Chef VS Ansible

Compare Chef vs Ansible and see what are their differences.

Chef

Chef Infra, a powerful automation platform that transforms infrastructure into code automating how infrastructure is configured, deployed and managed across any environment, at any scale (by chef)

Ansible

Ansible is a radically simple IT automation platform that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy and maintain. Automate everything from code deployment to network configuration to cloud management, in a language that approaches plain English, using SSH, with no agents to install on remote systems. https://docs.ansible.com. (by ansible)
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Chef Ansible
2 388
7,426 60,624
0.4% 1.0%
9.5 9.8
5 days ago 4 days ago
Ruby Python
Apache License 2.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 only
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Chef

Posts with mentions or reviews of Chef. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-02-16.

Ansible

Posts with mentions or reviews of Ansible. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-22.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Chef and Ansible you can also consider the following projects:

Cloud-Init - unofficial mirror of Ubuntu's cloud-init

pyinfra - pyinfra automates infrastructure using Python. It’s fast and scales from one server to thousands. Great for ad-hoc command execution, service deployment, configuration management and more.

Home Manager using Nix - Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@rycee]

Fabric - Simple, Pythonic remote execution and deployment.

cloudinit - Official upstream for the cloud-init: cloud instance initialization

Pulumi - Pulumi - Infrastructure as Code in any programming language. Build infrastructure intuitively on any cloud using familiar languages πŸš€

(R)?ex - Rex, the friendly automation framework

GNU Stow - GNU Stow - mirror of savannah git repository occasionally with more bleeding-edge branches

pexpect - A Python module for controlling interactive programs in a pseudo-terminal

psutil - Cross-platform lib for process and system monitoring in Python

ansible-pfsense - Ansible modules for managing pfSense firewalls

SaltStack - Software to automate the management and configuration of any infrastructure or application at scale. Get access to the Salt software package repository here: