# Progress Chef Reviews **Vendor:** Progress Software **Category:** [Cloud Infrastructure Automation Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/cloud-infrastructure-automation) **Average Rating:** 4.2/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 102 ## About Progress Chef The Progress Chef portfolio consists of multiple, integrated products. It offers a set of capabilities that provide organizations the flexibility to support different use cases. All these capabilities are based on a trusted set of tools rooted in open source, starting with the ability to configure, deploy and manage all aspects of a technology stack as well as the ability to secure and support compliance across the asset fleet. The Chef portfolio includes configuration/infrastructure management, application delivery (including edge support and device management as well as support for security and compliance), all of which are supported by a single pane of glass for fleet wide visibility and control. ## Progress Chef Reviews ### 1. Best tool to automate Infrastructure **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Suvom D. | Lead Devops, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 24, 2024 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** The best part of using Progress Chef is that it doesn't depend on a single cloud infrastructure. We offer SaaS as well as Product as a Service. Given this, we provide infrastructure code and Docker images for applications to our customers. Therefore, we required a service that can manage both infrastructure code and application deployment, including the pipeline for future releases. In these terms, Progress Chef is the go-to solution for us, whether our customer is in AWS, Azure, or GCP. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** I would like it even more if I can get a managed service for using Progress Chef. The Infrastructure requirement for Progress Chef is a bit complex. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** The problems that are solved by Progress Chef are as follows: 1. It doesn't depend on cloud infrastructure. It can be used for AWS, Azure, GCP or On-Prem deployment as well. 2. Single software can be used for configuration management, CI/CD, IaC. 3. To deploy an entire application with infrastructure in a customer environment irrespective of the cloud provider they use, Progress Chef is the best solution available in the market. ### 2. Ease of Automation **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Biswaranjan B. | C, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 18, 2024 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** I have used Chef in my previous company and have setup chef work station in my local. which was simple and it helps me to make some configuration changes without any downtime. it pulls configurations from the central server to the worker node **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Chef can improve their support community for better growth. Initially, I have faced a few issue while writing the cookbooks it would have helped if they improve their support community. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have integrated chef with Jenkins which helped a lot . Also if we make some changes we used to fire one command chef-client which provides detailed reports and logs of the actions it performs during each Chef client run. ### 3. 4+ years experience in creating cookbooks in IaaC environment. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** vikrama p. | Bengaluru, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 17, 2023 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** The most helpful aspect of Chef is its ability to automate and manage infrastructure as code. Chef supports various operating systems and cloud platforms, making it versatile for managing heterogeneous environments. I like the features for auditing and ensuring compliance with security policies. It helps organizations maintain a secure and compliant infrastructure. And I like a chef-automate dashboard. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Proper testing of cookbooks is crucial, and setting up a testing environment can require additional effort. Some colleagues find the testing and development process more involved compared to simpler tools. Lack of documentation or may lack real-world examples for practical scenarios. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Chef for post-build installation and configuration of software, significantly reducing the time required during server setup ### 4. I have such a great experience to use the same. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bhavesh P. | Senior Engineer (CloudOps/DevOps), Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 13, 2024 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Progress Chef sounds like a fascinating concept! It seems like a tool or platform designed to help individuals or businesses in the culinary field track their progress and improve their skills. I think what I'd like best about it is the potential for continuous growth and learning it offers. Being able to see your progress over time and identify areas for improvement can be incredibly motivating and helpful in mastering any skill, including cooking. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Nothing as of now. As it's covered all required features. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** It awesome tool which help to automate infra, CI/CD and cloud compliances. ### 5. Chef software devops automation product **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Naveenkumar M. | QA Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 21, 2024 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Broad user community ChefConf is an excellent conference **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** It remains to be seen how Chef evolves after being acquired by Progress The Chef technology itself for cookbook development has a not-insignificant learning curve due to how powerful it is **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Using Chef to automate configuration management allows DevOps teams to define policies that are repeatable, consistent and reusable. The result is increased business agility and security because all systems and resources are continuously and automatically evaluated, corrected, and modified. ### 6. Very Efficient and reliable **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vishal S. | Student Ambassador, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 19, 2023 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Progress Chef in my opinion is one of the best tools to maintain and manage servers. It has made our job much easier. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** There are very few downside and even few which I have faced, the setup and downtimes are daunting but apart from it it's great. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Earlier we used to mange our servers and cloud infra, manually but with is product, its way easier for us to understand the problems that occur in our systems. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Vishal, thank you so much for your kind words and I am so happy it is working to make your life easier. Best, Michelle ### 7. Chef for all your DevScOps needs - Love TestKitchen **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rinky K. | Operations Specialist 1, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 24, 2024 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** TestKitchen to test everyrecipe before deploying, manages hugs scale, stability Infra server provides and Inspec 6 parallel scan feature **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Can be better for Windows clients, Chef automate should be easier to install **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Manages huge RHEL7 fleet, scans using inspec profiles and reporing in Automate. ### 8. Progress chef is a great tool for Cloud Infrastructure Automation and Configuration Management **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kamil P. | Senior Cloud Consultant, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 19, 2024 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Progress chef is really easy in terms of Implementation. It has great number of features including Infrastructure Management, Release Automation, Task Management, Dashboard and Visualization etc **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Progress chef documentation can be made more simpler and adoptive. The quality if documentation is really important when it comes to implement a tool practically. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using Progress chef for automating the Infrastructure deployment and Configuration tasks management. ### 9. Easy Integration and Configuration **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 14, 2024 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** It is very wel written configuration management tool and very good to have for writing system configurations. It can very easily integrate with cloud based platforms.The best part is we can run it in client/server mode **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Written in pure domain specific Ruby language which can be difficult sometimes for users who don't know much about this language **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Automating the provision and configurations of new machines ### 10. Chef Recipes **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Firoj S. | DevOps Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 21, 2024 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** There are multiple reasons why i love chef, like being open source, auotmate the configuration, accuracy. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** For the general audience (college students) not hear about chef easily. They could have better marketing around it. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** By using chef we are taking L3 backup from one cloud provder to another. It saves us incase there is any breakdown/outage in cloud provider services. ### 11. DevOps tool To manage E2E operation and Build quality **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Palani M. | Performance Test Lead, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 15, 2024 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** It's an open source powerful automation tool Chef is a configuration management tool used in DevOps automation testing with codless CI/CD with open-source tool such as Jmeter **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** looking for better exe codeless CI/CD for automation and performance testing **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** I have done an POC for building end-to-end automation feature for one of our Direct tax application and it helped in doing CI/CD ### 12. Progress Chef is a Game-Changer for Cloud Infrastructure Automation **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kumar R. | Cloud Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 15, 2024 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** I love Chef's robust automation and flexibility. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** The steep learning curve and initial setup can be challenging. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Progress Chef solves configuration management and automation problems, streamlining infrastructure deployment and updates. This benefits me by reducing manual errors, ensuring consistency across environments, and saving time on repetitive tasks. ### 13. Devope value - configure, deploy, manage **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Geo G. | Operations Executive, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 16, 2024 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Optimize app delivery at any stage. It helps to optimize the performance and usage of applications in mobile devices and in the development **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Customer support is a bit hectic process. It's not easy to get in touch with the customer service **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Configuration and deployment of application ### 14. Configure automation with Chef **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Anshul S. | DevOps Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 24, 2024 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** This works on pull mechanism also configured bulk servers in a single go **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** As there are some clouds like terraform, it do not support server of it. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Automating the large numbers of servers in single go that reduces the manual work ### 15. It is genuine and works absolutely fine , must try once **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** anoop k. | Enterprise Sr Associate, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 16, 2024 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Best vision report and it is very easy to elaborate the things **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** These nothing such negatives about the progress chef **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Easy to maintain company servers and easy to config the work schedules ### 16. Application modernization with Progress Chef **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shivendra S. | Solution Architect - DevOps & App Modenization, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 22, 2024 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Securities and compliance integration and application packaging **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Support and problem solving with the prod is concerning **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Automating the workflow and applicationmodernization ### 17. An effective solution that simplifies deployment and seamlessly integrates systems **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Glenn K. | Board Member, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 03, 2023 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Progress Che­f has proven to be an exce­ptional solution from the moment we imple­mented it. We se­amlessly integrated the­ software with our existing systems, e­xperiencing no issues or compatibility conce­rns. The customer support team has be­en consistently available and provide­s valuable assistance whene­ver neede­d, demonstrating their reliability and significant contribution to our work. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** The curre­nt user interface of Progre­ss Chef needs improve­ment. Although it functions adequately, its usability lags be­hind other similar programs. This presents a challe­nge, especially for individuals who are­ not as familiar with technology, as it may impede the­ir ability to effectively utilize­ the software. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Progress Che­f streamlines settings manage­ment across different domains, providing a conve­nient and efficient solution. Its ce­ntralized platform automates actions, ensuring consiste­ncy and minimizing errors, leading to improved ope­rational efficiency. ### 18. Chef Review - Continuous Configuration & Compliance **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Stephanie L. | Software Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 29, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** With Chef, we are able to manage nodes in a new way. Our clients get insight into the health, configuration, and compliance of their system in a single platform. Also, since everything is in code, the ways to customize cookbooks, inspec profiles, and tailor policy for each node are limitless. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** The Chef community definitely has some growing to do. Progress Chef has been making an effort to listen to community members and they need to continue their journey of building up the community to what it once was. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Continued enforcement. Knowing that my nodes are checking in regularly so that I can pin point when something unexpected occurs is huge. The automate dashboard gives me visibility at a glance to track down anomolies. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Thanks for the input-and you will be happy to know we are working to increase automation out of the box. We have great things scheduled for 2023 and so glad you are part of the journey. We are better together. ### 19. The new standard in software solutions **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gayathri T. | Senior Developer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 18, 2023 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Progress Chef is an incredibly powerful tool that delivers lightning fast and convenient updates. It protects important data and ensuring great security. Unleashing maximum efficiency has never been easier in our company. The ease of implementation is also remarkable. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** For newcome­rs to the Progress Chef inte­rface, it may initially appear overwhe­lming to navigate. Providing more comprehe­nsive guide­s would greatly enhance the­ overall experie­nce. As well customer support could be more responvise. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** This seamless integration allows us to deliver our products quickly to our users. The incredible ability of Progress Chef to effortlessly integrate with different platforms has proven to be a major advantage, making our operations more efficient and saving us a lot of money. ### 20. Progress Chef is the best software to use if you want to be efficient and flexible. **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Issa M. | Management Consultant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 17, 2023 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** One of the­ standout features of Progress Che­f is its adaptability to meet the e­volving needs of our business. This software­ operates with remarkable­ efficiency, effe­ctively minimizing unproductive hours. Additionally, the platform's intuitive­ interface allows new use­rs to quickly become acquainted with its functions. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** The docume­ntation provided by Progress Chef could be­nefit from some improveme­nts. At times, it may appear disorganized, which can make­ it more challenging to find specific solutions in an e­fficient manner. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have­ seen a significant boost in productivity since imple­menting Progress Chef. This software­ effortlessly adjusts to our changing nee­ds, speeds up task completion, and he­lps new team membe­rs quickly get up to speed, re­ducing any potential delays. ### 21. to setup enterprise infra i worked with chef **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 14, 2024 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** writing cookbooks, support is good. community and ecosystem, integrations. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** pull mechanism little bit painful, versioning and roll back issue **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Chef automates the process of configuring and managing infrastructure components, we used to handle enterprise-level infra code with compliance ### 22. Automate your configuration management **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 23, 2024 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** It is super easy to use, You can create groups that are helpful **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Maintainence is difficult since it has many parts **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helped me in configuration of my cloud servers ### 23. A growing product for Infrastructure Automation and Compliance **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 19, 2023 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Great community of users and contributors Extensibility of the products allows customizations to be treated as 1st class citizens Infrastructure as Code + Compliance as Code! Code is very easy to read and write **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Documentation can be sparse/inaccurate/non-existent/overly technical - Really need that community support for complicated issues Paid support can be difficult to get through to someone you feel like understands the problem, or that can speak in a way that is adequately technical (have you tried turning it off and back on again?) **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Ensured compliance Deployment of systems with minimal user effort Turning pets to cattle ### 24. Best experience **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 11, 2024 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** It automate the configaration management of our server very efficiently. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Little complex to setup and need some programming language. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am using chef in our organization to automate configaration management. ### 25. Automate Configuration Management **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Apparel & Fashion | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 24, 2024 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** The product is super easy when it comes to usage **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Implementation could have been made less complex **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Configuration of remote servers ### 26. Great documentation and training **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 23, 2023 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Learn Chef and online documentation are both top-notch. Learn Chef has been invaluable for our team and is probably one of the best free vendor-hosted training tools we've encountered with any of our vendors. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Our most significant issue is keeping up as the product evolves. We are still using Berkshelf and are struggling to find the time to learn about policy files to facilitate the transition away from Berkshelf. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** First and foremost, we use Chef for the configuration management of our Windows Servers. In the past, we used a lot of PowerShell scripts and Group Policy to manage configuration. As our environment grew and we went from one or two Active Directory domains to five or six, Group Policy became more problematic. Chef has allowed us to utilize the same configuration source regardless of the domain the system resides in and even for those not in an AD Domain. Now that we are managing most of our Windows Server configuration with Chef, we are now moving into using Chef for compliance purposes. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Thanks for sharing and glad you are enjoying Chef! Check out our learn.chef.io for great new free training guides and options. Great resource for compliance https://www.chef.io/products/chef-cloud-security https://www.chef.io/products/chef-compliance Best, Michelle ### 27. Powerful Open Source Configuration Management on another level! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jim O. | sytem administrator, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 18, 2023 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** In my experience, Progress Chef has several strengths that make it a compelling choice for organizations looking to streamline their infrastructure management. Firstly, Chef's declarative language makes it easy to define and manage the desired state of infrastructure components. By defining "recipes" and "cookbooks" that describe the desired configuration of each resource, Chef ensures that the infrastructure remains consistent and predictable across environments. Another strength of Chef is its flexibility and extensibility. Chef has a large community of users and contributors who have created a wide range of plugins, integrations, and cookbooks that can be used to automate everyday tasks and integrate with other tools. This makes Progress Chef easy to customize Chef to suit an organisation's specific needs, whether a small startup or a large enterprise. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** However, like any tool, Progress Chef also has some potential drawbacks. For example, it can have a steep learning curve, especially for those new to infrastructure automation or programming. Additionally, Chef's complexity and flexibility can sometimes make troubleshooting problems or maintaining large codebases difficult. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Progress Chef helps me to solve the following problems in my IT environment: Ensuring consistency: With Chef, IT professionals can define the desired configuration of each component in their infrastructure as code. This ensures that the infrastructure remains consistent and predictable across environments, reducing the risk of human error and simplifying troubleshooting. Automating tasks: Chef allows IT professionals to automate many of the tasks involved in managing infrastructure, such as provisioning new servers, deploying applications, and configuring network settings. This can save significant time and effort, freeing IT professionals to focus on higher-level tasks. Scaling infrastructure: Chef makes it easier to scale infrastructure resources up or down in response to changing demand. This can help organizations save costs by only using the resources they need, and it can also improve reliability and performance by allowing resources to be added or removed as needed. Improving security: Chef can help IT professionals improve the security of their infrastructure by automating the configuration of security settings and policies, such as firewalls and access controls. This can help reduce the risk of security breaches and ensure that the infrastructure remains compliant with relevant regulations and standards. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Thanks Jim and we are working to making the learning curve easier. See our new free training we have added to learn.chef.io Best, Michelle ### 28. Easy to learn and implement **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mike F. | Mission Critical Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 24, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** It is easy to pick up the concepts and even easier to implement **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Moving between versions can be a headache. