# 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. Amazing tool to maintain large IT infrastructure **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Capital Markets | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 22, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** The biggest upside is the ability to maintain IT infrastructure config as code. This allows for easy scaling and management of resources. It also ensures no unplanned configuration drift. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** The minor inconvenience with using chef is handling the installation of the chef client on the remote hosts. I think it would be better if chef provides an easier tooling to manage the initial setup/installation of the chef-client on the hosts. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** The biggest advantage of using chef is the ability to manage configuration as code, that is the biggest advantage for us. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Thanks for the amazing review! We are glad you use our service and benefit from our scalability. We are looking into a better experience for installations and migrations and should have a solution soon. ### 2. Progress Chef is an excellent tool for devops automation. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sarthak S. | SDE2, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 25, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Progress Chef is an amazing tool for devops automation. The ease with which we can configure the instructions using receipes and cookbooks are the best feature. It is implemented using Ruby language which is super easy to understand and use as well. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** The chef workstation for development for cookbooks and recipes should possible be replaced by something of a UI based. Something similar to Jenkins which can provide easy configuration options. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using Progress Chef to automate our server patching tasks. As part of security remediation, patching is one of the tedious task which we could automate completely thanks to Chef. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Sarthak, Thank you so much for your feedback and appreciate your insight on improvements. We have things into our pipeline for our roadmaps, keep on the lookout. We will be sharing more details in Boston at ChefConf, hope to see you there Sarthak https://www.chef.io/chefconf/registration. ### 3. Its good tool for pull model for both windows and Linux nodes **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** siva durga prasad p. | consultant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 17, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** We like to use this for push model for CIS benchmark configurations **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** It is good if we can have push model to use to deploy configurations. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** It resolves most of the configuration keys in CIS benchmark model **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Siva, Great news we are working on something to help and should be live within the first quarter. ### 4. Chef makes managing IaaS resources easy **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 01, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Chef provides us with the ability to manage infrastructure (specifically servers or IaaS resources) in a scalable way across platforms and locations. Its ease of use and common language across operating systems give the ability to easily bridge gaps between teams and understanding, thus breaking down knowledge silos and facilitating the ownership of infrastructure code by traditional application teams. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Sometimes the learning curve can be steep for organizations that do not have an in-house subject matter expert. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** When implementing Chef, it's important to remember this is not something that can be rolled out overnight. There are several pieces to the puzzle, and making sure you get it right from the start instead of rushing a production solution is key to your success with the tool. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Chef provides a great platform for enabling the management of on-prem or cloud virtual machines. It uses a DSL based on Ruby to make the management of these resources easy to capture, in code, in the same way regardless of platform or operating system. This is specifically useful when working to scale across a multi-platform organization because it gets everyone speaking the same language while giving automation coverage that is managed singly regardless of OS. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > This is great feedback and check out our free learning platform https://learn.chef.io/. Note, we are consistently updating our training modes and have professional services that can help make the learning curve manageable and helps you to become a in-house SME. Thanks again for your time, insight, and recommendations. ### 5. Good tool for Cloud support **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Networking | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 17, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Agnostic tool that can provide support across cloud environments. Avoiding code lock-in is a best practice for us. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** There are dependencies across versions that can problematic. Changes to the user interface were not ideal. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Having a single source for our automation allows us to maximize the value of those scripts and gain speed in deployments across environments. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > We are glad you like the single source for automation to maximize the value of the scripts, and deployment speeds. We are working to improve our offerings and version dependencies. Thanks for taking the time to let us know how Chef works for you and your organization. ### 6. Chef Review **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Pharmaceuticals | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 09, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** It is very user friendly and helps in staying organized and ensures good quality in mass. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Documentation of new features is sometimes not very clear. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps in staying compliant which is something that is always a work in progress **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Thank you for your feedback and good news we are working to streamline and enhance out documentation. ### 7. Chef Review **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Marina M. | Lead cloud platform engineer and people leader, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 20, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Chef is really powerful configuration management tool with great customization options and flexibility. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Agent installation, complexity of use and troubleshooting steps **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Robust configuration management ### 8. unlocking knowledge to next level to benefit personal skills **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** chandra p. | database admin, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 19, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Overall sessions are good; thank you for an excellent course. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** nothing, Quality of the content was excellent. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** building database automation **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > thanks with much appreciation ### 9. Best server management tool **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** sumit s. | Python Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 10, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** I was in deployment department so for every software I need to configure all server manuall like supponse you have many servers that time you don't need to configure you all server just only update on workstation then it will update on all servers another thing is some times yon need to change you ENV variable so that time you can't run you dockesr image for all server instead of these just replace value by suing chef is another best part also for CI/DC part is best **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Here is nothing for dislike, but If they provide us containerization with server configuration like dockers with chef that time it will really easy to handle and many people will switch on this **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** If you want both CI/CD and server configuration in good manner that time use chef **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** We had one project in which we white label all things and deployed code on a different server for every client, so at that time, I needed to deploy code on 24 servers, and 70% of work for all servers were the same that time the first time I used chef and It reduced my working time from 2 weeks to 2 days and some time clint give updated information about his env like SMTP or third party URL so that time chef really helpfull **Official Response from benny Vasquez:** > Thank you so much for your review sumit! If you haven't already, definitely join the Chef Community Slack space. We have a bunch of folks there that can help with any problems you encounter and an announcement channel for our releases. ### 10. devops engineer **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 02, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** large community of users, lots of resources on the web. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** nothing so far, not sure why i cant submit this **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** automation, configuration as code for linux and windows systems **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > So glad you are enjoying our services. Did you check out the latest GigaOm report about Chef?Progress Chef is the Only DevOps Provider Recognized as a Policy as Code Leader (see chef.io) Thanks again!!!! ### 11. Chef for cooking safe security **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Lethesh M. | Assistant Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 01, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** I like the open community with lots of resources present in the documentation and also video tutorials which help someone like me who was new to this technology pick up and complete the tasks assigned easily and effectively . **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Compatibility with different programming languages such as python. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Benchmarking and compliance is a huge headache for anyone working in this sector which is minimized by chef. **Official Response from michelle sebek:** > Lethesh thanks for your feedback and I am glad you like the open community, they are a major reason we are successful. Please make sure you check out our slack chefcommunity.slack.com. and keep the feedback coming. At Progress Chef we continue to evaluate the current trends and way to meet our customers needs in new and different ways and languages. ### 12. Chef reviews **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nikhil B. | Platform Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 17, 2022 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** The vast variety of receipies in the community. Almost every tool installation has their own recipe. And easy management of central store for receipies. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** The configuration tree for the receipe can be bit less complex. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Managing multiple organisations in a single chef server . **Official Response from benny Vasquez:** > Thanks Nikhil! We can definitely work to make things less complex in our cookbooks. Thank you so much for that feedback! And if you haven't already I for sure recommend hanging out with the non-profit organization, Sous-Chefs. They have a website and also chat in our Chef Community slack space. They're always looking for feedback as well as contributors, so feel free to join! ### 13. Chef Review **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Yogesh R. | Principal DevOps Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 29, 2020 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Its very good tool to setup configuration management **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** its a agent based tool thats why we need to install agent everytiem **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** yes i always recommended chef to use for CI/CD **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** we are doing configuration management using the chef ### 14. Chef Configuration Management tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 20, 2019 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Most of our client uses Chef to deploy new code in an automated fashion. We also use it to update existing configurations and push those changes in an automated fashion to large groups of servers. Having the ability to deploy simple or full system changes out to a large group of servers with little human interaction has been a game changer for our company allowing us to deploy at scale and grow our infrastructure as our company grows. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** It is very complex tool and The Chef-client agent needs to be run on the nodes frequently to update the details of it state to master. And also to index the nodes based on tags. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** Yes, Centralized Configuration Management; Chef really excels at that as it provides a wide range of features that are well thought of, such as data bags, encrypted data bags, roles, shared repositories, cookbooks versioning, environment locking..etc **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Chef is really great when teams are attempting to migrate over from legacy systems. In our case, it was a switch over from AIX to Linux. Thus, it was a great opportunity to use Chef to build out deployment cookbooks that could then be used win order to set up the new servers in preparation for the upgrade. ### 15. Easy to deploy with Chef **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 11, 2019 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** We have build the scripts which makes it very easy to deploy with Chef. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** If something goes wrong its not easy to debug **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** Try it. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** All our deployments are with Chef now. ### 16. A Great Configuration Management tool **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Aiman N. | DevOps Principal Architect, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 01, 2018 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** - Great centralized features: data bags (central data storage), encrypted data bags, restricting script (cookbook) version on given nodes...etc. - Amazing ruby-based syntax. This what makes Chef my preferred configuration management tool over other tools that use their own DSL. You can always use Ruby directly for complex tasks - Open source: Chef has an open source version that does not lack important features - Ability to test your Chef scripts (recipes and cookbooks) using automated InSpec tests **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** - There is some learning curve involved, but it's worth it - It might be an overkill for simple automations **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Automates compute nodes configuration, so solves problems like: environment inconsistencies, speed up deploying new nodes, ..etc ### 17. Cooking with infrastructure as code **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 25, 2018 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Once you're familiar with Chef, it's a very powerful tool for ensuring that your servers are all provisioned in the exact same way, and committing those choices to source control. There is a fairly active open source, and a lot of community cookbooks already exist for common tasks. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Reasonably challenging to get up and running with, especially if you aren't coming from a Ruby background. The documentation lags somewhat and I occasionally found myself digging into source code to understand a behavior. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Automating and standardizing server configuration. Reducing the number of errors that arise from server configuration drift. ### 18. Longtime user and fan of Chef **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Phil A. | Director, DevOps, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 21, 2017 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** The Chef DK allows you to have a full CI/CD workflow for your infrastructure as code. With chef you can stick to the community cookbooks and boilerplate resources or you can make it do anything you like with raw ruby. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** As everyone says it can be a bit daunting to get started. Most new development seems to be targeted at enterprises. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** It's worth spending a bit more time up front to understand the product than you might with other configuration management solutions. The benefit is much more power and a massive community. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** With Chef, there's no excuse not to have your entire infrastructure as code. ### 19. Chef'ing up Liferay **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Christopher M. | Lead Software Developer, Building Materials, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 22, 2017 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** I like chef because it uses DSL for configuration instead of XML, Rackspace supports it very well, etc. However the absolute best thing about Chef is the concept of recipes where you can get your platform up and configured extremely easily if that platform has a chef recipe. In addition most large platforms do have chef recipes so it's great! Also, I like that it;s open source **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Some of the things i dislike about chef, and this might jkust be a criticism of configuration management in general, is that you need pretty much a full team to support it. Sometimes I feel like it adds more complexity instead of kless. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** Learn it well before you try to incorporate it in your enterprise **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** The biggest issue we are solving with Chef is the knowledge gap that exists in new employees when first learning out platforms. previous it would take months for new developers to become effective because they spend several months fighting with the platform, build tools, etc. Chef makes this much less of a hassle ### 20. Automation meets DevOps **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Earl W. | Windows Server Administrator, Computer Networking, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 27, 2018 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** It works on most platforms windows and Linux many flavors. Robust offering **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Server head must be Linux. Not a bad thing. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** A proven leader in Automation software **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Server build similar to Desired State ### 21. Repeatable Infrastructure has been made easy **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** setu s. | Software Engineer-III- Release and DevOps at Staples, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 15, 2018 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** IT infrastructure can be saved /reused as when required. Less time to create infrastructure **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Difficult to learn the language for beginners **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** 1) Faster time to market 2) Less human error 3) Robust infrastrcuture ### 22. Chef to automate your infra **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 05, 2018 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Easy to understand, configure the management of your infrastructure **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** available documentation is less as compare to other tools, **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** Easy to learn, implement, configure, distribute over the landscape, Ruby is the main attraction, can cook the best food for you with its available cookbooks for your infrastructure to automate **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** we need to deploy a software developed by our developer, our infrastructure is very complex with different OS, environment, DBs, explorers, with the help of CHEF we did this within stipulated time without any issues. ### 23. Exective chef at a university **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Food & Beverages | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 21, 2017 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Being able to feed people with simpe ingrednts **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** At times the lack of knowdgle of the time it takes to make a dish **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** Not at this time **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Meeting food cost ### 24. Infrastructure as code never looked so intimidating and yet hopeful **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Evan W. | Director of Engineering & Head of Cloud Transformation, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 12, 2016 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** The ability to code infrastructure and then run it in action from a single line command is amazing. Imagine spinning up not just 1, but an entire stack of services at once (a whole ecosystem). That's the power of Chef. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** The problems are myriad. Chef does not have an easy way to pick up for beginners. Most cookbooks are focused on Linux, not Windows. And whenever a deployment breaks, tracing it is a huge pain as there stacktrace is not very informative. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Chef solves the problem of continuously updating and deploying your software ecosystem from scratch for different purposes and even clients. This helps to make infrastructure development verifiable and repeatable. ### 25. Best tool for unifying development environment in a large team. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sahil S. | Research Intern, Higher Education, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 20, 2016 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Chef provides tools for for IT automation and after trying other tools. Its a master client model and is based in Ruby which was really helpful since we were also developing applications in Ruby on Rails. The best thing about chef is the collection of modules and configuration recipes. Also, its based around Git which everyone is familiar with and 'Knife' tool is very helpful during installations. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Learning curve is steep but since we were already using Ruby it was a bit easy for us. Apart from that, its a not a smiple tool, It can lead to very large code bases and complicated environments quickly. One needs to be aware of that. Also, it doesn't support push functionality which other alternatives does. Chef documentation can also be a little sketchy from time to time. They are more focused on making it work than writing documentations and doesn't provide as much platform support as other alternatives does. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use chef's Application Automation tool 'Habitat' to unify the development enviroment among a large team which can be a disaster while working with frameworks like Ruby on Rails. ### 26. deploy made easy again **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Renato Augusto T. | Desenvolvedor sênior, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 27, 2016 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Previously to deploy a large application was suffering, always happened several problems. When I met Chef (while studying the vagrant) quickly deployed in my company. Chef is able to handle EVERYTHING related to creation of a dynamic infrastructure **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Nothing, all in Chef is exquisite, even the price is right. Of course you will have to study hard for put the tool into production, but it is a study that will be worth it. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** Know that the documentation is extensive. It will take time to master the full tool, but the time spent will be saved in deploy **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** DevOps! In my company we had problems in the deployment of the tools. The time between the development and deployment was too long, now with Chef dramatically reduce the costs associated with deployment, and now we have the DevOps culture more strong ### 27. Great tool for system configuration management **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kevin V. | Software Architect, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 07, 2016 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Chef is pretty solid for configuration management of Windows machines and ensuring that they are all setup and provisioned the same way. The setup and scripting of recipes is pretty extensive, and Windows support is solid. There are a variety of recipes to do most windows configuration needed, as well as Linux. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** The setup is pretty complex, it can take awhile to just setup a server and figure out how to connect a client to it. It would be nice to have more functionality exposed in the Chef GUI, using command line for a majority of tasks can be tedious at times. Chef is mainly geared toward ensuring a server is configured properly, but it would be nice to have the option for 'one off' tasks. When you have agents already running on your systems for Chef it would be nice to run a task on a subset of machines instead of yet another agent and management system for that. It also runs best if you have a person dedicated to the configuration and on going maintenance of Chef. It takes some effort to keep up on your recipes. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** If you are using Azure, check out Microsoft's Azure lab on setting up Chef, it significantly speeds up the implementation process. Be sure to run through some tutorials and documentation on the Chef website as it is very difficult to setup straight out of the box. There aren't really any wizards or in-product tutorials. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Chef solves the system configuration management issue pretty well, it is able to ensure that machines are setup similarly. The 'configuration as code' aspect makes it clear to the organization what is involved in setting up and configuration of a server. It helps to document the process as long as you follow through on continuously adding recipes as you move along. ### 28. Powerful tool but difficult to get started with **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Michael M. | Cloud Specialist, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 21, 2016 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Simplifies bootstrapping fleets of servers and managing required packages. Allows developers to build upon a library of packages from other developers so they don't need to start at the basics from scratch and can more quickly and easily start on the parts that really matter **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Very difficult and time consuming to set up and get started with; large learning curve; compatibility issues with little to no documentation **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** Consider as a possible solution for your DevOps build but also consider other tools like Ansible. You may very quickly become dependent on Chef once you implement it so make sure you like it and it meets your needs first. Team members with previous experience will be a huge plus to overcome the initial learning curve and setup time. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Automating deployments, versioning deployment code, granular user permissions, scalable and highly available infrastructure and applications ### 29. Chef is an excellent tool for Server Configuration **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Liam B. | Mobile Developer, Internet, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 08, 2016 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** I have been using Chef as it helps me to automate my applications in configuring and getting deployed in my web network easily. It has got various features such as Chef Management console, Chef Analytics, and Client Reporting. It helps me to keep my server up all the time and saves up a lot of time in this area. It also allows me to keep the track of my applications in terms of version control. So, the applications remains in synchronization with the help of different versions available for each built. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** The setup document and tutorials could have been a little better. They have provided all the documentation in a single web page with no references to any external links. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** I would recommend you to choose between the free version and the paid version of Chef as per your needs and requirements. Getting an initial demo from the team would be a good idea. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using it for the automation for our server configuration which saves a lot of time and energy required for manual configuration each time the server gets down. I like the Chef Development Kit where all the command line tools are available for help if you are stuck somewhere. ### 30. Chef is Awesome! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Todd P. | Cloud Architect, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 31, 2016 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** The shear amount that you can do with the product from Linux to Windows, configurations to application deployments, Chef is delightfully AWESOME!!!!! **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** I personally don't have any dislikes for Chef as a product. The only caveat is when creating resources, you'll need to increase your Ruby knowledge and skills. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** To learn Chef, I highly recommend using the http://learn.chef.io . Even for an OPs guy, Chef is awesome! **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** When I jumped on the infrastructure as code bandwagon, I was testing both Chef and Puppet to Linux and Windows deployments. I chose Chef as they fixed a pending reboot issue with RDSH first. As a Solution/managed Service provider, the ability to reduce deployment time with a standard automated deployment methodology is invaluable. ### 31. Automating deployment with Chef **Rating:** 0.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mario C. | Army Of One, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 13, 2016 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Chef is a standard in automated deployment. Is used in Facebook and it's really REALLY powerful. It's a very serious thing about deployment automation and it's capabilities are huge. Maintains states (software, configuration...) of the entire cluster, and I'm talking about hundreds of nodes. Cookbooks are very popular and you can find them to do almost everything in the open source community. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Chef is terribly complex to deploy by itself, not only needs a Chef Server that internally will install a RabbitMQ, a SQL database, a Nginx... it can really take a lot of resources of your machine. Not only this, you need to install a daemon, Chef Client, on each Chef node you want to manage. Of course if this Client fails... your node is "lost" for Chef and you cannot manage it anymore until you restart the client. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** If you really, really need to manage a big set of nodes to do very complex things, you can give Chef a try (you also have Puppet). But if need something relatively simple I don't think is worth the effort. As I mention before, Chef is quite complex if you want to do simple things (maybe Ansible fits better in this case) **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** We were automating the installation of 8 to 10 linux packages over a set of 4 to 20 machines. We were using a "root" machine to start the installation and, using a web ui, let a user select a set of technologies to install them on the rest of the nodes. ### 32. Made for DevOps and Easy Deployment **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** M. Serhat D. | Senior Software Developer, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 14, 2016 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Chef is one of my favorite tools lately. It makes painful and risky deployments easy and fast. Chef is also providing a quite flexible infrastructure which lets you to manage many nodes easily. You can simply integrate your other DevOps practices with Chef. It helps you to understand your infrastructure better and minifies security risks before your service goes down. Definetely Chef is a great tool to minimize your downtime. I'm a Ruby developer and Chef has a good support for both Ruby and Rails environments. Also Chef recipes written with Ruby, which is time saving for me. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Hosted and premium versions are more expensive than I can afford. Also management console, analytics and high availability features are not included in free version. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** Before going with Chef, I suggest you to read well written documentation first and then check cookbooks for ready-to-use solutions before writing your own. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Chef makes our deployments easy and efficient. In the past deployments were stressful and time-consuming for us and Chef helped us to deal with deployments. Also check and read about Puppet, Ansible, Capristano and other DevOps tools which you can use together with Chef. ### 33. Devops made easy **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nagarjuna Y. | Software Development Engineer, Online Media, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 07, 2016 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Awesome documentation & training resources given by the Chef are easily understandable.I have used only the opensource and free versions of chef-solo (except for the trail period) in all the organisations I have worked with till now.I use chef in conjunction with vagrant to improve & automate the stuff in development life cycle.Librarian-chef is most useful bundler plugin for chef based infrastructure which one must try automates the things with simple commands. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** They divided the Chef tool into three categories for the sake of business which is very disappointing 1. Hosted Chef 2. Enterprise (On-Premise Version) 3. Opensource Version which comes with less add-on and no support Though there is a vast community present who are using chef for businesses it tuff to rely on opensource chef unless we have very experienced professionals.Pricing disappoints me a lot being a small organisation.Chef commitment to opensource is still doubtful which is an scary thing. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** Do you wanna save the amount of time managing server configuration for your systems? Then yes I would recommend Chef for you.For small organisation hire a experienced professional to save money that need to be spend on tech support while using chef otherwise train them to get expertise so that they can confidently manage your infrastructure. Choosing Hosted chef is best option for the organization with newly trained staff which would save organisation from critical situations. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cloud Deployment, Build Automation, Server configuration Management ### 34. A workhorse for deployment and configuration **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Stewart H. | Principle Engineer, Financial Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 03, 2016 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** The ability to manage multiple environments easily. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** The domain specific language has a couple of small quirks. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** https://docs.chef.io/ is your friend! The domain specific language (DSL) can be very hard at times especially for those coming from a non-Ruby programming back-ground. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** We used this to manage all of the hosts configurations and applications that we deployed. It was used for all aspects to manage log locations, configurations, and even some kernel level configurations. ### 35. Chef is neat and awesome **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ashutosh N. | Technical Lead, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 23, 2015 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Open Source Community support. Documentation is great. Well written Chef blogs to understand steps and procedure. Automated deployment of application in a farm. Availability of well written cookbooks. Ease of development with just enough knowledge of Ruby. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Installation should be made little faster. knife-plugins support is less Some of the cookbooks are not maintained.. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** I recommend to use Chef because of following reasons : Community support is amazing. You have developers/users in the list who help to solve your problems. You need not be proficient in Ruby, just know-how of Ruby is enough to start developing recipes. Most of the cookbooks available on Chef's git-hub page can be re-used and customized as per your requirement. It also supports majority of Operating Systems. I have worked with other configuration management and remote execution systems, but it all depends what your need is and which one fits your environment. Rather than wading through so many tutorials, decide on one and be on it. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** We wanted to do one-click installation of application on cloud. Did a setup right from bare-metal provisioning and then used Chef for application deployment on Private Cloud. Developed shell scripts which triggers chef-client once a machine is ready on blade server. Used knife-plugins to manage private cloud farm. Some of the benefits realized were ease of testing cookbooks using test-kitchen and Vagrant. Chef-solo was also helpful. ### 36. Excelent server automation tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rodrigo R. | Desenvolvedor, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2015 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** There are plenty of well written, documented and supported Chef recipes for dealing with all sorts of server automation, like users management, database management, Solr configuration, full application stack configuration (Sensu, Gitorious, Redmine), SSH, and many more commonly used software. All of them are open-source and have plenty of customization options. Chef itself has good documentation. Dependencies management is very easy and robust by using librarian-chef. Chef's verbose mode is very helpful when debugging what a recipe is doing and there's also a dry runner mode which won't actually run anything in the server, which is also helpful in some cases. Unlike Puppet there's no domain specific language to learn, which is a big advantage for me. You only have to learn a bit of Ruby, which is an easy language to learn and use and you are able to perform any logic pretty easily when compared with Puppet which is quite limiting when you need some custom logic which is not handled by their DSL and you are forced to extend their DSL. Chef can be configured through an specialized server that will orchestrate all managed servers or they can be used without setting up any Chef server, through chef-solo. Chef-solo can be integrated with Vagrant as well to help setting up a development environment very quickly. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** I'd prefer Chef's focused on chef-solo for most of its beginning tutorials as I find it the easier mode to start with and also the most useful one for most small organizations. The fact that chef-solo is not the tutorials assume makes it harder for a beginner to understand how it works. I also think they could be more backwards compatible in new releases. I remember it took me quite a while to fix some old recipes I had so that it would work in newer Chef releases... They use JIRA to manage their tickets and I really don't like JIRA. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** I'd recommend starting with the chef-solo mode, which is much easier to start with and well suitable even for more complex servers infra-structure. Also, take some time to learn some Ruby if you are not comfortable with the language. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** We integrate Chef and Capistrano to manage our servers and deploy our applications. Since both are written in Ruby, we can share a dynamic configuration written as a Ruby DSL that is used by both Chef recipes and Capistrano tasks. We use Capistrano to run Chef in the servers requiring changes. For example, we manage multiple environments and applications in a shared set of servers. We have a database server and two application servers and we are able to properly manage the database in the database server through Chef, configure Solr, install packages in the application servers, set up nginx in the right server and everything that is required for the application to run and finally run the deploy procedure using Capistrano tasks, which are more well suited to handle deploys and rollbacks than Chef is. The server management part is handled by Capistrano running chef-solo in the right servers. Then the deploy proceeds as usual with regular Capistrano tasks. All with a single command line that will inform the application, which application server to deploy to and the environment (production, Cert, experimental, staging and others). Being able to run a single command to handle the full deployment cycle gives a lot confidence specially because there are lots of steps involved for our applications to be properly configured and run in our servers... It would be really easy to forget some of those steps in a big release without the automated recipes. ### 37. Vagrant User **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 21, 2015 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** I won't state how much I like chef due to its automation, but I'd like to say that in comparison with puppet and ansible, it gives better control as it allows you to "develop" your system. The dependencies system that's out of the box due to Ruby is really good! As a vagrant only user, chef-zero was the product that I really needed! **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** - I have to write ruby - As a vagrant user, it feels it has quite some overhead when the system bootstraps - It takes more time to write something "quick and dirty", while ansible performs better for MVP cases - As a vagrant user, it feels ugly the way I have to