Chef vs UrbanCode Deploy comparison

Progress Software and IBM are both solutions in the Release Automation category. Progress Software is ranked #11 with an average rating of 7.0, while IBM is ranked #7. Progress Software holds a 1.4% mindshare in RA, compared to IBM’s 4.9% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Progress Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Chef

Read 19 Chef reviews

1,243 Views
298 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

UrbanCode Deploy

Read 27 UrbanCode Deploy reviews

1,373 Views
1,304 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Chef

UrbanCode Deploy

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 7, 2025

Chef and UrbanCode Deploy compete in the DevOps automation tools arena. Chef is popular for its pricing and support, while UrbanCode Deploy is favored for its comprehensive feature set that many users feel justifies its cost.

Features: Chef provides strong infrastructure automation, configuration management, and integration capabilities, enabling it to manage complex tasks efficiently and support infrastructure as code. UrbanCode Deploy excels in deployment automation, advanced release management, and seamless application delivery with extensive integration capabilities, making it ideal for complex environments.

Room for Improvement: Chef could enhance deployment capabilities and rollback support, improve ease of use, and further develop its community support. UrbanCode Deploy might benefit from simplifying its learning curve, expanding its documentation for new users, and offering more flexibility in pricing for various enterprise sizes.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Chef offers quick deployment and flexible infrastructure management, ideal for rapid iterations and varying environments. UrbanCode Deploy features a detailed deployment model suitable for enterprises needing intricate release processes, with strong customer service and comprehensive documentation, catering to complex enterprise deployment scenarios.

Pricing and ROI: Chef is known for its cost-effective solutions with low initial setup costs and efficient infrastructure automation maximizing ROI. UrbanCode Deploy, though more expensive, offers significant ROI for extensive deployment infrastructures with feature-rich offerings that justify the investment for those prioritizing advanced deployment automation.

To learn more, read our detailed Chef vs. UrbanCode Deploy Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. UrbanCode Deploy

September 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)

UrbanCode Deploy

Ranking in Release Automation

7th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Release Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 1.4%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of UrbanCode Deploy is 4.9%, up from 3.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Release Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
UrbanCode Deploy	4.9%
Chef	1.4%
Other	93.7%

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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AK13

DevOps Engineer at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

A handy interface that includes buttons or drag-and-drop options for all functionality

Our company uses the solution for standard, blue-green, and complex deployments. We have 250 users throughout our company. The solution handles complex deployments very efficiently. The user interface includes buttons or drag-and-drop options for all functionality. It is easy to create component…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."

"The scalability of the product is quite nice."

"Stable and scalable configuration management and automation tool. Installing it is easy. Its most valuable feature is its compliance, e.g. it's very good."

"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."

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

"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."

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

"One thing that we've been able to do is a tiered permission model, allowing developers and their managers to perform their own operations in lower environments. This means a manager can go in and make changes to a whole environment, whereas a developer with less access may only be able to change individual components or be able to upgrade the version for software that they have control over."

More Chef pros

"The stability is good. I haven't experienced any issues."

"Stable solution that's good for automating the CI/CD pipeline: from development to production."

"The solution handles complex deployments very efficiently."

"The most valuable feature is the snapshot functionality, which allows us to access previous versions of the artifacts."

"The most valuable functionality is the ability to define the deployment process, schedule the deployment and automatically execute the deployments to different environments."

"It is very easy to make a software release. It used to take us at least a couple of hours to make a release, now we went to production with a new one last night. This new release took me five minutes."

Cons

"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."

"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."

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

"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."

"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Chef cons

"I would like to have the agent up and running at all times, as opposed to only while it is in the DevOps pipeline."

"The interface allows access in a number of ways but that can be confusing."

"The scalability of this application needs improvement. Changes and variations in the application become bottlenecks as they need to be more seamless and comfortable."

"The technical support of the solution could definitely be improved as PMRs take long to resolve."

"I certainly would like to have a better way to pass information between deployment steps using UrbanCode Deploy because that's really difficult to do."

"I would like to see more reporting for container architecture."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

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

"We are able to save in development time, deployment time, and it makes it easier to manage the environments."

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

"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."

"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."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

"The cost of the solution is high but it offers great ROI."

"The licensing fees for this solution are based on the number of servers that are being deployed and the number of agents that you have."

"Considering COVID-19, the price is too high."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

16%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

41%

Insurance Company

13%

Computer Software Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	12

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	21

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

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Comparisons

BigFix vs Chef

Compared 42% of the time

AWS CloudFormation vs Chef

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Compared 9% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Chef

Compared 8% of the time

More Chef Competitors

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs UrbanCode Deploy

Compared 24% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs UrbanCode Deploy

Compared 23% of the time

GitLab vs UrbanCode Deploy

Compared 23% of the time

Octopus Deploy vs UrbanCode Deploy

Compared 11% of the time

Spinnaker vs UrbanCode Deploy

Compared 7% of the time

More UrbanCode Deploy Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

October 2025

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

UrbanCode Deploy

October 2025

Download UrbanCode Deploy product report

Also Known As

No data available

uDeploy

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

IBM UrbanCode Deploy orchestrates and automates the deployment of applications, middleware configuration, and database changes into development, test, and production environments—local, dedicated or shared cloud environments—accelerating time to market and reducing cost by shrinking manual efforts from days to minutes with automation, while reducing risk by cutting deployment errors by up to 90 percent.

IBM

Sample Customers

Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap

As policy, IBM does not release customer names on non-IBM web sites. However, public DevOps and UrbanCode Deploy case studies can be found here. IBM's UrbanCode Deploy customers span Small-Medium Businesses to Fortune 500 companies across all industries worldwide.

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. UrbanCode Deploy

September 2025

Free Report: Chef vs. UrbanCode Deploy

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