Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] vs Chef comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Broadcom and Progress Software are both solutions in the Release Automation category. Additionally, 86% of Broadcom users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Progress Software users who would recommend it.

Automic Continuous Delivery...

Read 13 Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] reviews

86% willing to recommend

Chef

Read 26 Chef reviews

5,954 Views
1,489 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Automic Continuous Delivery...

Chef

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] and Chef based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, GitLab, Red Hat and others in Release Automation.

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Release Automation

October 2026

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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

Automic Continuous Delivery...

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Chef

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Build Automation (13th), Release Automation (8th), Configuration Management (11th)

Featured Reviews

reviewer895359

Principal Project Engineer at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

Automatic installation for complex deployments and environments, with good workflow support

I like that really complex deployments are possible with it. It's very good. You have everything you need. You can design your workflows for your needs. You can do so much more, it's not just an automatic installation tool. It's a real deployment tool. I can do the complete deployment with everything that is possible.

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G Srivastava

Senior Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Agent setup and complexity have limited automation benefits but have reduced manual patching work

There are other automation tools, configuration management tools in the market, which offer many good functionalities compared to Chef. For Chef, we need to install those agents, the Chef client, on all those nodes. That is another heinous task to perform on those nodes. Compared with other tools, they do not require any agent; they simply push configurations to all the clients. Chef needs to improve on this agent installation on all those nodes. I would say that the agent configuration is required, and we need to manage the workstation, the Chef server, and then the Chef client. These two or three things are very difficult. It is a time-taking task compared with other configuration management tools. They need to compete with other tools, such as Ansible or Terraform. They should work on their agent part. If they can remove the agent installation on the nodes and combine both the Chef server and workstation into one server, that will provide a significant benefit in cost for the clients. They should aim for an agentless architecture rather than an agent-based architecture, which will help other customers. That is a very difficult thing because I have stopped using Chef. If you have very good developers who are skilled in Ruby language and can write codes in the Chef recipe, then those developers should start using Chef.

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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

"You can design your workflows for your needs."

"Self-service for developers, because they are able to deploy to development departments on their own, without needing people from operations."

"We increased our quality and reduced our time costs."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to see which problems have been resolved from deployment."

"You can automate everything you want."

"In first pilot run, we achieved five times faster deployment without human work."

"It gives us good feedback on visualizations and on how our processes have progressed."

"The measurement and the display functions make it easy to report all the statuses up to management, and it has helped our customers with their time, costs, and resources."

More Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] pros

"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."

"Using Chef for automating infrastructure and applications in my organization has helped us reduce manual tasks by more than forty percent, thereby saving significant revenue for the client."

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

"The scalability of the product is quite nice; we have deployed it across six to seven organizations."

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

"I wanted to monitor a hybrid cloud environment, one using AWS and Azure. If I have to provision/orchestrate between multiple cloud platforms, I can use Chef as a one-stop solution, to broker between those cloud platforms and orchestrate around them, rather than going directly into each of the cloud-vendors' consoles."

"I would rate this solution a nine because it's simple, easy to use, more versatile, and most importantly, it can handle the hundred thousand servers at the same time very easily and almost in no time."

"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."

More Chef pros

Cons

"One of the biggest features I've been asked by my team to put in there is opening more scripting languages to be part of the platform."

"At the moment, the version that we are using (version 12.0), the environment is complex with multiple installations. Therefore, the monitoring is not scalable, but this should be improved in 12.1 and 12.2."

"It would be very beneficial for us to see integrations into cloud environments, especially into the Google Cloud environment because we are heading towards cloud."

"If you have a technical problem and need development of the tool, the support team is terrible, because they cannot help with the technical details."

"The stability of the solution can be improved."

"key thing is support for cloud-based deployment. That is lacking."

"There are some bugs. For example, during the design of a workflow, important information is lost, it vanishes."

"GUI for mobile phones: Availability to approve and start deployment through mobile phones."

More Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] cons

"The learning curve is steep due to Chef's Ruby-based DSL and the complex components of cookbooks and recipes, which can be challenging for new users, especially those without programming backgrounds."