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Compliance reporting and easier configuration management **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Thanks Mike and I am super excited you provided your feedback. We are working towards improving moving between versions . ### 29. More Time **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Federico T. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 27, 2023 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** The automate compliance system is very ease of use. I ear the customer support is very dedicated. I need to test de app and discover a number of features. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** The UX is flow and test de ease of Implemenation. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Time and easy use. ### 30. A collaboration tool for team development **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gregory L. | Director, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 13, 2023 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** The capacity of Progress Chef to enhance team collaboration in application creation and deployment is what I find most remarkable. Team members can easily share resources and information thanks to its collaboration features and unified platform. I also value the tool's support for various computer languages and cloud platforms, which gives development and distribution more freedom and speed. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Even though it's a powerful tool, Progress Chef might not be the best choice for smaller teams or businesses due to its intricacy and higher expense. The program requires some technological proficiency and has a steep learning curve. Not to mention, customer support could be more quick and useful, especially to those who are new to the site. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Ineffective processes, human error, and scalability problems are just a few of the problems that Progress Chef addresses for businesses during the creation and implementation of applications. By automating time-consuming chores, its robust automation features and workflow management tools free up workers to concentrate on more crucial aspects of development. Deployment is also more scalable and error-free thanks to its support for numerous settings. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Thanks for you insight Gregory we appreciate YOU. Best, Michelle ### 31. Works Great **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Justin E. | BSA, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 30, 2023 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** They are very easy to use and makes things easy to understand. The customer support is great too. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** There is really nothing I do not like about it. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Automation and human entry error. ### 32. Configuration management tool(IAAC) **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 14, 2023 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Best configuration management tool for applying on multiple servers at once. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Troubleshooting cookbook errors. Logs are difficult to read. Installing agent process is a tedious work. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Ease of server provisioning and initial state setup. ### 33. Does it worth in 2023? **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Harshal S. | Cloud Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 09, 2023 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** 1:Progress Chef is known for its easy-to-use interface, making it easy for users to navigate and find what they need. 2:Chef has a large and active community of users, providing resources and support for those who need it. 3:Chef is designed to scale with an organisation's needs, making it an excellent choice for large enterprises or fast-growing companies. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** 1:Chef is a complex tool which is difficult for specific tasks, especially for those unfamiliar with its architecture and capabilities. 2: To deploy and maintain effectively, Chef requires significant resources, including hardware and staff. 3:Chef has a large community of users and many resources available, but documentation for the tool can sometimes be challenging for new users. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** As a cloud Engineer, I need to work on Infrastructure provisioning, and each project requirement is different as per their choice. To handle all these requirements, the chef has helped me manage infrastructure deployment and provisioning. Chef is designed to scale with an organisation's needs, making it an excellent choice for large enterprises or fast-growing companies. It helped me a lot as it can handle large and complex requirements. ### 34. I loved the convention **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jamaine A. | Data & Analytics Consultant , Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 05, 2023 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** The ability to manage many configurations at once. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** That it's not scalable, I would like it to be more so. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Managig our entire infra from simple CICD practices ### 35. Very pleased with Chef and it's products **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Carter W. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 22, 2023 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** The product line up offered from Chef. I mostly use the Infrastructure management and compliance tools. Super helpful and innovative. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** In the past, when I've run into hurdles working with Chef software, I've reached out to Chef directly and to the community and don't always find what I need. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Chef is solving infrastructure management and cloud compliance beautifully. It's so much better to just write a cookbook or inspec profile and have Chef do the work than to spend hours doing all the work yourself. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Thanks Carter and we are working to provide better support portal response times. ### 36. Chef opened the door for working with new technologies **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bart V. | Ingenieur automatisering, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 21, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Good toolset, good docs, support & community. Complete solution with useful features. Is in constant development using feedback from customers. Great to work with from a developer standpoint. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Bumpy or scattered product roadmap; eg. policyfiles introduced as an afterthought, and this also shows in the web UIs. Chef Automate UI not my personal favourite. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Testing new developments on local machines, Installing required toolsets for newly provisioned servers, Having general overview of automation runs, Being able to roll out updates to great number of servers at once **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Thanks for the kind words Bart. We are working on new and improved product roadmap. ### 37. Gets the job done in a nice and easy way **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Raphael G. | Cloud Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 16, 2023 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Automation has never been so easy to do, whether it is a server or other software-related workload; the progressive chef is handy has always been a forte. My team started using progressive chef before puppet or even ansible, and it's still everyone's favorite **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Not everyone had it easy with how to use it from the start, but after a while, everyone was alright. Create more developer advocates and communities around the product. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Devops tooling for the automation of our software systems. We used chef to automate our Quality Assurance environment before deploying it into production. We have been able to reduce technical debt and go faster then if we were not using it ### 38. Progress Chef review. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Zixon M. | Systems Management Analyst, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 19, 2023 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** I like their support and Chef meetings plus Chef is easy to manage and implement when the company has great support, it does adds to the value of the product. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Nothing, it's a great product, and it is very well supportred. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** If there is a problem, we report it at the meetings and it usually gets quickly resolved. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Thank you so much Zixon for your feedback. ### 39. Chef Experience **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 26, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** We have used Chef for 10+ years as our configuration management tool. The Chef Infra infrastructure has been robust and provided a stable platform for us to develop against. The out of box functionality solves many of our use cases and the Chef DSL provides enough extensibility that we can create functionality for our specific use cases. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** My main dislike about Chef is the care and feeding required to perform a chef-client update. Usually, taking a chef-client upgrade takes us at least a month to work through rolling it out across our organization. We have chef-client running daemonized in many environments, and the upgrade process stops the automatic runs for about a 24-hour period, which means we could have server drift during this window. This means we have to be picky about which version of chef-client we run, and usually wait until a new major version is released, upgrade, and then sit on that version until EOL. Ideally, we'd love to keep that current as much as possible. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** The main business process Chef is helping us to resolve is keeping our fleet of servers standardized and consistent. It allows us to use automation and code to keep systems up to date and current with our standards and reduces our reliance on humans to do much of that work. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Thanks for the feedback and great news we are working to provide a better experience for client update process. We will be posting updates on our chef.io website and https://medium.com/@progresschef Best, and reach out anytime Michelle michelle.sebek@progress.com ### 40. Save time with Chef **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 17, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Progress Chef allows our developers to have more control over their web application infrastructure, thereby allowing the developers to roll out web applications and services more quickly. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** - Figuring out the syntax required in Ruby to implement a given resource update is sometimes difficult. - It's not easy to pass status information from powershell scripts back to Chef/Ruby. - It's not real clear what Progress Chef is responsible for vs the Chef community. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Progress Chef automates a lot of the IIS setup that we previously performed manually. That speeds things up for our developers, as they don't have to submit service requests to IT Infrastructure to configure IIS. We are also now making additional use of Chef Inspec to ensure that our servers are hardened to CIS level 1 requirements. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Time is money and money is time. One of my favorite things to hear is that you save time using Chef-and with Chef you can enjoy a secure and compliant solution that is automate, configures, manages, and deploys. As far as the concern with community responsibilities you can reach out directly to our devrel manager jeff.strauss@progress.com that insight. Have a great day! ### 41. Chef is a great product, but I have some concerns. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 20, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Chef is a great product, and it solves many of the problems we have with compliance and policy enforcement. We have reasonably good support from our success team. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Development on the product seems hit or miss, sometimes rushed and not always well documented. Sometimes our customer success resources aren't sure how to solve our problems. It seems evident that something has happened internally to Progress/Chef, which is impacting their ability to develop and release stable products. This is a little panic-inducing for a company using Chef across an install base of nearly 70,000 servers. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** As mentioned, we solve quite a few build, deployment and compliance problems with Chef. Much of that work is purely steady-state, not actively developed or changed. We're hoping new versions of Chef client, Chef Automate and the underlying technologies can start driving more progress and involvement in developing Chef. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Thanks for the feedback. Your insights help us to improve continuously. Rest assured we are working on enhancements to our product releases, support, documentations, and. more. I can set up a meeting with you and our Product VP. Please send me an email with times and dates that will work for you. My email is michelle.sebek@progress.com ### 42. chef tools best **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ayman M. | Solution Automation Architect, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 21, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** I started using chef products over the last 8 years, and I became an expert in chef software running kitchens, chef knife cli, compliance, inspect, easy to integrate API's with other applications, pipeline, ruby language easy to use and get familiar quickly using chef error handling messages. Chef configuration management and deployment application. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Nothing at this point and no comments about any dislike of the product. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cost reduction is a must to keep clients using the product. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Thank you for being part of Chef and appreciate your business and insight, wow eight years, wait until you see what the next 8 years bring. ### 43. Chef has always been innovative and continues to be now that they are in the Progress family.. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chris T. | Program Manager, Software Defined Radio Systems, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 29, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** The Progress Chef team is responsive and reachable. They react to concerns and are always ready to help. The tools are best-of-breed and are constantly being improved. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Documentation of new features can often be a bit sparse, and discovering said new changes can be a bit difficult. Documentation also varies in detail level and scope. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** First and foremost, compliance. InSpec is completely a game changer in that regard. Ensuring consistency across the enterprise is another huge benefit. I would recommend InSpex (and have) to anyone facing technical compliance issues. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Thanks for your input and great news, we are working on creating a new documentation that will be streamlined and searchable. More details in the Future! WHOO OOOO ### 44. Great tool for managing packages, softwares and scripts on multiple systems **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Amar K. | Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 11, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Formerly known as CHEF, it is used to manage all the slave systems, so we don't have to manually log in to each of the slave nodes or machines to be able to install software systems. I used it when I was working in one of the previous product organization. We used CHEF to install multiple dependencies on the system by defining a cookbook and recipe. So basically we can define a set of tasks which has to be executed on the system and CHEF automatically logs in to the system and does the software install, package install or maybe change the configuration. In the big data world, suppose a node is required to have the software needed before it can operate. we just can run chef-client and it does everything automatically. This is an amazing tool and works fast without any hassles. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Since it is built on top of ruby, sometimes it's hard to figure out what has caused the error. There have been instances where the chef-client has failed, and it was pointed to an error, and late we got to know that it is related to ruby installation. sometimes, the chef errors are hard to debug. There is no intelligent troubleshoot mechanism and does not suggest user where to look for exact errors and fixes. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Mainly we used it to manage different nodes or the machine in the cluster. Since we used to work on the big data problem, and big data requires lots of nodes, and if one node fails, we have to reinstall all the software and packages required - also creating a custom folder, installing java, python etc. Installing it on let's say 50 systems one by one is not feasible and would kill lot of time, so CHEF comes handly. we can define cookbook and recipe and execute the chef-client in the slave systems, and all the software and packages get installed automatically. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Amar thank you for the feedback, we will look into how to help you improve how to troubleshoot, please reach out to me at michelle.sebek@progress.com and we can talk more about how to solve your dislikes. Keep the feedback coming. ### 45. Great solution if you need to manage and run workloads on traditional hosts (VM & physical) **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 21, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Everything is as code, so it's flexible and easy to reuse code. There are many pre-made cookbooks available on the Chef Supermarket to deploy a wide variety of software. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** - Test Kitchen and Chef InSpec are too rigid and prevent testing more advanced scenarios, e.g., upgrading a service from version A to B. - Since there's no notion of state, it is hard to track resources that need to be deleted. - The attributes precedence logic is way too complicated. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Chef allows our organization to manage and deploy services on hundreds of nodes. For instance, patching vulnerabilities such as Log4j is made easy using Chef. Since everything is in git, we have good traceability of changes made to the infrastructure. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > U have to love an everything as code solution like Chef and we are working to enhance our resources and have a great user experience when it comes to testing, documentation, and the website resources. ### 46. Progress Chef - My Experience **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 22, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Centralizing our configuration management for all of our managed nodes through cookbooks for all of our environments. Visibility into the cached cookbooks and ability to test locally. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Repeatability is tricky with Chef's two-pass model. Troubleshooting is challenging once the Chef codebase grows significantly. The attributes precedence evaluation is funky. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Chef is solving the automation of our configuration management for all existing and new deployments. We use it a a source of truth for our configuration, ensuring that config is repeatable. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > I appreciate your feedback and am so very grateful you are sharing your pain points. I would love to talk more about these items to see how we can help or if you would like to chat and link to our senior team for resolution. (michelle.sebek@progress.com) ### 47. Chef Inspec enforces CIS compliance rules **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 20, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Chef Inspec has an easy-to-understand human-readable format. We implemented the CIS benchmarks for Red Hat Linux as Inspec rules quickly and with minimal error. Now, all our systems get scanned daily for CIS compliance and non-complying systems are few. Chef Inspec is also run as part of the new system build process, so CIS compliance is there from the start. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** If you program in Ruby you might want to use a lot of native Ruby in Chef Inspec recipes. Avoid the temptation. First, see if there is a native Chef Inspec function. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Being 100% CIS compliant is one of our security goals. By leveraging the power of Chef Inspec we can accomplish this with less effort than coding everything from scratch. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Thank you so much for your insight and feedback. ### 48. Amazing Conference for Newbies! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Srinivas V. | DevSecOps Architect, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 25, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** The flexibility to attend virtually was very convenient, which helped me to participate in the conference at my own pace. The way marketing was done to attend the meeting was also fantastic. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Nothing that I could think of. Maybe LinkedIn marketing about the conference would be much better as I personally think that many more audience could have attended. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Problems about automation, enhancements and feature updates were terrific and how Chef solves them with an automated process is very beneficial. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Thanks and if you have any future suggestions, feedback, and input please don't hesitate to reach out to me @ michelle.sebek@progress.com. ### 49. DevSecOps via code **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 18, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** I like the fact that you can control your Operations via code. This allows you create a server repeatedly with changes can be made with very little effort. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** To get to good DevSecOps a lot of code needs to be written. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** I would like to see Progress create more methods that create a hardened box without much coding. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Thank you so much for your time and input. As I mentioned before we are looking into variations that can help you without as much coding. Check out our newsletter for more details. ### 50. I love Chef! **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Accounting | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 17, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Chef works best to enable our team to keep a tight watch on security concerns while allowing developers to create self-service vms and bootstrap them with their custom cookbooks. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** The biggest downside is that we have to use WSL to use test kitchen. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Chef solves the problem of how we transition from a "pets" to "cattle" server model. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > So glad you love Chef and we love our customers. Let's chat about your dislikes and how we can become a 5 star vendor. Please feel free to reach out to me at michelle.sebek@progress.com ## Progress Chef Discussions - [How has Progress Chef helped automate your infrastructure management, and what features do you rely on?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/how-has-progress-chef-helped-automate-your-infrastructure-management-and-what-features-do-you-rely-on) - [What is Progress Chef used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-progress-chef-used-for) - [View Progress Chef pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/progress-chef/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-25+00%3A06%3A17+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=cad6c88b-274a-42b4-86ed-57865d2f39ad&secure%5Btoken%5D=e1ac98e930046b78077a1dd967a2b9f3cf5681e49f9911c1f20c6955d7a4599d&format=llm_user) ## Progress Chef Features **Administration ** - Administration Console - Task Management - Dashboards and Visualizations - Access Control **Security** - Compliance Monitoring - Anomoly Detection - Data Loss Prevention - Cloud Gap Analytics **Functionality** - Deployment-Ready Staging - Integration - Extensible **Functionality** - Integrations - Extensibility - Test Customization **Cloud Visibility** - Data Discovery - Cloud Registry - Cloud Gap Analytics **Automation** - Test Automation - Intelligent Automation - Release Automation - Automated Provisioning **Compliance** - Governance - Data Governance - Sensitive Data Compliance **Management** - Processes and Workflow - Reporting - Automation **Management** - Automation - Processes and Workflow - Reporting **Security** - Data Security - Data loss Prevention - Security Auditing **IT Management** - Workflow Management - Infrastructure Management - IT Discovery **Administration** - Policy Enforcement - Auditing - Workflow Management **Agentic AI - Continuous Integration** - Autonomous Task Execution - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance **Agentic AI - Continuous Delivery** - Autonomous Task Execution - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance **Identity** - SSO - Governance - User Analytics ## Top Progress Chef Alternatives - [Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform](https://www.g2.com/products/red-hat-ansible-automation-platform/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (369 reviews) - [Jenkins](https://www.g2.com/products/jenkins/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (549 reviews) - [Azure DevOps Server](https://www.g2.com/products/azure-devops-server/reviews) - 4.2/5.0 (192 reviews)