabilities in integrating cloud-native features make it a strong contender for CI/CD pipelines.

Features: Chef's extensive library of cookbooks facilitates infrastructure automation through a comprehensive ecosystem. Its ease of use in writing recipes and versatility allows for managing a large number of servers efficiently. Tekton offers seamless integration with Kubernetes, supporting cloud-native CI/CD pipelines with flexibility and scalability. Its customizable pipelines and automatic scalability benefit developers in managing diverse tasks efficiently.

Room for Improvement: Chef could enhance its deployment processes to better align with market leaders and improve its rollback capabilities. Documentation and expanded integrations with third-party tools may also benefit users. Tekton could improve its log management and technical support access. Enhancements in usability for beginners and clearer guidance documentation could make it more approachable.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Chef provides user-friendly deployment tools across various environments with structured support channels and a vast community. In contrast, Tekton's deployment model is highly flexible, offering support from community sources and integrating seamlessly with Kubernetes, appealing to cloud-based teams seeking adaptability.

Pricing and ROI: Chef's pricing includes a higher initial setup cost due to licensing, but it promises a good return on investment through efficient infrastructure management. Tekton's open-source model ensures cost efficiency, making it a viable option for organizations focusing on CI/CD processes with a strong emphasis on cost-effective continuous integration and delivery.

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

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Tekton

December 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 881,082 peers since 2012

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

6.9

Tekton provides significant cost and time savings, enhancing scalability and efficiency compared to Jenkins with cloud-native features.

The return has been far more hours saved than spent.

reviewer2787969

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.

reviewer2787357

Site Reliability Engineer at Granicus Inc.

We have seen significant improvement in the time and the way we make changes to the infrastructure.

Sai Chandra

Principal Engineer at Wipro Limited

For more quotes and insights, download the Chef report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Tekton report

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

6.5

Tekton's support is effective with commendable Red Hat assistance, and many find community resources sufficient for issue resolution.

We usually work with the Chef teams and community support, who are always willing to assist.

Walter Ochieng Odhiambo

Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom

For more quotes and insights, download the Chef report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Tekton report

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

6.8

Tekton excels in scalability within Kubernetes, but requires customization and improved resource allocation for seamless integration.

We leverage both to achieve the best option possible for scaling.

Walter Ochieng Odhiambo

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.

reviewer2787357

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.

reviewer2787969

Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Chef report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Tekton report

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

7.0

Tekton is praised for stability and integration with Kubernetes, though configuration and resource management issues can affect performance.

It is a good tool to work with, offering a strong developer experience and community support.

Walter Ochieng Odhiambo

Software Engineer and Tester at Safaricom

Chef is stable.

reviewer2787969

Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

In my experience, Chef is quite stable most of the time.

Sai Chandra

Principal Engineer at Wipro Limited

For more quotes and insights, download the Chef report

Stability-wise, it is very stable, and we can seamlessly integrate.

reviewer2741265

Software engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Tekton report

Room For Improvement

Chef needs improved simplicity, integration, performance, documentation, better error messages, enhanced support, and usability for wider adoption.

Tekton needs better tool integration, flexible pipelines, improved UI, enhanced APIs, and comprehensive documentation for easier use.

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.

Walter Ochieng Odhiambo

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.

reviewer2787357

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.

reviewer2787969

Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Chef report

Scalability means based on the load, it will automatically gain resources and run.

reviewer2741265

Software engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Tekton report

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find Chef's pricing flexible but complex, appreciating AWS Marketplace integration despite preferring cheaper open-source alternatives.

Tekton is a cost-effective, open-source tool for Kubernetes environments, offering savings over licensed alternatives like Jenkins.

Licensing looks reasonable compared to the manual work of managing whole data centers with even 10,000 servers.

Walter Ochieng Odhiambo

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.

reviewer2787969

Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Chef report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Tekton report

Valuable Features

Chef automates configuration management, supporting scalability, ease of use, and efficiency, ideal for large-scale cloud environments with community support.

Tekton excels in Kubernetes integration, scalability, and automation, streamlining CI/CD with flexibility and compatibility for diverse workflows.

Security is a key aspect that Chef can automate, monitor new features that are available, and even do patches without you getting involved.

Walter Ochieng Odhiambo

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.

reviewer2787357

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.

reviewer2787969

Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Chef report

Tekton is highly customizable. With Kubernetes, we can customize on our own and create custom builders.

reviewer2741265

Software engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Tekton report

Categories and Ranking

Chef

Ranking in Build Automation

12th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Release Automation (5th), Configuration Management (12th)

Tekton

Ranking in Build Automation

2nd

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

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 Tekton is 7.9%, down from 12.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Tekton	7.9%
Chef	1.5%
Other	90.6%

Build 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.

Read full review

reviewer2741265

Software engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Benefit from a smooth learning curve and efficient adaptability

After seeing Jenkins and Tekton, I think Tekton is quite built on top of Kubernetes, so the learning curve is minimal. If you are working with Kubernetes, then OpenShift created Tekton on top of that, making it easily adaptable. Tekton is highly customizable. With Kubernetes, we can customize on our own and create custom builders. If teams have time and want to make enhancements, they can do it themselves. Whatever OpenShift is providing regarding Tekton is sufficient. It is easy to use because we don't need to write every pod step every time. 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.

Read full review

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881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

12%

Retailer

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

22%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	22

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Chef?

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Tekton?

We use Tekton for build and deployments. For LMP testing, we use the Tekton pipeline. We also use GitHub CI/CD. For infrastructure pipelines and Infrastructure as Code (IaC), we use Tekton. Previou...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 16% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 7% of the time

AWS CloudFormation vs Chef

Compared 7% of the time

GitHub Actions vs Chef

Compared 7% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Compared 6% of the time

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GitHub Actions vs Tekton

Compared 27% of the time

GitLab vs Tekton

Compared 24% of the time

Jenkins vs Tekton

Compared 7% of the time

Harness vs Tekton

Compared 7% of the time

Bamboo vs Tekton

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

January 2026

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

Tekton

January 2026

Download Tekton 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

Tekton is a powerful yet flexible Kubernetes-native open-source framework for creating continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) systems. It lets you build, test, and deploy across multiple cloud providers or on-premises systems by abstracting away the underlying implementation details.

Google

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

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. Tekton

December 2025

Free Report: Chef vs. Tekton

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