env zero (env0) vs Spacelift: IaC Orchestration Comparison

Selecting an infrastructure as code (IaC) management platform is a critical decision that impacts how your team provisions, governs, and scales cloud infrastructure. Both Spacelift and env zero are mature platforms designed to solve infrastructure automation challenges, each bringing unique strengths to orchestration, governance, and developer enablement.

Spacelift is a comprehensive infrastructure orchestration platform built for flexibility, advanced workflows, and multi-tool integration. env zero is an IaC automation platform focused on self-service infrastructure with strong cost management capabilities.

This article will help you understand the key differences between these platforms and how they approach infrastructure automation.

What we’ll cover:

1. What is Spacelift?
2. What is env zero (env0)?
3. The main differences between Spacelift and env zero
4. How Spacelift’s dual-path deployment model changes infrastructure management

Spacelift is a flexible infrastructure orchestration platform designed to manage the complete infrastructure lifecycle across provisioning, configuration, and governance. The platform supports multiple IaC tools and workflows, allowing teams to work with their preferred technologies in a unified environment.

The platform integrates with your existing VCS workflows. Connect your repositories, create stacks that reference your IaC code, define policies for governance, and Spacelift handles deployment automation with enterprise-grade security controls.

Key features of Spacelift

• Multi-IaC orchestration: Support for Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Ansible, Kubernetes, and custom workflows
• OPA policy integration: Policy-as-code across plan, approval, push, notification, and task decision points, with unlimited policies even in the free tier
• Stack dependencies: Chain stacks and pass outputs between them for end-to-end automation
• Drift detection: Automatically detect unauthorized changes with policy-driven responses
• Worker architecture: Public workers for simplicity or private workers for control over execution environment
• Spacelift Intent: Natural language infrastructure provisioning that eliminates code requirements for certain workloads
• Deployment flexibility: SaaS, cloud-hosted, self-hosted, or air-gapped deployments
• Module testing: Automated testing for Terraform modules with ephemeral environments
• User interface: Streamlined interface for managing complex infrastructure workflows

env zero (env0) is an IaC automation platform focused on enabling self-service infrastructure with governance guardrails. The platform emphasizes cost management and provides templated approaches to infrastructure deployment, making it straightforward for development teams to provision pre-approved infrastructure patterns.

env zero is particularly strong in organizations with clear separation between platform and development teams, where the primary goal is enabling developers to deploy standardized infrastructure within defined boundaries.

Key features of env zero

• IaC tool support: Supports Terraform, Terragrunt, OpenTofu, Pulumi, CloudFormation, and Kubernetes
• Template-based self-service: Pre-approved templates enable developers to deploy standardized infrastructure
• Cost management: Comprehensive cost tracking with pre and post-deployment cost visibility
• Cloud Compass: AI-powered tool for identifying IaC coverage gaps and drift risks
• Approval workflows: Governance through approval-based workflows and RBAC
• Custom flows: Ability to integrate additional tools into deployment pipelines
• Unlimited concurrency: No limits on concurrent runs in paid tiers

The table below summarizes the key differences between Spacelift and env zero (env0):

Feature	Spacelift	env zero (env0)
Multi-IaC orchestration	Unified workflows across all tools	Separate workflows per tool
Policy capabilities	Unlimited OPA policies, free tier+	OPA integration, approval-focused
Pricing model	Concurrency-based, $399/mo	Per-apply/environment, $349/mo+
Free tier	2 users, unlimited policies, core features	Limited features
Deployment options	SaaS, cloud, self-hosted, air-gapped	SaaS with self-hosted agents
AI capabilities	Intent (natural language), Saturnhead AI	Cloud Compass (coverage assessment)
Module testing	Automated with ephemeral environments	Registry only
Stack dependencies	Advanced output passing, workflow chaining	Basic dependency management
Configuration management	Native Ansible integration	Via Custom Flows
Drift handling	Policy-driven automated remediation	Detection with cause analysis
Worker control	Public or fully customizable private workers	Self-hosted agents
Resource visibility	Comprehensive cross-stack resource view	Environment-level tracking
Concurrency limits	Based on tier	Unlimited in paid plans

See also: Env0 (env zero) vs. Terraform Cloud (HCP Terraform)

While both platforms provide robust IaC automation capabilities, they differ in architecture, workflow design, and the specific problems they emphasize solving.

Spacelift is a broader IaC management platform with strong policy-as-code capabilities and multi-IaC support, while env0 focuses more narrowly on collaborative Terraform (and IaC) automation, as well as cost and governance around those runs.

