We performed a comparison between Chef and Jenkins based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Build Automation solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The scalability of the product is quite nice."
"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."
"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."
"It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."
"The most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."
"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."
"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."
"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."
"Jenkins has a lot of built-in packages and tools."
"I like the business logs. It's a very useful tool. Client-server communication is also very fast."
"The most valuable feature of Jenkins is its open source."
"We significantly reduced build times of large projects (more than 80k lines of Scala code) using build time on Jenkins as a time sample. It reduced the developer write-test-commit cycle time, and increased productivity."
"Distributed execution of build and test jobs."
"It's very useful when you want to automate different processes from beginning to end."
"Jenkins's open-based framework is very valuable."
"The most valuable features are Jenkins Pipelines for ALM and full Deploy Cycle."
"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."
"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."
"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."
"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."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"Some kind of SaaS product would be helpful in providing organizational structure."
"Partition security for the workflow of projects is not yet an option."
"The documentation on plugin development could be better: more examples. "
"The solution could improve by having more advanced integrations."
"It would be helpful if they had a bit more interactive UI."
"Logging could be improved to offer a clearer view."
"Upgrading and maintaining plugins can be painful, as sometimes upgrading a plugin can break functionality of another plugin that a job is dependent on."
"It can be improved by including automated mobile reporting integrations."
Chef is ranked 15th in Build Automation with 18 reviews while Jenkins is ranked 2nd in Build Automation with 83 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while Jenkins is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Chef writes "Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Jenkins writes "A highly-scalable and stable solution that reduces deployment time and produces a significant return on investment". Chef is most compared with AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager, SaltStack and BigFix, whereas Jenkins is most compared with GitLab, Bamboo, AWS CodePipeline, IBM Rational Build Forge and AWS CodeBuild. See our Chef vs. Jenkins report.
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