The following is a tale of two heavyweights in the CM arena: Microsoft’s Systems Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) and Chef. But even a big fish like Chef is still a minnow compared to the whale that is SCCM, which runs on about two-thirds of enterprise organizations.
This is where open source solutions like Chef come in, offering a pay-per-node pricing structure that is much more cost effective than SCCM.
However, the latter is a bare-bones package and calls for extensive knowledge of Chef and Ruby to use it effectively.
Chef is a better fit for Linux setups in a development environment, is cheaper than SCCM, and can also manage Windows setups if needed.