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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    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

    SUSE Multi-Linux Manager

    Score8.8 out of 10
    N/ASUSE Multi-Linux Manager is a solution used to simplify management of any complex IT infrastructure. SUSE Multi-Linux Manager provides automated patching, content lifecycle management, and realtime monitoring to keep a mixed Linux environment secure and compliant at any scale – from 10 to over 100,000 clients – from a single console.N/A
    Pricing
    Progress ChefSUSE Multi-Linux Manager
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Progress ChefSUSE Multi-Linux Manager
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Progress ChefSUSE Multi-Linux Manager
    Considered Both Products
    Progress Software
    No answer on this topic
    SUSE
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    6 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    12 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    6 Answers
    92%
    Delivers good value for the price
    11 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    6 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    12 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    6 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    10 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    6 Answers
    90%
    Implementation went as expected
    9 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    Progress ChefSUSE Multi-Linux Manager
    Small Businesses
    Salt
    Score6.2 out of 10
    Salt
    Score6.2 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Perforce Puppet
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Perforce Puppet
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Salt
    Score6.2 out of 10
    Salt
    Score6.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Progress ChefSUSE Multi-Linux Manager
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.9
    (18 ratings)
    10.0
    (12 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.2
    (2 ratings)
    Usability
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    9.3
    (2 ratings)
    Performance
    9.4
    (5 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.7
    (3 ratings)
    7.5
    (2 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    9.6
    (5 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Professional Services
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Progress ChefSUSE Multi-Linux Manager
    Likelihood to Recommend
    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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    SUSE
    In our specific use case, SUSE Manager is extremely useful. We're having a large landscape that is divided into intake, development, quality and production with a couple of different SUSE flavours that need to be automatically rolled out, configured, patched and maintained, everything from up to date repositories that are cloned on a daily basis straight from SUSE.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    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
    Read full review
    SUSE
    • Manages patch levels for most Linux OS by: date, group, cloud or custom channels
    • Uses a lite version of Salt to run commands or scripts on any numbers of servers at once.
    • Allows the joining of groups inside SUSE Manager to quickly access or work with servers so grouped.
    Read full review
    Cons
    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
    Read full review
    SUSE
    • The cloning of patches when using the content lifecycle module in a multi-environment landscape with many SLES flavours is a bit cumbersome.
    • More premade saltstate for default applications are always nice to have.
    • Upgrading SUMA could be easier, especially when a Postgres upgrade is also required.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Progress Software
    No answers on this topic
    SUSE
    I am expanding the use of SUSE Manager throughout our organization and can't imagine going back to the "wild wild west" we had before.
    Read full review
    Usability
    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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    SUSE
    The gui is extremely user friendly. The installation and configuration does have a learning curve, it takes a while to set everything up. But once you're passed this initial learning curve, everything is very intuitive. If you want extra automation, there's an api (eventough i personally find the documentation of the api could be ordered better). I gave this product a 9 because of the initial learning curve and the api documentation, but for the rest it suits my needs perfectly.
    Incentivized
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    Performance
    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
    Read full review
    SUSE
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    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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    SUSE
    SUSE Manager provided a top-tier support person on site to us for two days to help integration. We did all the standard stuff they help with before he arrived. We were able to use him to get all the tricky stuff identified and solved in the short time we had. Had they sent us a lower-tier guy, it would have been a waste. I was impressed they sent such knowledgeable person.
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    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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    SUSE
    The other competitors also have a good platform and service, but we went with SUSE due to cost. The price was best and we needed to keep under a certain budget. The functionality was perfect for what we needed so we took the step forward. This allows us to manage our Linux environment within the manager and update or deploy specific tasks to each as needed.
    Incentivized
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    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    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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    SUSE
    No answers on this topic
    Professional Services
    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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    SUSE
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    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
    Read full review
    SUSE
    • Manages patch levels for most Linux OS by: date, group, cloud or custom channels
    • Make it easy to audit our own infrastructure.
    • Allows the joining of groups inside SUSE Manager to quickly access or work with servers so grouped.
    • 24/7 support team.
    • Automatic deployment.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
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