Name: Chef Automate
Rating: 3.8 (54 reviews)

Overview

Product Information on Chef Automate

Updated 13th October 2025

What is Chef Automate?

Chef Automate is a software designed to support infrastructure automation, compliance, and continuous delivery. The software provides visualization tools, compliance dashboards, and workflow automation features that enable organizations to manage infrastructure as code across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. Chef Automate integrates with DevOps pipelines to streamline configuration management and policy enforcement, offering monitoring and reporting capabilities that help ensure consistent system states. It addresses the business problem of manual infrastructure management by facilitating automatic provisioning, configuration, and remediation, aiming to improve operational efficiency and collaboration among development, operations, and security teams.

Overall experience with Chef Automate

Senior Oracle Developer

<50M USD, IT Services

FAVORABLE

“Achieving Consistent Environment Deploys with Chef Automate”

4.0

Jan 15, 2025

Chef Automate is useful when it comes to configuration management and its automation specifically where there is no reliable drift detection and remediation. This puts a lot of work on our team to manually look for configuration differences and make corrections on them.

IT MANAGER

<50M USD, Hardware

CRITICAL

“Addressing the Complexity of Chef Cookbooks: A User's Perspective”

3.0

Jan 8, 2025

Chef Automate helps in the deployment and ensures conformity to best practices. Improvements in the management of dependencies in cookbooks would greatly enhance maintainability and lessen the onset of trouble-shooting problems.

About Company

Company Description

Progress (Nasdaq: PRGS) is a company that aids businesses in achieving faster innovation cycles, fueling growth and success. It provides top quality products for the development, deployment and management of high-impact applications. The company's services ensure the creation of necessary applications and user experiences, offers flexibility in how and where to deploy and facilitates the safe and secure management of all these processes. This comprehensive solution makes Progress an essential resource for numerous enterprises, software companies and developers, supporting them in meeting their defined objectives.

Company Details

Company type

Public

Year Founded

1981

Head office location

Burlington, MA, United States

Number of employees

1001 - 5000

Website

https://www.progress.com/

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Key Insights

A Snapshot of What Matters - Based on Validated User Reviews

Reviewer Insights for: Chef Automate

Performance of Chef Automate Across Market Features

Chef Automate Likes & Dislikes

I have found the Chef Automate tool especially useful owing to its infrastructure as code or IaC model. By defining configurations as code we achieved the same level of environment consistency in our deploys while significantly reducing errors.

Chef Automate enables me to describe and control the state of our servers in code. This has made our deployments more consistent and there are fewer mistakes made.

Highly available and scalable means it can handle small to large requests smoothly. Good security policies for auditing and compliance. Rollback support for the previous stable version in case of any failures.

In some cases, the settings of the actual individual host might considerably deviate from the stated code base. Such an approach leads to much inconsistency, which in turn leads to a management nightmare in the planning and production processes.

Chef cookbooks are the building blocks for configuration management and can become complex and hard to manage, especially so in large environments. Fixing entangled dependencies between cookbooks is a real pain and can take hours if not days.

Artificial Intelligence features are not very well supported. Tightly coupled with Ruby and their version. Monitoring features need to be increased for better issue tracking.

Top Chef Automate Alternatives

Peer Discussions

Chef Automate Reviews and Ratings

Recommended Gartner Insights

Market Guide for Continuous Configuration Automation Tools (Transitioning to Infrastructure Automation and Orchestration Tools)

<50M USD

IT Services

Review Source

Achieving Consistent Environment Deploys with Chef Automate

Hardware

Addressing the Complexity of Chef Cookbooks: A User's Perspective

PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER

50M-1B USD

Software

Chef configure, automate and scale your infrastructure with Precision and Consistency.

Oct 6, 2024

Chef Automate is a powerful DevOps tool used for configuration management and Infrastructure as a Code. It is written in Ruby and provides large support for in-built modules and libraries that help in automating server configurations, installing packages, running scripts to automate and run services, and managing servers and applications. To automate the task in Chef, we need to write chef recipes and cookbooks for the infrastructure definition, automating manual task and provisional the server and resources on premises data center and cloud. It does support both physical data centers and major public cloud providers like AWS, GCP, Azure and Digital Ocean. For example, we use chef to automate the setup and provisioning of multiple complex environments with all its dependencies, which helps in reducing the manual errors. It also makes application upgrades quite smoother, faster and more reliable with the support of immediate rollback functionalities.

Solution Architect

1B-10B USD

Transportation

Good product, could be enhanced.

Aug 31, 2021

The product is dependable and stable. It is clumsy to configure and code the recipes. It is left to the consumer to define a config management process for the recipes and cookbooks. SysAdmin teams not well versed in programming have a steep learning curve.

Sr Manager

Miscellaneous

Good Configuration Management tool for devops journey

May 31, 2020

Good experience. Although I personally like centralized PUSH architecture for configuration management, chef still does what it promizes. Overall, I am pleased that we use this product.