1. Multi-tool orchestration and workflow flexibility

Spacelift is built for teams running more than one IaC tool, offering unified orchestration with stack dependencies so outputs from one stack can feed directly into another. This lets you create cohesive, cross-tool automation pipelines instead of isolated runs.

env zero also supports multiple IaC tools, but treats them as separate workflows, with Custom Flows used to connect them. This separation works well when different tools operate independently.

2. Policy and governance capabilities

Both Spacelift and env0 integrate with OPA, but they emphasize governance at different depths.

Spacelift offers unlimited OPA policies even in the free tier, with policies working across multiple decision points: plan, approval, push, notification, and task policies. A built-in policy workbench lets you test policies before deployment.

env zero provides OPA integration and approval workflows focused on deployment-time governance, centered on approval flows and RBAC.

3. Deployment and hosting flexibility

Spacelift offers broad deployment flexibility: you can run it as SaaS, in your own cloud, self-hosted, or even in an air-gapped environment. That makes it easier to align the IaC platform with strict security or compliance requirements.

env zero operates as SaaS with self-hosted agents available for execution, balancing ease of use with execution control.

4. User experience and interface design

Spacelift’s interface is designed to surface complex information in a way that’s easy to digest, utilizing progressive disclosure to provide a clear understanding of critical status and relationships at a glance, and then drill into detail when needed.

env zero provides a functional interface organized around templates and environments, optimized for self-service workflows. It makes it straightforward for developers working within predefined patterns.

5. Pricing transparency and predictability

Spacelift uses concurrency-based pricing starting at $399/month, charging based on how many jobs can run at the same time. This model aligns costs with team productivity rather than resource counts or deployment frequency. The free tier includes two users with access to core features such as unlimited policies.

env zero offers per-environment and per-apply pricing models, with plans commonly reported by third-party sites as starting around $349/month, though current list prices are quote-based.. While they provide unlimited concurrency in paid tiers, costs scale with deployment frequency under the per-apply model. Cloud Compass adds approximately $18,000 annually for IaC coverage assessment features.

Note: Pricing examples in this article are based on public information as of November 2025.

6. AI and automation capabilities

Spacelift focuses its AI features on making infrastructure operations more intuitive and resilient. Spacelift Intent lets you describe infrastructure in natural language while still enforcing policies, and Saturnhead AI provides intelligent diagnostics and troubleshooting suggestions when runs fail.

env0’s Cloud Compass takes a different angle, using analysis to identify IaC coverage gaps and highlight drift risks, helping teams understand which parts of their infrastructure are not yet managed as code.

7. Module management and testing

Spacelift provides automated module testing with ephemeral environments, so modules can be validated before release and breaking changes are caught before they affect downstream stacks.

env zero offers a private module registry for storing and reusing modules.

8. Drift detection and remediation

Spacelift’s drift detection continuously monitors infrastructure and can automatically trigger remediation with policy-driven responses.

env zero also provides drift detection and adds cause analysis to help teams understand why drift occurred. 

In practice, env zero focuses more on insight and investigation, while Spacelift leans further into automated, policy-based remediation.

9. Configuration management integration

Spacelift treats configuration management as a core capability. Ansible playbooks are managed with the same sophistication as IaC, including centralized execution, full visibility, and the ability to chain configuration management with infrastructure provisioning.

env zero allows configuration management through Custom Flows, treating it as an extensibility feature rather than a native capability.

10. Worker architecture and control

Spacelift offers public workers for ease of use and private workers that run in your environment with customizable specifications. This provides organizations with flexibility in balancing security, performance, and operational control.

env zero uses self-hosted agents for execution that communicate with the env zero control plane.

11. Resource visibility and observability

Spacelift provides comprehensive resource visualization across all managed infrastructure, including visualizations that show resources, their relationships, and which stacks manage them.

env zero focuses visibility around deployment history and environment tracking, giving teams a clear view of changes and states at the template and environment level.

12. Extensibility and customization

Spacelift’s extensibility is built around a powerful hooks system that lets you customize every phase of execution: you can bring your own Docker images, tweak workflow commands, and integrate almost any tool into the pipeline. This flexibility allows the platform to adapt to unique workflow requirements.

env zero offers Custom Flows to extend the deployment process and integrate additional tools, which works well for standard integration patterns.

While env zero focuses on template-driven self-service for standardized environments, Spacelift’s dual-path model layers natural-language provisioning (Intent) on top of traditional IaC workflows, so platform teams can support both rapid experiments and rigorously reviewed production code in one place.

