Chef vs Octopus Deploy: What are the differences?
What is Chef? Build, destroy and rebuild servers on any public or private cloud. Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.
What is Octopus Deploy? Automated deployment for .NET. Octopus works with your build server to enable reliable, secure, automated releases of ASP.NET applications and Windows Services into test, staging and production environments, whether they are in the cloud or on-premises.
Chef and Octopus Deploy are primarily classified as "Server Configuration and Automation" and "Deployment as a Service" tools respectively.
Some of the features offered by Chef are:
- Access to 800+ Reusable Cookbooks
- Integration with Leading Cloud Providers
- Enterprise Platform Support including Windows and Solaris
On the other hand, Octopus Deploy provides the following key features:
- Deploy on-premises or to the cloud, securely
- Built for .NET developers
- Configuration and scripting
"Dynamic and idempotent server configuration" is the primary reason why developers consider Chef over the competitors, whereas "Powerful" was stated as the key factor in picking Octopus Deploy.
Chef is an open source tool with 5.83K GitHub stars and 2.35K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Chef's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Chef has a broader approval, being mentioned in 359 company stacks & 80 developers stacks; compared to Octopus Deploy, which is listed in 45 company stacks and 15 developer stacks.
