AWS CloudFormation vs. HashiCorp Terraform

HashiCorp Terraform

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
AWS CloudFormation	Score 8.8 out of 10	N/A	AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators a way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in a predictable fashion. Use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run an application. Users don’t need to figure out the order for provisioning AWS services or the subtleties of making those dependencies work.…	$0
HashiCorp Terraform	Score 8.5 out of 10	N/A	Terraform from HashiCorp is a cloud infrastructure automation tool that enables users to create, change, and improve production infrastructure, and it allows infrastructure to be expressed as code. It codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned. It is available Open Source, and via Cloud and Self-Hosted editions.	$0

Pricing

AWS CloudFormation

HashiCorp Terraform

Editions & Modules

Free Tier - 1,000 Handler Operations per Month per Account: $0.00
Handler Operation: $0.0009
per handler operation

Open Source: $0
Team & Governance: $20/user
per user/per month
Enterprise: Contact sales team

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
AWS CloudFormation	HashiCorp Terraform
Free Trial
Yes	No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes	Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

There is no additional charge for using AWS CloudFormation with resource providers in the following namespaces: AWS::*, Alexa::*, and Custom::*. In this case you pay for AWS resources (such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, etc.) created using AWS CloudFormation as if you created them manually. You only pay for what you use, as you use it; there are no minimum fees and no required upfront commitments. When you use resource providers with AWS CloudFormation outside the namespaces mentioned above, you incur charges per handler operation. Handler operations are create, update, delete, read, or list actions on a resource.

