A comparison of Opscode's Chef and Puppet Lab's Puppet for Enterprise applications.

1. Puppet vs. Chef – The Battle Wages On
Puppet vs. Chef
So, Puppet or Chef? A question of configuration management that has started more than
one flame war in its time. Whilst perhaps not helpful for those charged with implementing
an automation solution for their business the most appropriate answer really is “It
depends.” Many have argued that (considering the alternative) using either is fine. Just
get started!
There are differences though, both with the technologies and the companies behind
them, that an understanding of may make your choice a little easier.

2. Complexity & Power
When looking into each tool some themes consistently arise. It is frequently stated that
Puppet is a tool that was built with sysadmins in mind. The learning curve is less
imposing due to Puppet being primarily model driven. Getting your head around json
data structures in Puppet manifests is far less daunting to a sysadmin who has spent
their life at the command line than ruby syntax is. Chef on the other hand is procedural,
you write your recipes in ruby code. If you’re on the Dev side of DevOps, particularly if
you already have ruby experience, this approach feels natural to you. If you’re a
sysadmin it can be more problematic. The steep learning curve of Chef is also viewed as
a risk in larger companies. Skilling a large team up, and then maintaining those skills
over time, is seen as a additional risk.
The flip side to this argued by Chef users is that, once you are over the initially steep
learning curve, you get a lot more power and flexibility out of Chef. Its reliance on code
means you can bend configurations to your will much more easily. They would also
argue that the model driven approach of Puppet, which determines installation based on
defined dependencies, suffers in practice due to the loss of control. When defining
procedurally there are no surprises.
It should also be pointed out that Puppet now allow developers to work with pure ruby to
build manifests (as of version 2.6).
Platforms
Whilst both Chef and Puppet are cross platform Puppet is officially supported on a
broader range of operating systems. For details check these links:
Puppet Supported Platforms
Chef Supported Platforms
Community
As a more mature product Puppet has a larger user base than Chef. Chef has also been
considered more US centric to date. Having said this Chef has been making huge gains
over the past couple of years. It can be argued again here that a sysadmin may get
more from the Puppet community and a developer from the Chef one.

3. Documentation
Whilst early on both Puppet and Chef had awful documentation they have both improved
significantly. Their respective online documentation repositories can be found here. I
actually prefer the Puppet docs but I’m still carrying scars from early attempts to make
use of Chef’s offerings so I could be biased:
http://docs.puppetlabs.com/
http://docs.opscode.com/
In terms of reference texts both Puppet and Chef have excellent options available:
Pro Puppet
Puppet 2.7 Cookbook
Test Driven Infrastructure with Chef
Chef – The definitive guide (Coming soon)
Pricing
Both Puppet and Chef offer free open source versions. Puppet Enterprise is free for the
first 10 nodes and then $99 per node (per year) after that. Discounts kick in in tiers after
that until you hit 2500 nodes.
Private (behind the firewall) Chef ranges from $120 per month for 20 servers to $600 per
month for 100 servers. Chef also have a hosted (SaaS) offering which is priced the
same. Be prepared for pain with their UI though. It hasn’t won any user experience
awards
Conclusion
If you have time to try both then do. It’s a bit of a case of horses for courses and you
may be surprised. If you’re a large shop with a diverse range of skills in operations and
development you may lean towards Puppet. If you’re a Rails shop you’d probably go
straight to Chef. There really is no definitive answer though. As mentioned above, doing
one is light years better than doing neither so if you’re agonizing over the decision just
stop, toss a coin and get going today.