Chef vs VMware Tanzu Platform comparison

Progress Software and VMware are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Progress Software is ranked #20 with an average rating of 7.0, while VMware is ranked #13 with an average rating of 8.8. Additionally, 95% of Progress Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Chef

Read 19 Chef reviews

282 Views
172 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

VMware Tanzu Platform

Read 21 VMware Tanzu Platform reviews

380 Views
281 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Chef

VMware Tanzu Platform

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

Chef and VMware Tanzu Platform are competing in infrastructure management and application modernization. VMware Tanzu Platform tends to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive features, favoring scalability and innovation.

Features: Chef offers robust configuration management, automation for infrastructure scripting, and easy integration with CI processes. VMware Tanzu Platform includes application lifecycle management, cloud-native infrastructure capabilities, and supports microservices architectures.

Room for Improvement: Chef could improve in deployment processes, rollback mechanisms, and providing a GUI for less technical users. VMware Tanzu Platform needs to simplify its deployment process, enhance initial setup efficiency, and broaden support for legacy applications.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Chef is known for its straightforward setup and strong customer support, facilitating integration in existing environments. VMware Tanzu Platform, despite its complex deployment due to extensive capabilities, provides robust resources and support to ensure successful implementation.

Pricing and ROI: Chef is recognized for competitive pricing and favorable ROI due to efficient infrastructure management. VMware Tanzu Platform, with a higher initial cost, offers extensive capabilities that justify the investment for improved modern development frameworks and deployment efficiencies.

To learn more, read our detailed Chef vs. VMware Tanzu Platform Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. VMware Tanzu Platform

April 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 Build Automation

20th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Release Automation (11th), Configuration Management (18th)

VMware Tanzu Platform

Ranking in Build Automation

13th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

PaaS Clouds (12th), Cloud Management (25th), Development Platforms (3rd), Container Management (3rd), Service Mesh (7th), Agile and DevOps Services (2nd)

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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DarshanChaudhari

Solutions Architect Hybrid Cloud Practice US/Europe at Tech Mahindra Limited

Empowers seamless connectivity and integration through APIs while offering robust auto-scaling

I am involved in IT services and we provide a solution to customers. We work with VMware, Nutanix, OpenShift, and Microsoft Hyper-V The Tanzu platform is highly available, scalable, and flexible. It offers native services for autoscaling and integrations through APIs, allowing seamless…

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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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."

"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."

More Chef pros

"VMware Tanzu Mission Control has many valuable features, such as ease of use and customization."

"The Tanzu platform is highly available, scalable, and flexible."

"Tanzu is easy to upgrade and scale, whether we're talking about horizontal or vertical scaling. It is as smooth as possible without any downtime. The platform maintenance, upgrading, and operations part is very smooth."

"The most valuable feature of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is the management functionality of the cluster life cycle. Additionally, the solution integrates well with other vendors, such as Velero for backups and Sonobuoy for compliance. Additionally, it works well in multi-cluster environments."

"Defining security metrics has proven beneficial for customers in maintaining a safe environment."

"The observability platform and end-to-end service portal provided by Tanzu are the most valuable features."

"The Tanzu platform is highly available, scalable, and flexible."

"The valuable feature I have found to be the management of Kubernetes clusters in a private cloud or public clouds, such as Azure or Google Cloud Platform."

More VMware Tanzu Platform pros

Cons

"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."

"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."

"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."

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

"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."

"There appears to be no effort to fix the command line utility functionality, which is definitely broken, provides a false positive for a result when you perform the operation, and doesn't work."

"It is an old technology."

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

More Chef cons

"Tanzu provides better manageability as compared to OCP, but when it comes to tagging it with other products, it's a bit rigid. If I have to bring in any new product or something out of the box from a different vendor, working with Tanzu becomes a little difficult. For example, if I want to use the F5 services, I have to add one more layer of Avi, but I don't want to do that. If I have a list of the products that I want to use, such as for firewall services, with Tanzu, I will have to go through another layer, which creates complexity."

"The product should support integration with Google Cloud Platform (GCP)"

"We want to see a new feature that helps build more security architecture like Zero Trust Security or shifting left in Kubernetes."

"LYNX is a managed cluster solution that takes care of specific details within a cluster, such as sequences or services. I haven't seen this feature in Tanzu Mission Control."

"Another area of improvement is pricing."

