Chef Infra vs Rundeck

Chef Infra automates infrastructure configuration and helps keep systems aligned with a defined desired state. Teams express configurations and policies as code, test them, and deliver them through automated pipelines; Chef Infra can correct configuration drift when systems diverge. It supports Windows and Linux systems, cloud ARM systems, and Mac laptops across on-premises, cloud, and edge environments. Chef Infra Client includes more than 150 resources, while the community provides thousands of configuration templates. Chef Workstation bundles the client with Chef InSpec, Chef Habitat, Test Kitchen, Cookstyle, and Chef Upgrade Lab. The policy language is Ruby DSL, and listed capabilities include policy testing, reporting, and CI/CD integration. The free community version is non-commercial. Business costs $59 a year per node, and Enterprise costs $189 a year per node; Enterprise Plus requires a customized quote. Chef Infra Client 19.x is listed as the current LTS release, while 18.x is deprecated and earlier versions are end of life.

Rundeck gives incident response teams a self-service way to run automated workflows for preventing, diagnosing and resolving incidents. Jobs can start automatically when a PagerDuty incident begins or be launched manually from the PagerDuty interface. They can gather logs, service status and performance checks from affected systems, then add actions and results to the incident timeline. Runbook Automation can invoke workflows through a web interface, CLI, APIs or integrated applications. Certified Enterprise Plugins include ServiceNow, Kubernetes, Ansible, Datadog, VMware, GitHub, AWS SNS and SQL Runner. Single sign-on is supported with providers such as LDAP, Active Directory and SAML. Buyers can use the managed product or deploy self-hosted on-premise or in a private cloud; a license is required for self-hosted operation. The hosted Runbook Automation plan costs $125 a month, billed per user plus a platform fee. A free plan and a 14-day full-featured trial with no credit card are listed. Standard Support is listed for weekday business hours, while Platinum Support is 24×7.