Puppet vs. Chef: Which is Better for Your Infrastructure?
Pick the Right Configuration Management Tool
When it comes to Puppet vs. Chef, your choice of IT automation and configuration management tools can be the difference between worry-free infrastructure management and a long, hard journey filled with headaches. Get an overview of Puppet and Chef below, or see it in action with a demo.
What’s the Difference Between Puppet vs. Chef?
The main differences between Puppet and Chef include use cases, scalability, reporting, community support, and out-of-the-box features. Here’s a more technical breakdown.
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Platforms
Puppet
Progress Chef
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Platforms
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Platforms
Commercial: Linux, Windows, MacOS, AIX, Solaris Open Source: FreeBSD
Commercial: Linux, Windows, MacOS, AIX, Solaris, FreeBSD Open Source: Arista EOS, Virtuozzo, XCP-ng
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Language
PuppetDSL for desired state and task-based capabilities
Ruby-based DSL
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Architecture
Server/client OR client-less (“pull”)
Server/client OR client-less (“pull”)
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Interface
Puppet Enterprise provides a GUI with visibility to events & config details
Chef Automate provides a GUI with visibility to events & config details
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Setup
Built to scale with your automation needs
Chef can be scaled through integrated components
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Community
A bustling dev community and thousands of modules on the Forge (including many supported by Puppet)
Chef’s dev community is smaller, with about half as many modules on the Supermarket and very few supported modules
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Free Trial
Puppet Enterprise’s free trial allows you to automate 10 nodes for free as long as you want
Chef Automate offers a 60-day limited trial
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Scalability
Designed to scale for enterprise automation
Chef can scale because load is forced onto the client – but internal adoption by teams is often slow
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Visibility & Reporting
Robust visibility and reporting built into Puppet Enterprise (Impact Analysis available in PEA)
Accessible only with extensions
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Management
Puppet DSL and some YAML
Ruby-based DSL, Full Ruby, YAML, InSpec
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Cloud Availability
AWS, Azure, GCP + more
AWS, Azure, GCP + more
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Communication
SSL
SSL, SSH, WinRM
What Makes Puppet Better Than Chef?
Built-In Reporting + Visibility
Puppet can generate reports and help visualize the state of your configurations over time. With Chef, you’d have to use another tool for reporting and visualization.
Automatic Relationship Management
PuppetDSL’s desired state automation means you can tell it the configurations and dependencies you want, and it’ll figure out the rest. What makes it unique is its ability to do automatic relationship management and implicit resource ordering.
A Lighter Client
With Puppet, the logic workload is on the server, while the catalog with no logic or conditions is sent to the agent for execution. That means there’s less chance of a Puppet run affecting the processing on a heavily utilized node.
A Larger, More Robust Set of Tools
Puppet’s powerful infrastructure as code (IaC) has nearly unlimited use cases. It powers extensions which can automatically assess and enforce compliance in cross-deployed infrastructure at scale.
Pre-Built Content and a Huge Community
There are thousands of modules on the Puppet Forge, which automate tasks and open up integrations across infrastructure. Puppet and the Puppet Community build modules, help newbies, push the envelope for updates, and make Puppet better with each release.
Longevity and Expertise
Puppet has a huge footprint in ITOps and DevOps. We’ve been around for a long time, and we’ve left our mark with yearly DevOps reports, industry-leading advice, and smart solutions to our customers’ problems. We also leverage the Perforce community for ongoing support and innovative new solutions.
A Puppet Tool for Every Infrastructure Need
Puppet Core
The offering for Open Source Puppet users that need Security Compliance Enforcement, security hardened binaries and packages, and guaranteed SLAs for Puppet patches.
Puppet Enterprise
Drive efficiency at any scale with Puppet’s secure infrastructure automation and configuration platform.
Puppet Enterprise Advanced
The strength of Puppet Enterprise with Security Compliance Enforcement and Impact Analysis included.
Puppet is Built to Grow with Your Business. Chef Isn’t.
Scalability is at the core of Puppet. With tools for config management, automation, compliance, reporting, CI/CD, and more, Puppet powers your infrastructure management toolkit and lets you scale infrastructure with fewer headaches and less risk.
Chef, on the other hand, is known to be an impediment to scaling. Forrester reported that for Chef customers, “it took a long time to scale internal adoption and feel comfortable with advanced configuration and maintenance. They also reported that the documentation isn’t straightforward, making it hard to get up to speed quickly.”
See Puppet in Action or Try It for Yourself
Request a Demo Using the Form
If you’re evaluating infrastructure automation and configuration management tools like Puppet and Chef, you should absolutely do as much hands-on research as possible. That’s why we offer a free demo of Puppet products.