Progress Chef Licensing Explained: Node Counting and the 2026 Changes
This page answers the Progress Chef licensing questions buyers actually ask — what the free tier really allows, what counts as a node, and what the 2026 changes mean if you have been running Chef for free. Figures are Progress list prices in USD.
The short answer — and it is urgent: Chef Infra Server (Open Source) reaches end of life in November 2026, with no further security fixes contributed after October. Separately, Chef downloads are moving behind licence-validated endpoints through August to October 2026, which will break CI/CD pipelines pulling from the old omnitruck endpoints. And the free tier is restricted to non-production workloads — not a node count. If you are running free Chef in production, you are out of compliance regardless of size.
What does Chef cost?
Unusually for this category, Progress publishes prices:
| Tier (SaaS) | Price | Support | Concurrency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business | $59 per node per year | Standard | 10 concurrent job runs |
| Enterprise | $189 per node per year | Standard | 10 concurrent |
| Enterprise Plus | Quote only | Premium (24×7) | 50 concurrent |
Business includes node management, job orchestration, configuration management, desktop management, compliance audit and cloud security posture management. Enterprise adds the InSpec and Infra skills on top. Self-managed deployment is quote-only at every tier.
The $59 to $189 step is a 3.2× jump, and it is the main negotiation seam. The delta is largely the InSpec and Infra skill entitlement. Establish whether you actually need them before accepting Enterprise. Note also that 24×7 support is only available on Enterprise Plus, which is the unpriced tier — Business and Enterprise both get business-hours Standard support.
What does the free tier actually allow?
Non-production workloads only. Chef’s licence tiers are Free (unlimited duration, non-production, community Slack support), Trial (30 days, non-production, unlimited targets) and Commercial (production and non-production). The binding constraint on the free tier is a use restriction, not a node count.
Verified node limits where they exist:
- Chef InSpec 6 free tier: 10 targets, perpetual, non-commercial.
- Community users are capped at Infra 12 nodes and InSpec 3 targets — which in practice pins genuinely unlicensed community use to software roughly a decade old.
- Free and discounted licences exist for non-profit, academic and research organisations.
We could not find a published free-tier node limit for Chef Infra Client specifically, and we would not quote one. The non-production restriction is the constraint that matters.
What changed in 2025 and 2026
Three separate events are often conflated. Getting them straight matters because they have different consequences.
1. The source is still Apache 2.0
Chef moved to Apache 2.0 in 2019, not away from it. What changed was binaries: commercial use of Progress-built binaries requires a commercial relationship. The source code remains open, and building your own distribution is still legally available. Anyone telling you Chef “closed the source” is wrong, and it matters because the self-build escape hatch is real — if impractical.
2. Runtime licence keys on Chef Infra Client 19
A licence key is required only when the chef gem comes from public channels such as rubygems.org. It is not required when installed from official Progress distributions — the customer portal, Habitat packages, or native RPM, DEB, MSI and DMG installers. The breakage vector is non-interactive mode: without a key supplied via CHEF_LICENSE_KEY or --chef-license-key, the client errors and exits.
3. Licensed downloads — the live one
| Date | What is removed from open download |
|---|---|
| December 2025 | Chef Server 14 and earlier, ChefDK, old InSpec, deprecated tools (done) |
| August 2026 | All InSpec |
| September–October 2026 | Chef Client 16, 17, 18 |
| October 2026 | Chef Workstation |
Legacy omnitruck endpoints, CI/CD pipelines and package repository configurations will break. Automated downloads need to move to the new licence-key format. Progress explicitly notes these dates are tentative and may be revised without notice — which cuts both ways for planning.
4. Chef Infra Server open source reaches end of life
This is the biggest item and it did not get much attention. From end of October 2026, no new code, features or security fixes go into the open source Infra Server. November 2026 is end of life. The two forward paths Progress offers are Chef 360 SaaS or Chef 360 Self-Managed. Every free or self-hosted Chef estate has to become a paying customer, re-platform, or run unpatched infrastructure automation — and the download gating lands in the same eight-week window.
