HashiCorp Terraform vs. Progress Chef

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
HashiCorp Terraform
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Terraform from HashiCorp is a cloud infrastructure automation tool that enables users to create, change, and improve production infrastructure, and it allows infrastructure to be expressed as code. It codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned. It is available Open Source, and via Cloud and Self-Hosted editions.
$0
Progress Chef
Score 6.5 out of 10
N/A
Chef IT infrastructure automation suites were developed by Chef Software in Seattle and acquired by Progress Software in September 2020. The Chef Enterprise Automation Stack is an integrated suite of automation technologies presented as a solution for delivering change quickly, repeatedly, and securely over every application's lifecycle. The Chef Effortless Infrastructure Suit is an integrated suite of automation technologies to codify infrastructure, security, and compliance, as well as…N/A
Pricing
HashiCorp TerraformProgress Chef
Editions & Modules
Open Source
$0
Team & Governance
$20/user
per user/per month
Enterprise
Contact sales team
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
HashiCorp TerraformProgress Chef
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
HashiCorp TerraformProgress Chef
Considered Both Products
HashiCorp Terraform
Chose HashiCorp Terraform
- Terraform syntax is much easier to read and learn than Cloud Formation. - Terraform already supports AWS as well as several other cloud providers. - Terraform is backed by a great and supportive open-source community.
Chose HashiCorp Terraform
Centralized and standard configuration. Ease of VM provisioning.
Progress Chef
Chose Progress Chef
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 …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
HashiCorp TerraformProgress Chef
Small Businesses
HashiCorp Vagrant
HashiCorp Vagrant
Score 9.9 out of 10
HashiCorp Vagrant
HashiCorp Vagrant
Score 9.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Ansible
Ansible
Score 8.9 out of 10
Ansible
Ansible
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
Ansible
Ansible
Score 8.9 out of 10
Ansible
Ansible
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
HashiCorp TerraformProgress Chef
Likelihood to Recommend
6.5
(25 ratings)
8.7
(18 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(1 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Performance
9.4
(3 ratings)
9.4
(5 ratings)
Support Rating
7.4
(5 ratings)
7.7
(3 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
6.4
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.2
(3 ratings)
9.6
(5 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
HashiCorp TerraformProgress Chef
Likelihood to Recommend
HashiCorp
8 because it's currently best-in-class and is completely essential to use in contrast to not expressing your infrastructure as code. That said, new contenders are nipping at its heels, and I expect stronger tools to emerge in the coming years. Hopefully the Terraform team is able to keep pace.
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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.
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Pros
HashiCorp
  • Terraform is cloud agnostic. Just select the suitable provider for the cloud and it will do the job.
  • Templating is possible to make the Terraform templates reusable.
  • Variables can be created to make the templates generic so that it can be reused for different environments or resources.
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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.
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Cons
HashiCorp
  • The errors generated by the plan and preview commands are pretty cryptic, it can be hard for newcomers to the scripting language to understand how to address problems.
  • Access controls around workspaces is limited which makes it harder to secure reduce the scope of teams ability.
  • Analytics around user usage, applies and plans would be helpful for managemenet.
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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.
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Usability
HashiCorp
I love Terraform and I think it has done some great things for people that are working to automate their provisioning processes and also for those that are in the process of moving to the cloud or managing cloud resources. There are some quirks to HCL that take a little bit of getting used to and give picking up Terraform a little bit of a learning curve, thus the rating
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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
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Performance
HashiCorp
Terraform's performance is quite amazing when it comes to deployment of resources in AWS. Of course, the deployment times depend on various parameters like the number of resources to deploy and different regions to deploy. Terraform cannot control that. The only minor drawback probably shows up when a terraform job is terminated mid way. Then in many cases, time-consuming manual cleanup is required.
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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.
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Support Rating
HashiCorp
I have yet to have an opportunity to reach out directly to HashiCorp for support on Terraform. However, I have spent a great deal of time considering their documentation as I use the tool. This opinion is based solely on that. I find the Terraform documentation to have great breadth but lacking in depth in many areas. I appreciate that all of the tool's resources have an entry in the docs but often the examples are lacking. Often, the examples provided are very basic and prompt additional exploration. Also, the links in the documentation often link back to the same page where one might expect to be linked to a different source with additional information.
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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.
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Alternatives Considered
HashiCorp
Terraform is the solid leader in the space. It allows you to do more then just provisioning within a pre-existing servers. It is more extensible and has more providers available than it competitors. It is also open source and more adopted by the community then some of the other solutions that are available in the market place.
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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.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
HashiCorp
No answers on this topic
Progress Software Corporation
The pricing seemed inline with our products in this space. Nothing out of the ordinary in contract, term, or pricing structure
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Professional Services
HashiCorp
No answers on this topic
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
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Return on Investment
HashiCorp
  • we are able to deploy our infrastructure in a couple of ours in an automated and repeatable way, before this could take weeks if the work was done manually and was a lot of error prone.
  • having the state file, you can see a diff of what things have changed manually out side of Terraform which is a huge plus
  • if state file gets corrupted, it is very hard to debug or restore it without an impact or spending hours ..
  • writing big scale code can be very challenging and hard to be efficient so it's usable by the whole team
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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.
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ScreenShots

HashiCorp Terraform Screenshots

Screenshot of Terraform StateScreenshot of Terraform RunsScreenshot of Terraform VariablesScreenshot of Terraform WorkspacesScreenshot of Terraform Cost Estimation