Chef Infra licensing: what is free, what needs a license, and the Cinc option
Chef Infra Client from Progress is free only for personal and non-commercial use; commercial use needs a license, listed at $189 per node a year for Chef Enterprise. What that means for a fleet, the free Cinc distribution, and the realistic alternatives.
If your fleet runs Chef Infra, the license question is easy to get wrong, and the answer depends on where your Chef packages come from.
What Progress's terms say#
Progress Chef's own documentation says the license depends on how you get the software (Chef docs: licensing):
- Official Chef distributions are governed by the Chef End User License Agreement or your commercial agreement with Progress. Chef Infra Client 19 from an official download does not need a license key to run, but its free tier covers personal and non-commercial use only (About Chef licenses).
- Commercial use is broad. Chef's FAQ counts using the software to deploy or test systems in any environment that leads to production for commercial gain (Chef FAQ).
- The source code of open-source Chef projects stays under the Apache 2.0 license.
At list price, Chef Enterprise is $189 per node a year (chef.io/pricing, seen October 26, 2026): $47,250 a year for 250 servers, $189,000 for 1,000.
The Cinc option#
Cinc is a free distribution of Chef Infra Client built by the community from the Apache 2.0 source, and it aims to be fully compatible (cinc.sh). Many teams switch to it to keep their cookbooks without a commercial license. Read Cinc's own license files before you rely on it, and note that you take on the support Progress would otherwise give.
Your options#
- License Chef Enterprise. Right if you use Chef's commercial tooling and the per-node price works for you.
- Switch the client to Cinc. Keep your cookbooks and roles; replace the packages.
- Run local mode without a Chef server.
chef-client --local-mode(or Cinc's) applies cookbooks on each machine with no Chef Infra Server; something else then delivers cookbooks, schedules runs and collects results. - Migrate over time to Ansible or Salt, one role at a time.
Where Gardience fits#
Gardience manages Windows and Linux fleets on the open-source Salt agent, and runs existing Ansible playbooks and Salt states over that connection, with approvals and an audit trail, at a flat price per fleet instead of per node. It does not run Chef cookbooks today.
We are considering running Cinc or Chef cookbooks in local mode over the same connection: cookbooks from Git, a run on each machine, results and approvals in one place. If that would help your team, tell us what you run and on how many machines. It decides whether we build it.
Try Gardience on your own machines
One supported console for Windows and Linux on open-source Salt: patching, a scored STIG/CIS-aligned baseline, drift repair, event-driven automation, two-person approval and a tamper-evident audit log. Flat yearly pricing, not per node.
Free 90-day trial (25 nodes)See it work Compare