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)
Our great sponsors
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
Chef Ansible
2 390
7,475 61,068
0.8% 1.0%
9.6 9.8
about 19 hours ago 7 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.
  • I_suck_and_my_tests_are_order_dependent
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Feb 2023
    my contribution: public_method_that_only_deep_merge_should_use

    https://github.com/chef/chef/blob/68dd5f42273f19bc5975c0dc8e...

    that was 9 years ago and it was code smell that things were broken apart incorrectly and at some point i rewrote it so that wasn't necessary -- but sometimes you just gotta move the ball down the field, even if you don't get a first down.

  • Ask HN: Codebases with great, easy to read code?
    35 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Mar 2022
    I've found the Chef project (https://github.com/chef/chef) to be high quality and easily readable but I've been working with Chef for like 8 years at this point which might be influencing how I view it.

    Hashicorp projects also seem very well done too especially given how extensible they are.

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 2024-04-22.

What are some alternatives?

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

Capistrano - A deployment automation tool built on Ruby, Rake, and SSH.

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

Puppet - Server automation framework and application

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.

BOSH - Cloud Foundry BOSH is an open source tool chain for release engineering, deployment and lifecycle management of large scale distributed services.

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

Mina - Blazing fast deployer and server automation tool

Fabric - Simple, Pythonic remote execution and deployment.

gru - Orchestration made easy with Go and Lua

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

Logstash - Logstash - transport and process your logs, events, or other data

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