Likelihood to Recommend Progress Software Corporation
Chef is a fantastic tool for automating software deployments that aren't able to be containerized. It's more developer-oriented than its other competitors and thus allows you to do more with it. The Chef Infra Server software is rock-solid and has been extremely stable in our experience. I would definitely recommend its use if you're looking for an automation framework. And it also offers InSpec which is a very good tool for testing your infrastructure to ensure it deployed as intended.
Read full review TeamCity is very quick and straightforward to get up and running. A new server and a handful of agents could be brought online in easily under an hour. The professional tier is completely free, full-featured, and offers a huge amount of growth potential. TeamCity does exceptionally well in a small-scale business or enterprise setting.
Read full review Pros Progress Software Corporation
Chef is great at deploying code to both small and large groups of servers. We use chef to standup new servers as well as deploy updated code to existing servers and it does this very well. Being able to make a change and have it push manually or automatically to any subset of servers has changed the landscape of how our IT teams operate. Read full review TeamCity provides a great integration with git, especially Bitbucket. When a new code release (build) fails TeamCity has a great tool for investigation and troubleshooting. TeamCity provides a user-friendly interface. While some technical knowledge is required to use TeamCity, the design helps simply things. Read full review Cons Progress Software Corporation
Chef could do a better job with integration with other DevOps tools. Our company relies on Jenkins and Ansible, which took some development and convincing for plug-ins to be created/available. It would be nice if kitchen didn't only have a vagrant/virtual-box prerequisite. Our company one day stop allowing virtual-box to run without special privileges, and that caused a lot of issues for people trying to do kitchen tests. Chef could use more practice materials for the advanced certification badges. There was not a lot of guidance in what to study or examples of certain topics. Read full review The customization is still fairly complex and is best managed by a dev support team. There is great flexibility, but with flexibility comes responsibility. It isn't always obvious to a developer how to make simple customizations. Sometimes the process for dealing with errors in the process isn't obvious. Some paths to rerunning steps redo dependencies unnecessarily while other paths that don't are less obvious. Read full review Usability Progress Software Corporation
The suite of tools is very powerful. The ability to create custom modules allows for unlimited potential for managing all aspects of a system. However, there is pretty significant learning curve with the toolset. It currently takes approx 3-4 months for new engineers to feel comfortable with our implementation
Read full review Performance Progress Software Corporation
It loads quick enough for basically all our systems. Because we have this for local dev environments, speed isn't really a big issue here. Yes, depending on the system, sometimes it does take a relatively long time, but it's not an issue for me. One thing that is annoying is that if I want to make a small change to a cookbook and re-run the Chef client, I can't just make the change in the cache and run it. I have to do the whole process of updating the server.
Read full review TeamCity runs really well, even when sharing a small instance with other applications. The user interface adequately conveys important information without being overly bloated, and it is snappy. There isn't any significant overhead to build agents or unit test runners that we have measured.
Read full review Support Rating Progress Software Corporation
Support for Chef is easily available for fee or through the open source community as most the issues you will face will have been addressed through the Chef developer community forums. The documentation for Chef is moderate to great and easily readable.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Progress Software Corporation
We considered the three leading competitors in the field: Chef, Puppet and
Ansible .
Ansible is a very strong competitor and has a nice degree of flexibility in that it does not require a client install. Instead the configuration is delivered by SSH which is very simple. Puppet seems like it has fallen off the pace of the competition and lacked the strong community offered by Chef. We chose Chef because of the strong support by the company and the dynamic and deep community support.
Read full review TeamCity is a great on-premise Continuous Integration tool. Visual Studio Team Services (
VSTS ) is a hosted SAAS application in Microsoft's Cloud.
VSTS is a Source Code Repository, Build and Release System, and Agile Project Management Platform - whereas TeamCity is a Build and Release System only. TeamCity's interface is easier to use than
VSTS , and neither have a great deployment pipeline solution. But
VSTS 's natural integration with Microsoft products, Microsoft's Cloud, Integration with Azure Active Directory, and free, private, Source Code repository - offer additional features and capabilities not available with Team City alone.
Eric Huggins Cloud Services Practice Manager and Principal Architect
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model Progress Software Corporation
The pricing seemed inline with our products in this space. Nothing out of the ordinary in contract, term, or pricing structure
Read full review Professional Services Progress Software Corporation
The entire professional services team was great to work with. The curriculum was tailored to our specific use cases. The group we worked with were very responsive, listened to our feedback, was very easy to schedule and accommodate. I cannot say enough good things about our professional services experience
Read full review Return on Investment Progress Software Corporation
Chef is a good tool for baselining servers. It will be a good ROI when there are huge number of servers. For less number of servers maintaining a master will be an over head. One good ROI will be that the Operations Team also gets into agile and DevOps methodologies. Operational teams can start writing scripts/automations to keep their infra more stable and their application stack more reliable. Implementation of Chef eliminates the manual mode of doing things and everyone aligns to automation mind set. It helps in change of culture. Read full review TeamCity has greatly improved team efficiency by streamlining our production and pre-production pipelines. We moved to TeamCity after seeing other teams have more success with it than we had with other tools. TeamCity has helped the reliability of our product by easily allowing us to integrate unit testing, as well as full integration testing. This was not possible with other tools given our corporate firewall. TeamCity's ability to include Docker containers in the pipeline steps has been crucial in improving our efficiency and reliability. Read full review ScreenShots