Progress marks Chef Infra Server 15.x as deprecated and names Chef 360 Platform as its successor. Since September 15, 2026, downloads of Chef Client 18 and older, and of Chef Workstation, require a license key. This page is for platform and DevOps teams running self-managed Chef — four replacements with public per-node prices, five more that are quote-only, and the migration dates straight from Progress's own documentation.
See the comparison Migration calendarPrices checked September 20, 2026 on each vendor's own pricing or buying page. Confirm before you commit — per-node pricing and support tiers move. Sorted by what migration actually costs you, not by who pays us.
| Tool | Best for | Public price | What the migration costs you | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cinc Server Open source A free rebuild of Chef Infra Server, maintained independently since Progress announced the end of the open source Infra Server. | Teams that want to keep their existing server, cookbooks and runbooks with no licence cost | $0. No paid tier, no licence key. Confirmed on the project's own documentation. |
The closest option to a like-for-like move: engine compatibility with Chef Infra Server 15.x, a chef-server-ctl compatibility wrapper, and cookbooks run unchanged. |
Cinc Server docs |
| Chef 360 Platform Progress's own successor to Infra Server. Managed cloud control plane rather than a server you host. | Organisations staying with Progress that accept a managed control plane and per-node billing | $59 per node per year (Business). $189 per node per year (Enterprise). Enterprise Plus and self-managed deployments are quote-only. | Not a server swap. Cookbook-driven workflows give way to platform skills, so plan this as a re-platforming project with a budget line, not a weekend upgrade. | Chef pricing |
| Ascender Pro (CIQ) Commercial Ansible automation with published per-node list prices and no node minimum. | Cost-sensitive fleets, from a handful of nodes to thousands, that want commercial support without a sales call | $100 per node per year with Standard support. $150 per node per year with Premium support. No node minimum. | Ansible under the hood, so Chef recipes and cookbooks become playbooks. The upside is transparent pricing; the cost is a rewrite. | CIQ pricing |
| mgmt config Open source Event-driven configuration management that keeps running and reacting to state changes, rather than converging on a schedule. | Small, technically strong teams that want no vendor dependency at all | $0. Fully open source, no paid tier. | A full rewrite in its own mcl language. Nothing from Chef carries over, and there is no commercial support contract to buy if you get stuck. | mgmt config |
Sources checked 2026-09-20: docs.chef.io/versions (Infra Server 15.x = Deprecated, end of life November 30, 2026, successor Chef 360 Platform), chef.io/how-to-buy, ciq.com/pricing, cinc.sh/docs/server, mgmtconfig.com.
These five are real migration targets that Chef shops commonly evaluate. None of them publishes a dollar figure for the edition you would need, so they are not in the table above. Where to talk to sales, and what the free tier gets you, is below.
| Tool | Best for | Pricing model | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform The largest agentless automation ecosystem, with the deepest training and third-party content base. | Enterprises that want vendor SLAs and a path into RHEL and OpenShift consumption | Quote-only on Red Hat's own pricing page; a no-cost trial is available. Recipes become playbooks — a rewrite, but the best-documented one. | Red Hat pricing |
| Puppet (Perforce) Agent plus central server, declarative enforcement — the closest architecture to Chef. | Agent-based configuration management at scale, for teams already comfortable with that model | Puppet Core is free for fewer than 25 nodes (developer use). Puppet Enterprise is contact-sales only; no dollar list price is published. | Puppet pricing |
| Salt Project / SaltStack Fast remote execution and event-driven automation; can run agentless over SSH. | Large fleets that want speed and do not want an agent on every host | The open source Salt framework is free. The commercial product now sits inside Broadcom's VMware Aria Automation stack and is quote-only, which is a different procurement route than buying Chef was. | Salt Project |
| Rudder (Normation) Configuration plus continuous compliance scoring, patch and CVE management. | Security and compliance-driven teams that also need configuration enforcement | Rudder Core (community edition) is free and open source. Enterprise and the Corporate Security Suite are quoted per node per year on request — a low-risk pilot path. | Rudder pricing |
| Opafra Agentless SSH runner with approval gates and audit trails around server automation. | Teams that need change approval and audit evidence, not just configuration enforcement | Plans are quoted per organisation (Team, Business, Enterprise), with unlimited hosts on every plan. No agent or daemon on the hosts. | Opafra pricing |
If a vendor publishes list pricing later, tell us nothing — check their page. We only report what is published where we can link to it.
Start from the job you hired Chef for, not from the feature matrix. The single biggest fork in the road is whether your cookbooks survive the move.
Cinc Server. It is the only option here that runs Chef cookbooks unchanged, keeps the server configuration layout familiar, and costs nothing. The trade-off is that you are relying on a community-maintained fork rather than a vendor contract.
Chef 360 Platform if you want to stay with Progress — it is the documented successor. Ascender Pro if you want the lowest publicly listed commercial per-node price and are willing to move to Ansible playbooks.
Look at Rudder: free community edition for a pilot, continuous compliance scoring as the core feature rather than an add-on, and the enterprise quote only when you are ready. Puppet is the other architectural match if you already run agents.
mgmt config or Puppet Core (under 25 nodes) if you can absorb the rewrite. With a small fleet, rewriting a handful of cookbooks is days of work, not a project — and both free paths remove the per-node line item entirely.
Two separate clocks are running: the end-of-life date for the software, and the phased removal of unauthorised downloads. Progress states that every download date is tentative and may be revised without notice, so treat this as planning input and verify on the source pages.
Progress lists Chef Infra Server 15.x as Deprecated with an end-of-life date of November 30, 2026 on its product lifecycle page, docs.chef.io/versions, and names Chef 360 Platform as the successor. Deprecated means Chef no longer publishes scheduled releases for it; support continues under the published service level agreement until the end-of-life date.
According to Progress's download-change blog, unauthorised downloads of Chef Client 18 and older, and of Chef Workstation, were removed on September 15, 2026, and those binaries now require a licence key through the Chef download portal. Progress labels every date in that schedule as tentative and subject to revision, so check the source page before you plan around it.
Only if you leave the Chef ecosystem. Cinc Server is a rebuild of Chef Infra Server that keeps cookbook support and a chef-server-ctl compatibility wrapper, so cookbooks keep running. Ansible-based tools, Puppet, Salt, Rudder, Opafra and mgmt config all use their own formats — playbooks, manifests, states, policies or mcl — and cannot execute Chef cookbooks. Budget for a rewrite, not a port.
Chef 360 Platform. Progress's lifecycle page lists it as the successor for Infra Server, InSpec and Supermarket, and its buying page shows $59 per node per year for Business and $189 per node per year for Enterprise, with Enterprise Plus and self-managed deployments quote-only.
Because none of them publishes a dollar list price for the edition a Chef shop would need. Puppet Core is free below 25 nodes, Rudder Core and the Salt open source framework are free, and Opafra quotes per organisation; the enterprise editions are contact-sales only. We do not invent list prices, so they appear with their pricing model in the section above instead of a made-up number in the table.
No. The order follows what the migration costs you — tools that keep your cookbooks first, then the rewrite options, then the ones that cannot publish a price. Some outbound links may become affiliate links later. That will not change the order or the numbers on this page.