We performed a comparison between Chef and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Release Automation solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Application deployment and keeping the devices secure no matter where they are, by having this cloud solution — that has been great."
"The solution is stable."
"It's easy to manage and easy to configure."
"Microsoft Endpoint Manager is not expensive overall, especially for small environments."
"Its direct integration with all the other products that we have from Microsoft is valuable. We're using the E5 license, and we have a whole wealth of different products available. It just makes it easier to have everything from one provider."
"For Windows services, there are multiple options within Intune to modernize it to be more internet-facing and dynamic."
"Intune enables us to manage our devices from anywhere."
"Intune device restriction policies enable me to enforce limitations on the device, like blocking the mobile camera or restricting the employees from using and inserting USB devices, including thumb drives and flash drives."
"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."
"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."
"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."
"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."
"The product is useful for automating processes."
"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."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"The solution can scale."
"It has an easy-to-use interface. It is REST API driven, and it integrates with Active Directory. It provides the ability to grant permissions to other users who would not necessarily have those permissions via the GUI so that they could run other people's jobs. For example, you could have the Oracle team grant permissions to the Linux team so that they can use each of those playbooks or each other's code. It is called shift-left."
"Ansible Tower offers use a UI where we can see all the pushes that have gone into the server."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don’t need an agent for it to work."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is quite stable. If you set it up correctly with the right configurations and there are no hiccups during installation and deployment, it will be stable. I'd give stability a rating of eight out of ten."
"Ansible Tower provides a GUI, which is an enhancement, and a well-liked feature by operation teams."
"The user interface is well-built and very easy to navigate around."
"I like the agentless feature. This means we don't install any agent in worker nodes."
"A new Intune feature allows application packaging, but it incurs additional licensing costs for a significant number of applications."
"For an existing customer who has an SCCM, it would need to be upgraded to an MECM first before I can introduce Microsoft Intune."
"I think that there is room for improvement with the reporting. If this is done, it will be a better product."
"The configuration and pricing can be improved."
"Intune should be much more granular in terms of supporting more Android cellular devices."
"There is improvement needed in integrating with the installed Office solutions versions, such as Office 2019. The Office 365 integrates without a problem."
"Reporting and troubleshooting for the application deployment could be better. It's very difficult to understand."
"The pricing can be expensive if you are not combining it with other products."
"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."
"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."
"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."
"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."
"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."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"Some of the modules in Ansible could be a bit more mature. There is still a little room for further development. Some performance aspects could be improved, perhaps in the form of parallelism within Ansible."
"The communication on it is not probably where it could be. We could use some real life examples where we could point customers to them and say, "This is what you are trying to do. If you follow these steps, it would at least get you started a bit quicker.""
"The area which I feel can be improved is the custom modules. For example, there are something like 106 official modules available in the Ansible library. A year ago, that number was somewhere around 58. While Ansible is improving day by day, this can be improved more. For instance, when you need to configure in the cloud, you need to write up a module for that."
"There needs to be improvement in the orchestration."
"It needs better documentation."
"For Ansible Tower, there are three tiers with ten nodes. I would like them to expand those ten nodes to 20, because ten nodes is not enough to test on."
"In Community, there's a lot of effort towards testing, standardizing, and testing for module development to role development, which is why Molecule is now becoming real. Same thing with Zuul, which we are starting to implement. Zulu tests out modules from third-party sources, like ourselves, and verifies that the modules work before they are committed to the code. Currently, Ansible can't do this with all the modules out there."
"Networking needs to be improved."
More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
Chef is ranked 15th in Release Automation with 18 reviews while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 3rd in Release Automation with 58 reviews. Chef is rated 8.0, while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Chef writes "Useful for large infrastructure, reliable, but steep learning cureve". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Capable of broad integrations with easy-to-operate infrastructure and user controls". Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager and Digital.ai Agility, whereas Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, Microsoft Configuration Manager, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps and BMC TrueSight Server Automation. See our Chef vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform report.
See our list of best Release Automation vendors and best Configuration Management vendors.
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