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	AWS CloudFormation	HashiCorp Terraform
Considered Both Products	AWS CloudFormation Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudFormation Since the product I'm involved is primarily hosted on AWS we use CloudFormation but in some other products where we have hybrid cloud deployments we prefer terraform which is opensource. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudFormation Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudFormation As we have our whole infrastructure on AWS, that is why we selected AWS CloudFormation. AWS CloudFormation is better integrated with AWS services than other available products and also provides visibility and tracking on AWS. AWS CloudFormation is free while Terraform … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudFormation We didn't look into anything else as Cloudformation was "built-in" for AWS, it just kind of made sense to go with that. Terraform was something that we briefly looked into Terraform but decides to stick with Cloudformation because our task was relatively "simple". Apparently if … Incentivized Helpful? Manuela Jacqueline Mercado Rodríguez Senior Full Stack Developer Chose AWS CloudFormation AWS CloudFormation has more features and robustness. It is suited for professional projects since it provides stability and a wide variety of options for configurations. These include not only dividing stacks by specific code changes, but also in regions. This allows more … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudFormation The only real comparison would be to Terraform, which is another IaC technology at the infra level. Terraform is cloud-agnostic, which means most popular cloud providers are supported. While AWS CloudFormation is AWS-only. Although, if you consider CDK, CDK for Terraform … Incentivized Helpful?	HashiCorp Terraform Callum O'Connor Senior Analytics Engineer Chose HashiCorp Terraform Dbt was fine, but you end up with an extremely bloated repo/project. Often where all of the models are the same, named similarly, and generally just doesn't adhere to the concept of DRY coding. In Terraform we're able to template a lot of this work and dynamically generate … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HashiCorp Terraform HashiCorp Terraform is much better than Cloud Formation. For one, the language is just easier to use, but more importantly, the provider ecosystem is much better in HashiCorp Terraform than in Cloud Formation. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HashiCorp Terraform HashiCorp Terraform has Cloud agnostic capability to use with different cloud vendors and the ease of creating the code with minimal effort. Incentivized Helpful? Eric Mintz CEO Chose HashiCorp Terraform I'm beginning to look at Pulumi. In my opinion, it looks like it would be a good replacement for HashiCorp Terraform, and it has the advantage of configuration via scripting, rather than via HCL, which is HashiCorp Terraform configuration markup language. In my opinion, the … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HashiCorp Terraform We have used Vagrant to develop our application in a virtual box environment and prepare it to be packed with Packer. The image created from these two tools will be deployed by Terraform. We are using Consul for service discovery and as a job locking so we don't have two jobs or … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HashiCorp Terraform CloudFormation is only for AWS so if you're trying to deploy to another cloud provider then Terraform is your product. Terraform has lots of public support so you can find answers to questions by Googling. CloudFormation is easy to view the resources/services that are … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HashiCorp Terraform Terraform was more preferred over ansible as it is considerably more intutive. Incentivized Helpful? Guillermo Buritica Tobon Consultant - Site Reliability Engineering Manager (SRE) - Managed Services Chose HashiCorp Terraform Actually both products work very well. We use Terraform for speed and Ansible for configuration management both products work really well together Incentivized Helpful? KM Kulbhushan Mayer Senior Solution Architect Chose HashiCorp Terraform SIngle tools for both tools, no need to remember two different syntaxes. Incentivized Helpful? Jude Allred Co-Founder & CTA Chose HashiCorp Terraform Terraform is a large step ahead of the previous generation of infrastructure-as-code providers. I'd never go back to, e.g. Puppet or Chef, Ansible, etc. That said I think that Pulumi has a good chance of displaying it, in no small part because the Terraform language itself … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HashiCorp Terraform AWS CloudFormation is better if you just want to stick with AWS because it's integration with AWS is better, provides auto-rollback in case of failures, and has GUI to manage and view the stacks built. Terraform is better when we want to stay cloud-agnostic. Terraform is better … Incentivized Helpful? Michael Jenkins Senior Systems Reliability Engineer Chose HashiCorp Terraform I can't find these applications listed, but other IaC tools I have used include: AWS CloudFormation, Azure Resource Manager Templates, and GCP Cloud Deployment Templates. For a comparable tool, I have the most experience with CloudFormation. Compared to CloudFormation, the first … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HashiCorp Terraform Chef and Terraform are not apples to apples because Chef is more focused on config management, whereas Terraform is more focused on provisioning. However, I can say that where they do overlap in configuration management is that Terraform is the preferred tool because it has an … Incentivized Helpful? Jeffrey Severance Senior Solutions Engineer Chose HashiCorp Terraform Terraform is the solid leader in the space. It allows you to do more then just provisioning within a pre-existing servers. It is more extensible and has more providers available than it competitors. It is also open source and more adopted by the community then some of the other … Incentivized Helpful? Dhruba Jyoti Nag Associate Chose HashiCorp Terraform Terraform is open source and has strong community support. It is cloud-agnostic versus competing products like AWS cloud formation, hence has a distinct advantage. The scripts once set up are easy for developers to administer during development, hence during production … Incentivized Helpful? Murugan Mani Developer/DevOps Engineer at Target Technology Services Chose HashiCorp Terraform UI design and development always sticks when it comes to multiple or say 'n' number of same configurations. It's very easy to download and execute Provides cross platform support and it's reliable. Incentivized Helpful? Kyle Rockman Software Engineer Chose HashiCorp Terraform Terraform has made better choices in how their product works, is used over time, and can be integrated with. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HashiCorp Terraform Centralized and standard configuration. Ease of VM provisioning. Incentivized Helpful? Aiman Najjar DevOps Engineer Chose HashiCorp Terraform - Terraform syntax is much easier to read and learn than Cloud Formation. - Terraform already supports AWS as well as several other cloud providers. - Terraform is backed by a great and supportive open-source community. Incentivized Helpful? Deepshikha Gandhi DevOps Engineer Chose HashiCorp Terraform Terraform shares the methodology of creating configuration files for your infrastructure with tools like CloudFormation. However, Terraform is cloud-agnostic unlike CloudFormation which is AWS specific. Terraform can be used to maintain AWS and OpenStack clusters … Incentivized Helpful? Charles Anderson VP Engineering Chose HashiCorp Terraform CloudFormation is the lingua franca of AWS. You certainly can't go wrong using it, but I like the syntax and open-source nature of Terraform. That's mostly a personal preference. I have not tried any other non-Amazon tools for provisioning AWS. And, of course, the AWS tools … Incentivized Helpful? SM SHASHIDHAR REDDY MALLEPALLY Senior Software Engineer Chose HashiCorp Terraform Terraform is easier for developing infrastructure and takes less time to create infrastructure. Main advantage is reusability. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HashiCorp Terraform HashiCorp Terraform has more possibilities Incentivized Helpful?

