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chef vs puppet vs ansible on Hacker News

Across 2007–2026 of Hacker News, chef leads chef vs puppet vs ansible with 18,755 mentions to puppet’s 17,902, peaking in Feb 2013.

Mention-over-time for chef vs puppet vs ansible, overlaid across 2007–2026 of Hacker News. Each line is a live date-histogram over ~45M posts and comments, computed with Upstash Redis Search.

chef18,755 mentions, peak Feb 2013puppet17,902 mentions, peak Feb 2022ansible17,837 mentions, peak Mar 2020
2008201120142017202020232026
Open this comparison in the interactive tool — zoom to any date range and read the stories behind each spike →

How the lead changed hands

The config-management wars: Chef leads the automate-your-servers era ~2011–12, Puppet trades blows through 2013, then Ansible's agentless approach pulls ahead 2014–15.

The stories behind each line

Top “chef” stories
  1. In defense of the Google chef 994 points · 2011
  2. Ultrasonic Chef's Knife 824 points · 2025
  3. Kim Jong-il's Sushi Chef 728 points · 2013
  4. Chart Shows Who Marries CEOs, Doctors, Chefs and Janitors 452 points · 2016
Top “puppet” stories
  1. Puppeteer Support for Firefox 655 points · 2024
  2. Puppeteer: Headless Chrome Node API 406 points · 2017
  3. Why Puppet, Chef, Ansible aren't good enough 362 points · 2014
  4. Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck 354 points · 2013
Top “ansible” stories
  1. Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud 556 points · 2020
  2. Why Puppet, Chef, Ansible aren't good enough 362 points · 2014
  3. Ansible Techniques I Wish I’d Known Earlier 346 points · 2021
  4. Ask HN: Anyone struggling to get value out of coding LLMs? 345 points · 2025

Each term on its own

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