Thinking About A Shift Away From Terraform Cloud?

Hey folks,

If you are using or evaluating Terraform Cloud (TFC) for your IaC orchestration needs, you might be considering other options.

First, I want to call out that my company, Masterpoint, partners with Spacelift, so I have a bias.

However, all the TACOS vendors (Spacelift, Scalr, Env0, Terramate, and Terrateam) are awesome and worth checking out. TACOS stands for Terraform Automation and COlaboration Software, and as the expansion of the acronym implies, they help with running and managing Terraform or OpenTofu at scale. TACOS vendors allow you to drive many applys using policies, merge driven workflows, and push information to integrations and connections. Some, including Spacelift, also support executing the TF code in both their environment or yours, which can help if you have compliance needs or security requirements. All this makes it super simple to manage IaC at considerable scale.

We believe Spacelift provides the best experience today, which is why we partnered with them. You can check out our OSS child module which does a lot of the heavy lifting to automate their platform.

Back to the topic of moving off TFC: the major reason to do so is pricing. TFC pricing is absurd and is based on the number of Resources Under Management. It's nonsensical because cloud resources are not all created equal -- one S3 bucket is not one resource after-all. This pricing is not sustainable for anyone who has alternatives. IMHO, TFC's pricing model is why they introduced the Terraform licensing change. Other parties were eating their lunch. Instead of changing their pricing model to something reasonable, HashiCorp tried to put their competitors at a disadvantage.

In the long run the license change is going to be a bad call for HashiCorp because OpenTofu is growing. That team is proving they can ship great features and work with the community well.

All of the TACOS tools have better products than Terraform Cloud at a better price point (5-10x cheaper). Using options like these moves you towards OpenTofu, which is good long-term because who knows what IBM is going to do with HashiCorp now that the deal is official.

May your vendors’ pricing models always be sensible,

Matt @ Masterpoint

PS If you are thinking of leaving TFC for any other solution, check out our blog post on TFC migration. There are a couple of useful tips and tricks in there.

Or, want to chat through some tricky IaC issue that you or your org is running into? Grab some free time on my calendar.