"I think it can be costly considering the advantages and disadvantages of Chef."

"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."

"It is an old technology."

"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."

"Chef has a very steep learning curve, especially for beginners."

"They could provide more features, so the recipes could be developed in a simpler and faster way. There is still a lot of room for improvement, providing better functionalities when creating recipes."

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

More Chef cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Customers often complain about the price."

"If you have a fixed contract, it has limits to spreading out. If you have a flexible enterprise license contract, then you have a lot of scalability for this tool."

"I can save time and money more quickly."

"We increased our quality and reduced our time costs."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"We are using the free, open source version of the software, which we are happy with at this time."

"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."

More Chef pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Outsourcing Company

15%

Construction Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Healthcare Company

Outsourcing Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	9

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	20

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Chef?

The licensing cost is zero for Chef if you are using the free version. They have developed other versions, such as SaaS-based and self-managed. For the SaaS-based version, it is $59 per node per ye...

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What needs improvement with Chef?

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What is your primary use case for Chef?

We used Chef, the automation tool, as an Infrastructure as Code tool for configuration deployment, such as deploying patches on numerous servers, first on the development box, then on QA, and then ...

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Comparisons

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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL]

Compared 10% of the time

GitLab vs Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL]

Compared 9% of the time

More Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] Competitors

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs Chef

Compared 8% of the time

Jenkins vs Chef

Compared 7% of the time

AWS CloudFormation vs Chef

Compared 6% of the time

GitHub Actions vs Chef

Compared 6% of the time

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Chef

Compared 5% of the time

More Chef Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL]

October 2026

Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] report

Download Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

Chef

October 2026

Download Chef product report

Also Known As

CA Continuous Delivery Automation, Automic Release Automation, Automic ONE Automation, UC4 Automation Platform

No data available

Overview

Deliver apps at pace with agile development and let customer satisfaction soar.

Today, the pressure is on to transform how you deliver applications to market. Get release agility and speed without compromising quality and stability with CA Continuous Delivery Automation. Deliver apps reliably on demand from development through production—mobile to mainframe. Agilely scale as the cadence, volume and complexity of your apps grow. It’s DevOps-ready release management and automation for your dynamic enterprise.

Broadcom

Chef is a powerful automation tool designed for efficient infrastructure management across varied environments. With its environment-as-code model, Chef provides predictability and reliability in deployments, enhancing security compliance and reducing manual intervention.

Chef focuses on automating deployments and configurations, ensuring server consistency, managing scalable environments, and orchestrating service deployments. Its versatile recipe-writing and Ruby-based flexibility cater to large-scale operational needs. Chef’s integration with services like AWS and Azure enhances its versatility, while its idempotent deployments assure reliability. Despite its prowess, Chef requires improvements in feature offerings, especially regarding container orchestration and cloud technologies.

What are Chef's Key Features?

Automation: Streamlines infrastructure management across diverse environments.
Environment-as-Code: Offers predictability and efficiency in management.
Idempotency: Ensures reliable deployments by maintaining the same outcome no matter how often applied.
Cloud Integration: Seamlessly integrates with AWS and Azure.
Security Compliance: Enhances security measures across infrastructures.
Ruby-Based Flexibility: Provides versatile recipe-writing and flexible configurations.
Scalability: Suitable for large-scale operational needs.

What Benefits Should Users Consider?

Consistency: Automated deployments reduce errors and manual efforts.
Efficiency: Decrease in manual intervention enhances team productivity.
Reliability: Idempotent deployments ensure consistent outcomes.
Scalability: Supports expanding infrastructures effectively.
Security: Maintains compliance with enhanced security features.

Chef is implemented across industries to automate application deployments, manage CI/CD pipelines, provision infrastructure, and maintain compliance. Its recipes and cookbooks streamline workflows in application deployment, system updates, and orchestration of services, reducing errors and manual intervention in a variety of sectors.

Progress Software

Sample Customers

BET365, Charter Communications, TASC

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

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, GitLab, Red Hat and others in Release Automation. Updated: October 2026.

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