manage my secret files, databags are not the best case **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** Make it being easier to bootstrap new projects - MVPs, maybe use some template bucket? **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** As a team leader, I've manage to create a unified environment for my team members, and having it on git, we are having the opportunity to all extended based on our ongoing needs. Using chef like that, It also gives me the opportunity to have a "shared communication protocol" with the devops side, and not missing any details that have been developed throughout the development phase. As a business perspective, it has make the dev environment "disposable", as everything that's needed run in the Dev's VM and their laptops have no value now, or worrying if they got stolen ### 38. DevOps Engineer at Refinery29 **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 17, 2015 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Chef is an all around wonderful provisioning system. I see the biggest advantage of Chef over its competitors, namely Puppet and Ansible (I don't have experience with any others), is the company and the community it facilitates. The most helpful part of the community is the wide, seemingly all inclusive, range of open source cookbooks available, which for the most part can be used out of the box to provision any system you might be building. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Developing new cookbooks—even more so when extending existing ones—for Chef requires a deep knowledge of how Chef works and of Ruby. Just knowing what you want to do is not enough. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** If cookbooks exist for everything you need, use Berkshelf with Chef to provision your systems. If cookbooks do not exist for your purposes or you need finer grained control than what existing cookbooks provide, use a different tool. I highly recommend Ansible, having built Refinery29's provisioning system using it, and have mostly heard good things about Salt, but have yet to try it. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** I used Chef at Elephant Ventures to build provisioning scripts for managing systems used to develop, and ocassionally deploy, web sites for our clients ### 39. Best Configuration Management System **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 14, 2015 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** I have been working on Opscode Chef, though named is changed to Chef. I must say having worked on this technology for last 4 years now and also having worked on other configuration management system like puppet, anisble and salt. I always like chef for it's flexibility and easy to use features. Chef does not imposes develoepers/devops to learn and understand any new platform, if some one can understand the basic of ruby, should be more then enough. The community support is best part of the chef. Documentation is the thing which you can rely on. There are many open source where it's documentation is not so good and supportive. Does not hold good with chef. Apart of official docs one can find many other posts on blogs on chef. Over a period of time, chef has become a self sustained in pendent platform itself. People of built tool of other tools to help many developers and devops. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Couple of tools which are out of the box, yet to see the stable release. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** Considering the community support and the amount of the developer involved I can recommend others considering chef to other configure management system **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am running my entire e-commerce ERP and CRM solutions and running my entire aws stack using chef. ### 40. I use it for production technology at a cyber security startup and absolutely love it **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jared M. S. | Cyber Security Researcher and Project Lead, Research, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2015 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** I love the ease of use, specifically the short time required to get set up and start iterating on a project using chef to manage complex configurations across large clusters of servers. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** There a few things I don't like, but one in particular is that when first learning chef I found it hard to find exactly what I needed in the documentation and tutorials. Eventually, however, I was able to dig through enough documentation that I found what I needed. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** Rather than trying to parse through many tutorials, just get started on a project with it. You'll find that Chef's intuitive design makes this method of learning easy! **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am using Chef to automate configuration across many servers that require rapid iterations of changes to configuration. Without chef, I wouldn't be able to deploy changes to hundreds of machines spread across the world. ### 41. Best infrastructure as code tool! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Online Media | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 12, 2016 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** The DSL is ruby based, it makes sense, and there is a vibrant community that is very helpful. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Initial setup can be a bit confusing. Chef-solo, chef-client, chef-zero, etc. Managing cookbooks is also confusing until you set up berkshelf, which is a third-party tool. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** There are both free and paid options. Since chef 12, the enterprise and open source versions are very similar - but there are some paid options that are interesting, like analytics and chef delivery. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** It solves the problem of having 'snowflake' servers - with Chef, every server is set up identically, which leads to a much more dependable environment. It also saves time when spinning up new machines. ### 42. good work in setting up instance in cloud **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2015 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** After use the chef, it's easy and take very less time to set up a production instance(from 2 weeks to 3 hours). It's easy to learn by official docs. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** a little expensive for side project / start up project **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** it's good enough when build a cloud environments. And it's a good option on migrating the existing biz to the cloud. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** set up different environments(DEV/QA/PROD) by chef. Migrating the existing environment to the cloud and also build new environments. ### 43. Chef is Infraestructure as a Code **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 10, 2016 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Not biased to said that everything from Opscode - Chef was well design, from their solo version to the Chef Provisioning module. You can write and deploy your whole infraestructure. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Chef Server Operation could give trouble as in performance issues. