What users are saying about
Consul vs Chef Infra
16 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener noreferrer'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 8.5 out of 100
Based on 16 reviews and ratings
47 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener noreferrer'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 8.4 out of 100
Based on 47 reviews and ratings
Likelihood to Recommend
Consul
Consul looks to me like an amazing solution to store configuration data. In huge cloud environments like what we are using nowadays, it is quite important to have a reliable source of parameters to our distributed applications, easily scalable and also, easy to change parameters spreading them efficiently over our entire environment.
Senior Devops Engineer
SOTIComputer & Network Security, 1001-5000 employees
Chef Infra
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.

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Financial Services Company, 10,001+ employeesPros
Consul
- Service Health: Using Consul for service health/discovery has been critical to our success in a hybrid environment
- K/V Store: The Consul K/V store is the best solution out there for our particular use case, which is as a locking mechanism to coordinate otherwise random runs of our configuration management system. This has allowed us to have peace of mind of system availability in our on-prem infrastructure.
- API: The Consul API as a whole is excellent and extremely easy to work with
- Documentation: Hashicorp really does documentation well. Their examples are easy to follow and everything is written in a manner that is easy to understand for beginners with the tool.

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Information Services Company, 501-1000 employeesChef Infra
- 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.

Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology
Computer Software Company, 201-500 employeesCons
Consul
- We would like to see more out of the box training for Consul use.
- Best practice examples would be nice for routing.
- The agent could be easier to run.
Operations/Systems Manager
Crowell SystemsComputer Software, 51-200 employees
Chef Infra
- 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.

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Hospital & Health Care Company, 10,001+ employeesUsability
Consul
Consul 10.0
Based on 1 answer
Consul's API is extremely user friendly. While their web interface isn't quite as "mature", it's still pretty easily navigated for the average person. Together they make a pretty easy to pick up and use tool.

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Information Services Company, 501-1000 employeesChef Infra
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Performance
Consul
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Chef Infra
Chef Infra 9.3
Based on 10 answers
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.
Enterprise Software Architect
Latham Pool Products IncBuilding Materials, 1001-5000 employees
Support Rating
Consul
Consul 8.2
Based on 4 answers
I've never used paid support from HashiCorp, but I consider its support a good one, since they provide a lot of free resources for the community and there are good user groups supporting you on several sorts of issues. Also, HashiCorp is known as a company with a strong relationship with the community, that is easily noticed by the events HashiCorp promotes over the world.
Senior Devops Engineer
SOTIComputer & Network Security, 1001-5000 employees
Chef Infra
Chef Infra 7.0
Based on 5 answers
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.

Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology
Airlines/Aviation Company, 51-200 employeesAlternatives Considered
Consul
We studied Zoekeeper, trying to decide which could become our service broker tool of choice. But although it is meant to be a very high performance tool, it got immensely shadowed by the vast plethora of available tools that Consul offers. The monitoring, health checking tools, as well as the key-value data storage and gossip clustering functionalities just could not be beaten
Sr. Software Developer
CONSLOG - Construction SoftwareInformation Technology and Services, 1-10 employees
Chef Infra
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.
Senior Vice President Of Product Development
RizingInformation Technology & Services, 501-1000 employees
Return on Investment
Consul
- Consul has paid for itself just in monitoring and keeping us notified alone.
- Configuration changes can be monitored and will make even your Security team smile.
- The time saving tools will help make even a lean IT team work like a larger force.
Operations/Systems Manager
Crowell SystemsComputer Software, 51-200 employees
Chef Infra
- 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.

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Computer Software Company, 1001-5000 employeesPricing Details
Consul
General
Free Trial
—Free/Freemium Version
—Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—Entry-level set up fee?
No
Chef Infra
General
Free Trial
—Free/Freemium Version
—Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—Entry-level set up fee?
No