When to use it: Before considering Chef, make sure you’re familiar with Git, as it’s required for configuration, and Ruby, as you’ll have to be writing in it. Chef is good for development-focused teams and environments. It’s good for enterprises looking for a more mature solution for a heterogeneous environment.

Price: Free open source version, standard and premium plans priced on a per node per month basis that can get down to $6/node/month or $6.75/node/month respectively at high volume.

Pros:

• Rich collection of modules and configuration recipes.
• Code-driven approach gives you more control and flexibility over your configurations.
• Being centered around Git gives it strong version control capabilities.
• ‘Knife’ tool (which uses SSH for deploying agents from workstation) eases installation burdens.

Cons:

• Learning curve is steep if you’re not already familiar with Ruby and procedural coding.
• It’s not a simple tool, which can lead to large code bases and complicated environments.
• Doesn’t support push functionality.