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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    PDQ Deploy & Inventory

    Score9.2 out of 10
    N/APDQ.com headquartered in Salt Lake City offers PDQ Deploy, a software deployment tool used to keep Windows PCs up-to-date without bothering end users.

    $1,575

    per year per user

    Progress Chef

    Score6.5 out of 10
    N/AChef 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
    PDQ Deploy & InventoryProgress Chef
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    PDQ Deploy & InventoryProgress Chef
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional DetailsPDQ was built by entrepreneurs & educators. Small businesses (<50 employees), nonprofits, and schools enjoy a 15% discount.—
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    PDQ Deploy & InventoryProgress Chef
    Considered Both Products
    PDQ
    No answer on this topic
    Progress Software
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    12 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    6 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    11 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    6 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    12 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    6 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    10 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    6 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    11 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    6 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    PDQ Deploy & InventoryProgress Chef
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    Salt
    Score6.2 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    No answers on this topic
    Perforce Puppet
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Enterprises
    No answers on this topic
    Salt
    Score6.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    PDQ Deploy & InventoryProgress Chef
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.6
    (12 ratings)
    8.9
    (18 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    9.3
    (6 ratings)
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.4
    (5 ratings)
    Support Rating
    10.0
    (5 ratings)
    7.7
    (3 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.6
    (5 ratings)
    Professional Services
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    PDQ Deploy & InventoryProgress Chef
    Likelihood to Recommend
    PDQ
    PDQ Inventory is great if you have a local network of computers on or off a domain. As long as you have a way to log into them with common credentials. Great for large organizations, particularly ones interconnected with VPNs. PDQ Inventory isn't so great for PCs that aren't connected to the same LAN the server is on. (i.e. non-vpn remote users) They used to have a remote agent you could install, but it was removed after numerous issues.
    Incentivized
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    Progress Software
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    PDQ
    • Push out new software
    • Push out Updates to current software
    • Push out patches and updates that we don't have other ways to push out
    • Keep end-users updated with little involvement
    Incentivized
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    Progress Software
    • 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.
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    PDQ
    • The facility to attempt re-deployment can be a bit easier to use, however, once you get used to it, it is OK.
    • The errors that it produces can be a bit cryptic, so could do with some sort of a verbose mode, when logging issues with packages being deployed.
    Incentivized
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    Progress Software
    • 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.
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    PDQ
    PDQ is very useful and one of the tools that we use a lot.
    Incentivized
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    Progress Software
    No answers on this topic
    Usability
    PDQ
    The interface is straight forward and guides you through the process there. PDQ keeps track of the when new updates are made available writes the scripts and all l you need to do is push the button. (Mr George Jetson) Now with the download done you just sit back worry free and watch the software install in 1% of the time it would take to take care of the PC manually.
    Incentivized
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    Progress Software
    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
    Incentivized
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    Performance
    PDQ
    No answers on this topic
    Progress Software
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    PDQ
    The built-in help menus and general ease of use render whatever systems support there might be almost irrelevant. There is stability in the system's simplicity; if you're in the position to use such a product, you're your own best friend. Simple web searches more often than not turn up the solution to any little niggles, such as what silent install switches specific applications require (a remarkably wide choice of options exist). System updates are timely and unobtrusive, installing in no time at all. Maybe I've just been lucky; if so, long may it continue!
    Incentivized
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    Progress Software
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    PDQ
    This software was referred to us by an IT professional. Previously, we were installing the software with the help of remote desktop applications but it was very time consuming; it was wasting the user's time since he could not use his computer. After testing PDQ Deploy, we just never looked back.
    Incentivized
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    Progress Software
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    PDQ
    No answers on this topic
    Progress Software
    The pricing seemed inline with our products in this space. Nothing out of the ordinary in contract, term, or pricing structure
    Incentivized
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    Professional Services
    PDQ
    No answers on this topic
    Progress Software
    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
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    PDQ
    • Speed of deployment is very positive for new software setup, saving hours of testing and deployment locally
    • Made patching for large computer estate very efficient, another positive for staff not having to spend hours of patching individual machines
    • Works well for small team of IT's and again makes various repetitive tasks much easier
    Incentivized
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    Progress Software
    • 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.
    Incentivized
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