Features

AWS CloudFormation

HashiCorp Terraform

Configuration Management

Comparison of Configuration Management features of Product A and Product B
	AWS CloudFormation - Ratings	HashiCorp Terraform 7.9 Ratings 2% below category average
Infrastructure Automation	00 Ratings	9.00 Ratings
Automated Provisioning	00 Ratings	8.70 Ratings
Parallel Execution	00 Ratings	6.30 Ratings
Node Management	00 Ratings	7.70 Ratings
Reporting & Logging	00 Ratings	7.80 Ratings
Version Control	00 Ratings	8.10 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	AWS CloudFormation	HashiCorp Terraform
Small Businesses	HashiCorp Terraform Score 8.5 out of 10	HashiCorp Vagrant Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Ansible Score 9.2 out of 10	Ansible Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises	Ansible Score 9.2 out of 10	Ansible Score 9.2 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	AWS CloudFormation	HashiCorp Terraform
Likelihood to Recommend	7.6 (0 ratings)	8.4 (0 ratings)
Usability	- (0 ratings)	8.1 (0 ratings)
Performance	- (0 ratings)	9.4 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	- (0 ratings)	7.4 (0 ratings)
Ease of integration	- (0 ratings)	9.2 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	AWS CloudFormation	HashiCorp Terraform
Likelihood to Recommend	Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the Cloning Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource Management Guide. For information virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource. Management guide. For information virtual hardware, installed software cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource Management Guide. For information and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource Management Guide. For information. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	8 because it's currently best-in-class and is completely essential to use in contrast to not expressing your infrastructure as code. That said, new contenders are nipping at its heels, and I expect stronger tools to emerge in the coming years. Hopefully the Terraform team is able to keep pace. Incentivized Jude Allred Co-Founder & CTA Read full review
Pros	IaC, transactional on top of that Support for "mainstream" general programming languages Sharable IaC "snippets" that can setup standardized environments for individuals quickly OOP techniques are available thanks to OOP languages Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Terraform is cloud agnostic. Just select the suitable provider for the cloud and it will do the job. Templating is possible to make the Terraform templates reusable. Variables can be created to make the templates generic so that it can be reused for different environments or resources. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Cons	Error Description upon Failure Needs to be Improved. Slow to create, delete or update. Need to delete resources manually. It can ask before starting deletion whether to skip those resources or delete them. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	The errors generated by the plan and preview commands are pretty cryptic, it can be hard for newcomers to the scripting language to understand how to address problems. Access controls around workspaces is limited which makes it harder to secure reduce the scope of teams ability. Analytics around user usage, applies and plans would be helpful for managemenet. Incentivized Ben Carter Vice President Enterprise Architecture Read full review
Usability	It's easy enough to get a shared template & apply it. You don't even have to download-then-upload or copy-and-paste, a publicly-accessible url works. Diving deeper, it has enough powerful capabilities to make the life of a platform / DevOps engineer bearable. However, you need equally deep knowledge to troubleshoot issues, when they inevitably pop up. This is the same for all IaC technologies, as they are additional abstraction layers on top of the native API provided by the cloud providers. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	I love Terraform and I think it has done some great things for people that are working to automate their provisioning processes and also for those that are in the process of moving to the cloud or managing cloud resources. There are some quirks to HCL that take a little bit of getting used to and give picking up Terraform a little bit of a learning curve, thus the rating Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Performance	No answers on this topic	Terraform's performance is quite amazing when it comes to deployment of resources in AWS. Of course, the deployment times depend on various parameters like the number of resources to deploy and different regions to deploy. Terraform cannot control that. The only minor drawback probably shows up when a terraform job is terminated mid way. Then in many cases, time-consuming manual cleanup is required. Incentivized Dhruba Jyoti Nag Associate Read full review
Support Rating	No answers on this topic	Terraform is community driven but does offer support for it's Enterprise product. When contacting the team at HashiCorp we have always gotten resolution to our issues. They have been very responsive in returning our calls and answering our questions as they come up. We are currently using the open source model. Incentivized Jeffrey Severance Senior Solutions Engineer Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Since the product I'm involved is primarily hosted on AWS we use CloudFormation but in some other products where we have hybrid cloud deployments we prefer Terraform which is opensource. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	dbt was fine, but you end up with an extremely bloated repo/project. Often where all of the models are the same, named similarly, and generally just doesn't adhere to the concept of DRY coding. In Terraform we're able to template a lot of this work and dynamically generate assets based on variables instead. Incentivized Callum O'Connor Senior Analytics Engineer Read full review
Return on Investment	+ We can standup a VPC in minutes - It took a lot of inital time to set up + With logging/rollback, made testing much easier. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Using code, we are able to build and deploy cloud resources faster and more consistently than producing the same resources in the console manually. For applications that share architectures, we can reuse code to expedite development. We can also do the same with modules that are shared across the organization. By defining all of our resources as code, we can deploy complete environments with "batteries included." For example, we can use code that spins up servers in a cloud provider and at the same time, creates monitors with in our monitoring provider. Likewise, when the servers are decommissioned, the monitors are decommed along with them. In the past, the creation and decom of the monitors would have been a disjointed, manual step. With Terraform we get it all with one "terraform apply." Incentivized Michael Jenkins Senior Systems Reliability Engineer Read full review
ScreenShots	AWS CloudFormation Screenshots	HashiCorp Terraform Screenshots