Chef vs UrbanCode Deploy comparison

Progress Software and IBM are both solutions in the Release Automation category. Progress Software is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.3, while IBM is ranked #8. Progress Software holds a 1.8% mindshare in RA, compared to IBM’s 4.0% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Progress Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Chef

Read 25 Chef reviews

2,068 Views
517 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

UrbanCode Deploy

Read 27 UrbanCode Deploy reviews

1,551 Views
1,489 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: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. UrbanCode Deploy

February 2026

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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

5th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Build Automation (12th), Configuration Management (12th)

UrbanCode Deploy

Ranking in Release Automation

8th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Release Automation category, the mindshare of Chef is 1.8%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of UrbanCode Deploy is 4.0%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Release Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Chef	1.8%
UrbanCode Deploy	4.0%
Other	94.2%

Release 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.

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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

"Automation is everything. Having so many servers in production, many of our processes won't work nor scale. So, we look for tools to help us automate the process, and Chef is one of them."

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

"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."

"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."

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

"Using Chef for automating infrastructure and applications in my organization has helped us reduce manual tasks by more than forty percent, thereby saving significant revenue for the client."

"The most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."

"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."

More Chef pros

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

"The solution handles complex deployments very efficiently."

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

"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."

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

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

Cons

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

"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."

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

"Other things would be the need to use Cinc if you want to use the open-source version because Progress Software's policy on copyright is confusing for new users and it puts a barrier in the way to adoption because many small, medium enterprises, startups, and non-profits who might want to use Chef would find the whole Cinc versus Chef situation confusing and the fact that there is not an easy path to install Chef and then go to a paid version without having to change from Cinc to Chef or Chef to Cinc."

"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."

"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."

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

"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."

More Chef cons

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

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

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

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"Pricing for Chef is high."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

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

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

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

36%

Insurance Company

11%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

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	5
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	21

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...

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

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

February 2026

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

UrbanCode Deploy

January 2026

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

February 2026

Free Report: Chef vs. UrbanCode Deploy

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