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."It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."
"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"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."
"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 most valuable feature is automation."
"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."
"It's very useful when you want to automate different processes from beginning to end."
"Jenkins can be used for elastic management, if you have any sensitive data or credentials you can use them across the environment. Additionally, the solution is easy to use and can be used across multiple use cases."
"It has a lot of community posts and support."
"We have started to integrate Pipelines as a part of a build, and built a library of common functions. It simplified and made our build scripts more readable."
"The solution is scalable and has a large number of plugins that can help you scale it to your needs."
"With Jenkins, the pipeline will take your code from any versioning system like GitHub or Bitbucket. All the security scans can happen in one go and then all the tests also get run. You can just build one container in it and deploy it."
"We really appreciate that this solution is plug and play. When coding in the version control system, this product completes the build process automatically."
"The most valuable features of Jenkins are its ease of use and good plugins available. You are able to connect to a lot of solutions."
"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."
"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."
"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."
"Support and pricing for Chef 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."
"I would rate this solution a nine because our use case and whatever we need is there. Ten out of ten is perfect. We have to go to IOD and stuff so they should consider things like this to make it a ten."
"Sometimes you have Jenkins restarting because of OOM errors."
"We need more licensed product integrations."
"The onboarding of Jenkins should be smoother, and it should have more pipelines available as it's deployed on many different servers."
"The solution's UI can use a facelift and the logs can use more detailed information."
"I would like to have an integrated dashboard on top of it and a better UX to look at. The dashboard could be better in terms of integration with other tools. We should be able to have a single pane of glass across all the tools that we use where Jenkins is the pipeline. This can be a very good upgrade to it."
"It would be helpful if they had a bit more interactive UI."
"There are a lot of things that they can try to improvise. They can reduce a lot of configurations. It is currently supporting Groovy for scripting. It would be really good if it can be improvised for Python because, for most of the automation, we have Python as a script. It would be good if can also support Python. We have a lot of Android builds. These Android builds can be a part of Jenkins. It can have some plug-ins or configurations for Android builds. There should also be some internal matrix to check the performance. We also want to have more REST API support, which is currently not much in Jenkins. We are not able to get more information about running Jenkins. More REST API support should be provided."
"They need to improve their documentation."
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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