Terraform Cloud (HCP Terraform) vs. GitHub Actions

Terraform Cloud, now branded as HCP Terraform, is a managed service by HashiCorp for provisioning and managing infrastructure using Terraform. It centralizes Terraform state management, automates runs, and provides team collaboration features without needing to host your own Terraform backend.

Key features:

• Remote state storage with encryption and versioning
• VCS integration for automated plan and apply workflows
• Role-based access control and policy enforcement via Sentinel and Open Policy Agent (OPA)
• Workspace management with support for variable sets and environments
• Integrated run history, logging, and notifications for auditability
• Dynamic provider credentials (AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Vault) for short-lived, per-run access

Read more: Terraform Cloud – Overview, Key Features & Tutorial

GitHub Actions is a CI/CD automation tool integrated directly into GitHub, enabling developers to define and run workflows triggered by events in their repositories. It uses YAML-based configuration files to automate tasks like testing, building, and deploying code.

Key features:

• Native GitHub integration for seamless repository event triggers (e.g., push, pull request)
• Custom workflows defined in .github/workflows/ using YAML syntax
• Support for matrix builds to test across multiple environments or configurations
• Access to a marketplace with pre-built actions and reusable workflows
• Scalable runners for Linux, Windows, and macOS with support for self-hosted agents (and cloud-native, short-lived credentials via OIDC for AWS/Azure/GCP)

Read more: GitHub Actions Tutorial – Getting Started & Examples

Before diving into specifics, this comparison assumes your team wants to run Terraform workflows reliably, with collaboration, security, and auditability in mind. Each platform takes a different approach — let’s see how they differ across five key dimensions.

1. Purpose and abstraction level

Terraform Cloud is a purpose-built platform for managing Terraform runs, state, collaboration, and governance at scale. It abstracts away much of the infrastructure plumbing so teams can focus on writing infrastructure code.

GitHub Actions is a general CI/CD engine built into GitHub. It gives you flexible automation primitives (jobs, runners, steps) that you can wire together for Terraform workflows, but you typically add a remote backend (S3+DynamoDB, etc., or HCP Terraform) for state and locking and wire in guardrails yourself.

2. State management

With Terraform Cloud, state is hosted, versioned, and locked automatically by the platform. You get concurrency protection out of the box, which avoids conflicts caused by simultaneous changes. In remote runs, HCP Terraform automatically uses the workspace’s state and overrides any explicit backend.

GitHub Actions, by default, does not manage Terraform state or locking. You’ll need to plug in remote backends (e.g. S3 + DynamoDB or Terraform Cloud itself) and explicitly handle locking logic in your workflow scripts or via additional tools.

3. Policy enforcement and governance

Terraform Cloud supports Sentinel, HashiCorp’s policy-as-code engine. HCP Terraform also supports OPA policy sets. Both frameworks gate runs during the pipeline.

GitHub Actions has no built-in policy engine for Terraform. You must integrate external tools (e.g. OPA, Conftest, custom policy runners) into your workflows and enforce gating yourself. You can additionally use GitHub Environments with required reviewers for repo-level approvals.

4. Scalability

Terraform Cloud is managed as SaaS (or self-hosted enterprise), so updates, scaling, and infrastructure overhead are handled by HashiCorp or your ops team. You mainly maintain your workspace configuration. Agents let you execute runs on your own infra with custom images and lifecycle hooks.

GitHub Actions workflows can scale in concept, but complexity tends to grow as you add environments, edge cases, secrets, and error-handling. You’ll spend more effort maintaining YAML, custom steps, and managing drift or edge failures.

5. Integration with Git and workflow UX

Terraform Cloud can trigger runs from Git commits or pull requests. It can post statuses, link back to runs, and integrate tightly with VCS. Cross-workspace orchestration is available via Run Triggers and the newer Stacks model.

GitHub Actions lives inside your repo. Running Terraform via Actions means your infrastructure changes stay in the same Git workflow you already use. That gives you low friction for small teams or simpler stacks, though you may lose some of the guardrails you get in Terraform Cloud unless you explicitly build them in.

When it comes to infrastructure orchestration, generic CI/CD platforms such as GitHub Actions often lack the specialized features needed to manage complex Terraform workflows. Purpose-built tools like Terraform Cloud fill part of that gap by offering Terraform-specific management, but they still have limitations in flexibility and extensibility. That’s where Spacelift shines.

With Spacelift, you get:

• Policies to control what kind of resources engineers can create, what parameters they can have, how many approvals you need for a run, what kind of task you execute, what happens when a pull request is open, and where to send your notifications
• Stack dependencies to build multi-infrastructure automation workflows with dependencies, having the ability to build a workflow that, for example, generates your EC2 instances using Terraform and combines it with Ansible to configure them
• Self-service infrastructure via Blueprints, enabling your developers to do what matters – developing application code while not sacrificing control
• Creature comforts such as contexts (reusable containers for your environment variables, files, and hooks), and the ability to run arbitrary code
• Drift detection and optional remediation

The table below compares all three tools:

If you want to learn more about what you can do with Spacelift, check out this article.

Terraform Cloud provides a dedicated environment for Terraform runs with built-in state management, policy control, and collaboration features. GitHub Actions offers more flexibility and integration within GitHub but requires custom setup for Terraform state, security, and scalability.

Teams typically pick Terraform Cloud for control and governance, while GitHub Actions appeals to those seeking simplicity and tighter repo-level automation.

With Spacelift, you have all the tools necessary to deploy your IaC without the bloat of app deployment build tools. So check it out today for a free trial and a custom-tailored personal demo!