Chef Reviews in June 2025: User Ratings, Pros & Cons

"Exective chef at a university "

What do you like best? Being able to feed people with simpe ingrednts What do you dislike? At times the lack of knowdgle of the time it takes to make a dish Recommendations to others considering the product: Not at this time What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized? Meeting food cost

"A workhorse for deployment and configuration"

What do you like best? The ability to manage multiple environments easily. What do you dislike? The domain specific language has a couple of small quirks. Recommendations to others considering the product: 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 are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized? We used this to manage all of the hosts ...

"Powerful tool but difficult to get started with"

What do you like best? 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? 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 ...

"Automating deployment with Chef"

What do you like best? 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? Chef is terribly complex to deploy by itself, not only ...

"Chef is an excellent tool for Server Configuration"

What do you like best? 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 ...

"Powerful but Quirky"

What do you like best? * Keeps recipes in version control. * Simple to modify system recipes * Keeps systems in sync What do you dislike? * 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 are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized? * Keeps a ...

"Powerful but Quirky"

What do you like best? * Keeps recipes in version control. * Simple to modify system recipes * Keeps systems in sync What do you dislike? * 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 are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized? * Keeps a ...

"Effective and smart way of config management, with a bit of a learning curve"

What do you like best? 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? 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 are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized? Used in the past to deploy and manage small - medium clusters.

"Chef is neat and awesome"

What do you like best? 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? Installation should be made little faster. knife-plugins support is less Some of the cookbooks are not maintained.. Recommendations to others considering the product: I recommend to use Chef ...

"Strong Core Software, Disappointing Community Additions"

What do you like best? The diverse collection of community cookbooks. What do you dislike? 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 the product: 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 ...