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** Design well and do not forget to have clever metrics from your CI and CD workflow **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Infraestructure as Code. Continuos Delivering and Integration. ### 44. Powerful but Quirky **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 25, 2016 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** * Keeps recipes in version control. * Simple to modify system recipes * Keeps systems in sync **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** * Can revert developer/administrator changes with little notice. * Documentation can be out of date, suggesting commands that don't work with no clear suggestion for replacements. * Individual node configuration is kept separate from recipes, not version controlled. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** * Keeps a variety of servers maintained with proper configuration. * Propagates changes to many servers simply. * Makes transferring server roles between hardware much simpler. ### 45. Strong Core Software, Disappointing Community Additions **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Human Resources | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 23, 2015 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** The diverse collection of community cookbooks. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** The lack of maintenance on the majority of community cookbooks, which requires me to re-invent the wheel rather than use a pre-existing framework. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** If you're new to configuration management ideas in general, Chef has a steep learning curve. The Chef software gives its admins just enough rope to hang themselves. If you're already familiar with the Chef DSL (or config management DSLs in general), Chef is a powerful tool. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Reproducible infrastructure. Chef is a great tool for infrastructure management, as long as you know what you're doing. Chef's documentation does not hand-hold users through its set-up, use, or troubleshooting so I've regularly relied on third-party blogs/instructions to maintain my Chef cookbooks. If you're looking for a tool that guides you through installation, configuration, and use, I recommend Puppet. ### 46. Simple yet Elegant **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mohammad Hossein M. | CEO & Founder, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2015 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** When you are a rapid web designer/developer, you never want to be late on delivery. Chef should be your choice if you want to automate or config a system the way you want. It's easier than what you might think. Test it today! **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** I've never had a problem with Chef, so I do not dislike anything about it. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** Just use it once and you'll love it. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** 1. Saving time, 2. Saving Money, 3. Saving Clients 4. Learn how to think big about my future web dev needs. ### 47. Effective and smart way of config management, with a bit of a learning curve **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Paul B. | Senior Developer, Oracle OpenStack, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 11, 2016 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** Once you get running with Chef it's a very useful tool for config management, and a huge step forward over traditional methods. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** The learning curve can be a bit steep, there is plenty of terminology and patterns to wrap your head around. Once it clicks though it's easy enough to use. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Used in the past to deploy and manage small - medium clusters. ### 48. Chef let IT infrastructure implementation like an art planting. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Almighty Y. | Python Fullstack & Openstack Consultnat, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2015 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** 1. Chef is cross platform management solution. 2. make automation easier. 3. Just like cooking, follow the menu instruct to make a delicious meal. 4. Node role define flexible, easy and good for work. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** 1. module enhance not easy. 2. knife tool function may be could more and more. 3. Could not direct access to node console. 4. System configuration were handle by admin node(chef server). **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** not yet. ### 49. Infrastructure setup and maintenance automation for our PaaS offering **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Fábio S. | Enterprise, Cloud, Business Intelligence and Big Data Engineer and Architect, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 29, 2015 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** The powerful recipes system, version control and distributed capabilities. Chef allowed us to automate most, if not all the automated provisioning and change management systems in the underlying servers of our PaaS offering through Ruby scripting, shell scripting and Powershell scripting. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Ruby scripting. Ruby is a language that, in my opinion, is declining in relation to more straightforward ones like Python. Chef relies a lot in Ruby, which, in a company like ours, is a skill that is hard to find, and there are some features that are only found in external gems which have not been maintained for a while now. Unfortunately the document is sparse and you'll have to comb through the internet to find answers to some common use cases. **Recommendations to others considering Progress Chef:** Be proficient in Ruby. Understand the concepts behind it and go for a subscription that will help you get up and running quickly. Unfortunately the document is sparse and you'll have to comb through the internet to find answers to some common use cases. **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** Automation of the provisioning of our PaaS offering servers and change management (patch installation, platform upgrades, performance metering). Chef, as an open source solution backed by an Enterprise version, allowed us to start small and scale very quickly to around 600 servers now. ### 50. Chef is one of best automation tool **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sandip R. | Technical Lead - Ruby on Rails, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 18, 2015 **What do you like best about Progress Chef?** We used chef configuration management is doing good job so faar. **What do you dislike about Progress Chef?** Process of deployment configuration is something tricky to understand but once learned is one of the great tool **What problems is Progress Chef solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have Internal product that we deploy on four different servers using chef and doing various configurations for each. ## 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?page=2§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-24+12%3A46%3A16+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=01dce987-8fb9-4448-9e7b-364818c12789&secure%5Btoken%5D=4f5106c45655f327bee234d1e6d589f0d5375b3f08b101444a864f810da76d5f&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)