Technical Architecture Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 10
Dec 13, 2025
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.
The setup cost and licensing are reasonable compared to what we deliver. Licensing looks reasonable compared to the manual work of managing whole data centers with even 10,000 servers. Chef will be better for monitoring as it brings cost in a unified way so that you don't just look at it as spending but also look at the savings at the end of the day for your licenses. This license is not quite high, depending on what we achieve, because it does a lot for us in infrastructure management.
Presales Consultant - Solution Architect at Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Real User
Apr 5, 2022
Pricing for Chef can be relatively high for some customers but, if we consider the benefits it provides, we can say that it is a reasonable price. . Customers need to pay for the license of the tool on a yearly basis.
Director at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
MSP
Dec 11, 2018
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 AWS platform is solid. With the technologies that they offer, it makes it easy to integrate. When you are building environments and your able to integrate everything together, this is good thing.
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 through the AWS Marketplace was a good place to go to purchase this product because you receive a sense of authenticity with the products. Since AWS has its own checks on AWS Marketplace products, there is sense of relief that the product will not be problematic.
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 went the AWS route because we are fully cloud-based anyway. It was something that people who came before me were already familiar with, so it was a lot easier for me to get buy-in. 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. All you can do is communicate with them what's happening and get something that you're both comfortable with. However, if you're doing that, then what's the point of having the per-node model in the first place? It would be better to move to a fixed-pricing model.
We are still in the process of evaluating Chef Compute. Currently, we use Chef and Puppet. Soon, we will probably be purchasing it from AWS Marketplace.
There are some flexible pricing models which you get from multiple partners, and then we bundle our solution. From that perspective, it is okay so far. But maybe when we go to the enterprise level, there will be components we have to pay for, when it comes to DevOps with customers who already have an existing license. Those things are always complicated. But otherwise, for regular commercial licensing, it can be flexible.
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...
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.
The setup cost and licensing are reasonable compared to what we deliver. Licensing looks reasonable compared to the manual work of managing whole data centers with even 10,000 servers. Chef will be better for monitoring as it brings cost in a unified way so that you don't just look at it as spending but also look at the savings at the end of the day for your licenses. This license is not quite high, depending on what we achieve, because it does a lot for us in infrastructure management.
Chef is priced based on the number of nodes.
Pricing for Chef can be relatively high for some customers but, if we consider the benefits it provides, we can say that it is a reasonable price. . Customers need to pay for the license of the tool on a yearly basis.
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 AWS platform is solid. With the technologies that they offer, it makes it easy to integrate. When you are building environments and your able to integrate everything together, this is good thing.
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 through the AWS Marketplace was a good place to go to purchase this product because you receive a sense of authenticity with the products. Since AWS has its own checks on AWS Marketplace products, there is sense of relief that the product will not be problematic.
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 went the AWS route because we are fully cloud-based anyway. It was something that people who came before me were already familiar with, so it was a lot easier for me to get buy-in. 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. All you can do is communicate with them what's happening and get something that you're both comfortable with. However, if you're doing that, then what's the point of having the per-node model in the first place? It would be better to move to a fixed-pricing model.
We are still in the process of evaluating Chef Compute. Currently, we use Chef and Puppet. Soon, we will probably be purchasing it from AWS Marketplace.
There are some flexible pricing models which you get from multiple partners, and then we bundle our solution. From that perspective, it is okay so far. But maybe when we go to the enterprise level, there will be components we have to pay for, when it comes to DevOps with customers who already have an existing license. Those things are always complicated. But otherwise, for regular commercial licensing, it can be flexible.