What counts as a managed node?
Chef’s definition is broad, and the breadth is where budgets go wrong:
“An individual component of your system, physical or virtual (for example, a server, workstation, IP router, virtual machine, or another device or component), that’s assessed, installed, configured, updated, scanned and/or managed using any Chef product.”
Three consequences worth planning for:
- “Server” is not the unit. Workstations, IP routers, VMs and “another device or component” are all named. If you use Chef for desktop management, laptops count.
- Assessed counts, not just configured. The verb list includes “scanned” — a machine you only audit with InSpec is a licensed unit.
- Targets are broader than nodes. Cloud accounts and container hosts are explicitly named as InSpec compliance targets, so cloud security posture scanning consumes units on a different basis than node counting.
Ephemeral and autoscaled infrastructure is the open question. Whether a node destroyed after an hour counts, and whether counts reset, is not addressed in Chef’s published terms. Force it into the contract.
How does this compare to Ansible?
| Progress Chef | Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform | |
|---|---|---|
| Unit | Per node, per year | Per managed node |
| Published price | Yes — $59 / $189 per node/yr | No — quote only |
| Source licence | Apache 2.0 | GPLv3 (ansible-core) |
| Free production path | None — free tier is non-production | ansible-core and AWX, unsupported but current |
| Node recycling | Not published | Explicitly does not recycle counts |
| 24×7 support | Enterprise Plus only (unpriced) | Premium tier |
The honest read: both are per-managed-node — that is not a differentiator, whatever a sales conversation suggests. Chef is more price-transparent, publishing two of three tiers where Red Hat publishes nothing. But Ansible’s free path is materially stronger: ansible-core and AWX are genuinely usable, current and unrestricted by version, whereas Chef has no current-version free production path at all. That is the single biggest licensing-model difference and it favours Ansible.
Ansible’s node counting is harsher in one specific way — Red Hat states explicitly that it does not recycle node counts. Chef publishes no equivalent statement, which is arguably worse because it is unknown rather than merely strict.
The architectural difference — agent versus agentless — is usually the real decision driver, not licensing.
Frequently asked questions
Our Infra Server is open source and dies in November. What are the options?
Progress offers two: Chef 360 SaaS or Chef 360 Self-Managed. The third option nobody sells you is re-platforming to something else entirely, which for some estates is the right answer. Migration effort is not published by Progress, so it needs scoping against your actual cookbook and node estate rather than estimating from a vendor page.
Our CI pulls Chef from omnitruck. When does it break?
InSpec in August 2026, Chef Client 16 through 18 in September to October, Workstation in October. The fix is moving to the licence-key download format and adding --chef-license-key to bootstrap commands. If your pipelines have not been updated, test now rather than discovering it in a deployment.
We have run free Chef in production for years. Are we out of compliance?
Almost certainly yes — the free tier is non-production only. Historically this was hard for Progress to enforce; the download gating changes that. It is a better conversation to have on your own timeline than theirs.
Can we just build from the Apache 2.0 source?
Legally yes, and Progress said so when it made the change in 2019. Practically it means self-maintaining a distribution, and after November 2026 the Infra Server source receives no security fixes — so you would be maintaining security patches yourself as well. For most organisations that is a worse deal than a licence.
What happens at non-renewal — do nodes stop converging?
Not published. Given the download-gating architecture, the plausible mechanism is loss of binary access and update path rather than a runtime kill-switch, but that is inference. Get it in writing.
Is there a minimum node count or contract term?
Neither is published at any tier. Pricing is quoted per node per year; the free tier is described as renewed annually.
Pricing and licensing terms verified 19 September 2026 against Progress Chef’s published pricing, licensing documentation, support SLA and product blog announcements. The download-removal dates fall within the period covered by this page and Progress states they are subject to revision — confirm current status before planning a cutover.
Infra Server OSS ends in November. Have a plan by then.
We scope Chef migrations properly — what your real node count is under Progress’s definition, what moving to Chef 360 costs against re-platforming to Ansible, and fixing the pipelines that are about to break on licensed downloads.