Two paths, one platform

Path 1: Traditional IaC for production workloads

For production infrastructure and critical workloads, you use the traditional IaC approach with full code control, rigorous testing, comprehensive policies, and complete auditability. This is where Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, and other IaC tools shine, providing the precision and control necessary for infrastructure that matters.

Use traditional IaC (Path 1) for:

• Production infrastructure
• Long-lived environments
• Infrastructure requiring complex dependencies
• Resources that need version-controlled configuration

Path 2: Spacelift Intent for rapid provisioning

Spacelift Intent eliminates the need to write infrastructure code for non-production workloads, rapid prototyping, testing environments, and experimental infrastructure. Developers describe what they need in natural language, and Intent provisions the infrastructure while maintaining full governance and policy enforcement.

Use Spacelift Intent (Path 2) for:

• Development and testing environments
• Rapid prototyping
• Proof-of-concept infrastructure
• Short-lived experimental workloads
• Ad-hoc infrastructure needs

Better together

The power isn’t in choosing between these paths, it’s in using both simultaneously. Your organization operates with the same rigor for production infrastructure while dramatically accelerating everything else. The same team, the same policies, the same platform, but different workflows optimized for different needs.

A developer might use Intent to spin up a test environment in minutes, validate their changes, then use traditional IaC workflows to promote those changes to production with full code review and testing. The platform teams set the policies once, and they apply to both paths. The governance framework remains consistent even as the provisioning method changes.

How Intent transforms infrastructure workflows

Consider a typical scenario: A developer needs a test environment to validate a new feature. With traditional IaC platforms, this requires writing code, submitting for review, running through the deployment pipeline, and waiting for approval.

With Spacelift Intent:

1. Developer describes: “I need a PostgreSQL database and an EC2 instance for testing the new authentication service”
2. Intent provisions the resources with appropriate policies applied
3. Developer has their environment in minutes

The critical insight is that not all infrastructure requires the same level of rigor. Your production database cluster demands meticulous code review. Your Tuesday afternoon test environment does not.

No code, full governance

Intent doesn’t sacrifice governance for speed. Every resource provisioned through Intent flows through your organization’s policy framework. If your policies prohibit public S3 buckets, Intent won’t create them. If your policies require specific tagging, Intent applies those tags automatically.

Real-world impact

The dual-path model fundamentally changes how platform teams and developers interact:

• Development teams provision test, dev, and staging infrastructure without blocking on the platform team or learning HCL
• Platform teams focus their expertise on production-critical infrastructure while enabling self-service for everything else
• Experimentation accelerates because spinning up a prototype environment doesn’t require a pull request
• Both paths enforce the same policies, maintaining consistency across all infrastructure

The competitive advantage

While env zero and other platforms continue improving their traditional IaC management capabilities, they’re competing on a single dimension. Spacelift’s dual-path deployment model creates an entirely new category of infrastructure provisioning.

Organizations using Spacelift gain a significant velocity advantage: they maintain the same rigor and control for production infrastructure while dramatically accelerating everything else. The platform recognizes that speed and governance aren’t opposites, they’re complementary when applied appropriately.

This isn’t about replacing IaC, it’s about recognizing that different infrastructure workloads have different requirements and providing the appropriate tooling for each, all within the same unified platform with consistent governance.

Both Spacelift and env zero (env0) are capable platforms for managing infrastructure as code, each with strengths in different areas. env zero is well-suited to template-based self-service and cost management, while Spacelift offers broader multi-tool orchestration and greater deployment flexibility.

The meaningful difference emerges when you consider how infrastructure teams actually work. Most platforms, including env zero, optimize for a single workflow: write code, review code, deploy code. This works well for production infrastructure but creates friction everywhere else.

Spacelift’s dual-path deployment model with Intent recognizes that infrastructure provisioning isn’t one-size-fits-all. By providing both rigorous IaC workflows for production and natural language provisioning for everything else, working together on a unified platform, Spacelift eliminates the false choice between speed and governance. You get both, applied appropriately based on the workload.

For teams looking to accelerate infrastructure delivery without sacrificing control, the question isn’t just about comparing features, it’s about whether you want a platform that manages infrastructure one way or a platform that adapts to how your team actually works.

Ready to see how Spacelift’s dual-path deployment model can transform your infrastructure workflows? Start with our free tier to experience both traditional IaC orchestration and Intent firsthand, or book a demo with our engineering team to see it in action.