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Chef vs vCenter Configuration Manager comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 16, 2024

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

Microsoft Intune
Sponsored
Ranking in Configuration Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
309
Ranking in other categories
Remote Access (2nd), Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) (1st), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (1st)
Chef
Ranking in Configuration Management
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (12th), Release Automation (5th)
vCenter Configuration Manager
Ranking in Configuration Management
10th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
8.2
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Configuration Management category, the mindshare of Microsoft Intune is 8.2%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Chef is 2.8%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of vCenter Configuration Manager is 1.5%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Configuration Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Microsoft Intune8.2%
vCenter Configuration Manager1.5%
Chef2.8%
Other87.5%
Configuration Management
 

Featured Reviews

AkashKamble - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr MacOS specialist engineer at Cyber24
Enables management of multiple operating systems with a single license
The best feature is that it's a Microsoft product, so if anything goes wrong, we get quick support for anything required. Remote system functionality allows us to sit anywhere and take control of any device via remote management. We can enhance security for clients' laptops with built-in Microsoft Defender, which is available with the Microsoft Intune license. We use it for reporting purposes through endpoint analytics. When pushing scripting, there are two types available: remediation script and reservation script. Through endpoint analytics, you can push defender policies to clients. It helps with reporting, inventory updates, and monitoring tenant status health.
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.
Nikhil Nikhil - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Operations Lead at TT Systems LLC
Compliance management has improved efficiency but licensing changes pose challenges
I am not using any advanced features or AI. I am employing a basic VMware vCenter setup for my infrastructure. Scalability has no major limitations, and the solution is efficient. Overall, it's satisfactory. I would rate the vCenter experience as seven out of ten due to concerns regarding license, pricing, and AI features.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Microsoft Intune has transformed my organization; we are managing to scale the Intune deployment across all our regions efficiently, and it works perfectly for our needs."
"The features I found most valuable in Intune are its user visibility and troubleshooting options."
"The user experience of Microsoft Intune is very friendly and the interface is very good."
"The solution has reduced the risk of security breaches by 30%."
"It is a cloud solution, and you can easily scale as your needs grow."
"The most useful features in Microsoft Intune are the policy enforcement and conditional access."
"Remote Wipe and Autopilot is one of the best features."
"When managing a large number of devices in an organization, it becomes easy to handle them on one platform using Microsoft Intune."
"The most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."
"If you're handy enough with DSL and you can present your own front-facing interface to your developers, then you can actually have a lot more granular control with Chef in operations over what developers can perform and what they can't."
"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."
"Chef benefited my organization by definitely reducing time because we were provisioning tens of thousands of servers."
"Chef has impacted my organization positively by ensuring that consistent deployments across production and test environments help more effective testing and faster deployments mean that more work can be done in one release cycle."
"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 has given us an easy time doing all that automation, security, and monitoring by automating the processes across all those servers so that we don't do manual work, going one place at a time to install updates."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of vCenter Configuration Manager is the automated processes."
"vCenter has some good user experience, and the initial setup is straightforward."
"It is a very stable solution."
"The interface is very user-friendly and the solution is simple to use."
"vCenter Configuration Manager is a stable solution that is very easy to manage and deploy."
"The features are easy to handle and straightforward."
"The management of vCenter Configuration Manager can support the UI interface. It helps in monitoring, logging alert and performance, forecasting the system to provide services in the environment."
"We can scale the solution as needed."
 

Cons

"For additional functionality, I suggest that Microsoft could expand on asset management. Since the platform is there, they could develop it into a full-fledged asset management system."
"They should make it easier to order it, however, that's generally true for everything from Microsoft."
"I would like to see Intune improve its handling of hybrid domain joins."
"It would be interesting to integrate the server side of Intune. Some group policy updates we have on the Windows Server side and possibly some on the client side could also be included."
"There is room for improvement in integrating additional features such as Purview and SharePoint activities into Intune."
"The most significant challenge is reporting and monitoring. The reporting accuracy for deploying applications and all aspects of Intune needs to be improved."
"When pushing anything from Microsoft Intune, the sync timing is 48 hours. While sometimes it takes 5 to 10 minutes, the official period given by Microsoft is within 48 hours, which can be time-consuming for policies, applications, or patches."
"Microsoft Intune lacks the ability to provide seamless remote assistance or remote control."
"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."
"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"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."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"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 ease of setup and installations could be improved."
"They could improve the hybrid-cloud environment and its management, not only for the local host but also including the connection between public and private cloud."
"Configuration Manager's reporting could be better. I need to use a third-party reporting solution to get the details. They could add reporting features similar to RVTools."
"There are some complexities within the system center. For example, we use two different applications for updates and the deployment of the machine. We also have another third party solution."
"There is room for improvement in operating and managing cluster environments and maintenance. And hardware environment visibility."
"The solution needs to add its own backup system because it has issues integrating with third-party solutions."
"The price could be reduced."
"The solution could be more integrated with the Microsoft environment."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."
"We are partners, so we receive some discount. However, from the customer's perspective, Microsoft Intune's pricing is competitive with non-Microsoft technology, and the price is good compared to other market competitors."
"Microsoft Intune is reasonably priced for large organizations that already have Microsoft Enterprise licenses, but it is less affordable for smaller businesses."
"I am not that aware of the pricing, but as compared to other MDM solutions, Microsoft is providing a lot of things at the organizational level. So, it is quite reasonable as compared to other MDM solutions."
"Its price is quite okay. I wish they provide certain additional features with the same license."
"They have categorized the licenses according to the size of the business. So, if it's a smaller organization, we can choose the license accordingly. If it's a big organization, then we can choose accordingly. Everything is clearly mentioned, and we can decide. It's suitable for all kinds of infrastructure, and that's very goo"
"Every customer used to purchase licenses based on their needs."
"The tool is cheaper than our company's other MDM tools."
"We are able to save in development time, deployment time, and it makes it easier to manage the environments."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"Their licensing costs are high. But I think for the scale that we are using, it's suitable. If you use it on a larger scale with many servers, you have to pay a lot of money for them. I think it's suitable for organizations that don't need expert people that want more money each year or each month because it's a straightforward solution. We prefer to pay for these products that are integrated and straightforward."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"The product is highly-priced."
"The pricing is mid-range so I rate it a six out of ten."
"While the pricing is reasonable for large corporations, it presents a substantial financial challenge for medium-sized businesses."
"The price of the solution is too expensive for us and we are looking to move to another solution."
"It is an expensive product."
"It's a large application. It consumes a lot of resources. Sometimes the price is too high for our customers. If they buy it directly from VMware, its hard to convince the customer that we will bring down the total cost of ownership, in the end."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Retailer
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business119
Midsize Enterprise47
Large Enterprise153
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise19
 

Questions from the Community

How does Microsoft Intune compare with VMware Workspace One?
Microsoft Intune is a great tool for managing a mobile device fleet while keeping access control. The solution makes ...
What are the pros and cons of Microsoft Intune?
Microsoft Intune is a great configuration management tool and has a lot of good things going for it. Here are some of...
How does Google Cloud Identity compare with Microsoft Intune?
Microsoft Intune offers not only an easy-to-deploy data protection and productivity management solution, but also ...
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 fun...
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 Terrafo...
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...
What do you like most about vCenter Configuration Manager?
Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for vCenter Configuration Manager?
Nowadays, it is a bit expensive. It's costly, primarily due to the licensing aspect.
What needs improvement with vCenter Configuration Manager?
My impression on the impact of the real-time monitoring features of vCenter Configuration Manager is that it's somewh...
 

Also Known As

Intune, MS Intune, Microsoft Endpoint Manager
No data available
vCM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Mitchells and Buzzers, Callaway
Facebook, Standard Bank, GE Capital, Nordstrom, Optum, Barclays, IGN, General Motors, Scholastic, Riot Games, NCR, Gap
Bank Al Bilad, Thomas-Krenn.AG, Pronto!, Unimed Juiz de Fora
Find out what your peers are saying about Chef vs. vCenter Configuration Manager and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,889 professionals have used our research since 2012.