"The solution is currently focused on VMware infrastructure and I would like to see more options made available."

"Cost is always a concern. Smaller companies might find the price a bigger issue."

"Having a unified dashboard to manage all infrastructure, whether it involves additional IT infrastructure or modern apps, would be highly advantageous"

More VMware Tanzu Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"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."

"Pricing for Chef is high."

"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 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."

"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."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

"The price of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is greater than that of Red Hat's competitor solution"

"I would recommend that businesses look into the full price for their requirements. The price is high, but there are some open-source add-ons that can be used for customization while keeping costs down, although these might not be suitable for everyone."

"VMware Tanzu Mission Control is cheaper than Red Hat OpenShift."

"One of our Spanish customers told us that VMware Tanzu Service Mesh is a very expensive product for their data center."

"The least expensive licensing cost for VMware is around $350 per core."

"The product is not expensive, but it is not cheap."

"There are different licenses available. You have to upgrade your license if you want to scale the solution more."

"Its pricing is very competitive. We get around 70% or 75%, sometimes even 80%, discount on the product. I would rate it a four out of five in terms of pricing."

More VMware Tanzu Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

17%

University

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

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.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Chef?

Chef is priced based on the number of nodes.

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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.

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Which is better - OpenShift Container Platform or VMware Tanzu Mission Control?

Red Hat Openshift is ideal for organizations using microservices and cloud environments. I like that the platform is auto-scalable, which saves overhead time for developers. I think Openshift can b...

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What do you like most about VMware Tanzu Application Service?

The solution is integrated very well with a lot of other systems. Also, its GUI is very good.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for VMware Tanzu Application Service?

Since I have a developer team, they use the solution for testing purposes.

See all answers

Comparisons

BigFix vs Chef

Compared 33% of the time

AWS Systems Manager vs Chef

Compared 15% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Chef

Compared 11% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Chef

Compared 11% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 9% of the time

More Chef Competitors

Rancher Labs vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 18% of the time

Kubernetes vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 13% of the time

Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 11% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 9% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 7% of the time

More VMware Tanzu Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Chef

April 2025

Download Chef product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Tanzu Platform

April 2025

Download VMware Tanzu Platform product report

Also Known As

No data available

Tanzu Application Catalog, Application Platform, Application Service, Hub, Mission Control, Service Mesh, Build Service, Concourse for VMware Tanzu

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

VMware Tanzu Platform is designed for cloud-native development and management of Kubernetes, CI/CD processes, microservices, and containerized workloads. It supports deployments both on cloud and on-premises, providing centralized management via Mission Control.

VMware Tanzu Platform offers seamless integration with vSphere, ESX, and vSAN, supporting centralized cluster management and lifecycle management. The platform provides a GUI for monitoring CI/CD pipelines and network policies, enhancing multi-tenancy and Day 2 operations. Users can easily manage Kubernetes clusters, monitor applications, and integrate with tools such as GitHub, GitLab, Cloud Foundry, and Azure. It ensures compliance and security for service providers, financial institutions, and businesses.

What are the key features of VMware Tanzu Platform?

Integration with vSphere, ESX, and vSAN: Enhances compatibility and flexibility.
Seamless Cluster Management: Centralized control over Kubernetes clusters.
CI/CD Pipelines and Network Policies: Simplifies monitoring and management.
Multi-tenancy Support: Facilitates resource sharing among multiple users.
Comprehensive Lifecycle Management: Streamlines deployment and scalability.
Observability Platform: Provides enhanced visibility and control.

What benefits and ROI should users look for in VMware Tanzu Platform reviews?

Centralized Management: Simplifies operations and reduces manual effort.
Enhanced Compliance and Security: Meets regulatory requirements.
Flexibility in Deployment: Supports both cloud and on-premises options.
Seamless Integration: Works with multiple vendors and tools.
Developer-Friendly Environment: Improves productivity and innovation.

Industries such as financial institutions, service providers, and businesses requiring rigorous compliance and security deploy VMware Tanzu Platform. These entities benefit from centralized management, streamlined DevOps processes, and integrated tools, enhancing their capabilities in cloud-native developments and containerized workloads.

VMware

Sample Customers

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

Verizon, Cerner, Zipcar, Avarteq

Buyer's Guide

Chef vs. VMware Tanzu Platform

April 2025

Free Report: Chef vs. VMware Tanzu Platform

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