Every category where a model named Chef for a mid-market B2B company. Share is first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts; rank is within every product named in that category.

Category	Function	Share	Rank	Negative rate	Labels	Quadrant
Infrastructure as code	Cloud and infrastructure	0%	45 of 46	69%	13	criticized challenger
Secrets management	Identity and access	0%	27 of 40	100%	1	under 10 labels · led by Doppler at 33%

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for Chef yet. From the next edition this section shows, per buyer segment, whether its share moved by more than the measured noise floor.

By model

How each model treated Chef across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Twelve models, six prompts per category.

Model	Mention	Negative	Labels
Claude Haiku 4.5	0	2	2
GPT-5.4 mini	0	0	0
Gemini 3.5 Flash	0	1	1
Perplexity Sonar	0	1	1
Grok 4.1 Fast	1	1	2
Mistral Small	1	0	1
DeepSeek V4 Flash	1	1	2
Llama 4 Maverick	0	0	0
Qwen 3.7 Flash	0	1	1
Kimi K2	0	1	1
GLM 4.7 FlashX	0	0	0
MiniMax M2.5	1	2	3

By framing

Which of the six questions produced the naming. By model says how often; this says asked what. The first-choice count on the right carries the marks of the models that produced it.

FramingLabels by classFirst choices

Direct1 labelNone

Paraphrase0 labelsNone

Comparative8 labelsNone

Budget-constrained1 labelNone

Scale-constrained2 labelsNone

Negative28 labelsNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative40 labels in all, every segment counted; 0 of the 0 first choices count toward share, since the comparative and negative framings do not. The bar is one segment per label class, to scale within the framing.

What the models said for it

Verbatim evidence the judge attached to positive labels.

No positive label carried a quote.

And against it

Verbatim evidence attached to negative labels. A warning on a product with few labels is a warning; on a product with many, it is one voice among them.

“Chef Infra Server hits end-of-life in Nov 2026... Avoid for new work: Pure legacy config tools” Grok 4.1 Fast · IaC · negative prompt · hard negative

“Avoid for new projects: Chef, Puppet, SaltStack (commercial), CDKTF.” DeepSeek V4 Flash · IaC · negative prompt · hard negative

“avoid using them as your primary provisioning tool” Kimi K2 · IaC · negative prompt · hard negative

“Avoid for infrastructure provisioning.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · IaC · negative prompt · hard negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Chef, over the 40 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Chef was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Puppet39 of 400Not in the top three

Terraform37 of 4017Not in the top three

Ansible35 of 409Not in the top three

Pulumi34 of 406Not in the top three

AWS CloudFormation34 of 400Not in the top three

OpenTofu25 of 4014Not in the top three

Google Cloud Deployment Manager17 of 400Not in the top three

SaltStack17 of 400Not in the top three

Azure Resource Manager templates16 of 400Not in the top three

Crossplane14 of 401Not in the top three

A head-to-head page exists where both products are in a category's top three. The other rows are the same fact without a page behind them, so they link to the product instead.

What carried it into the answer

The sites and pages cited by the answers that named Chef. A fact about retrieval, not a lever on the model.

Citations exist only for the models that return a source list, four of the twelve in this edition, so these counts come from 35 of the 40 answers that named Chef and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

apiiro.com18

spacelift.io18

claranet.com17

pulumi.com17

reddit.com17

cortex.io14

dev.to11

guideflow.com11

computingforgeeks.com10

daily.dev10

143 of the 143 domain citations in answers naming Chef came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

apiiro.com/blog/best-iac-tools18

pulumi.com/blog/infrastructure-as-code-tools15

claranet.com/uk/blog/right-and-wrong-approach-to-infrastructure-code14

cortex.io/post/best-infrastructure-as-code-iac-tools14

guideflow.com/blog/infrastructure-as-code-tools11

computingforgeeks.com/best-infrastructure-as-code-iac-cloud-automation-tools10

daily.dev/blog/top-7-iac-pitfalls-risks-challenges-solutions9

checkthat.ai/answers/what-are-the-best-infrastructure-as-code-tools8

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Names read as Chef

What the judge wrote, as written, with how often. The vendor table decides that these count as Chef; a claim can dispute any of them.

Chef (Infra Server) 1Chef/Puppet 1

Is this your product?

Claim this page

Claiming is free and changes nothing in the data. A claimed page shows a verified contact who is told when each edition publishes and when Chef's standing changes by more than the noise floor; the right to propose corrections to the vendor table, meaning names the judge wrote that should or should not read as Chef, applied by version and listed in the change log; and a one-line description supplied by the vendor and marked as such.

It does not get any change to labels, shares or verdicts, any preview, or any say over which quotes appear. A verification link goes to your work email; an address at chef.io is approved on the spot, any other address is reviewed by hand.

Your name and company appear on the claimed page, or the company alone if you ask below. A title and a LinkedIn address appear there too if you give them, and are left off if you do not. Your email address is never published.