Spacelift vs. Terraform Cloud (HCP Terraform)
Spacelift is an infrastructure orchestration platform for the full lifecycle of your infrastructure as code (IaC). It runs Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, and Ansible from one workflow, with policy at every decision point, drift detection that reconciles itself, and private workers you host in your own environment. It's a Terraform Cloud (now HCP Terraform) alternative that takes Terraform automation and management to a whole new level.
How Spacelift compares to Terraform Cloud
IaC support
Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, Ansible
Terraform only
Git workflow
Rego push policies decide what every Git event triggers, per stack.
Path filters you configure, branching logic you can’t change.
Policy as code
Native OPA at seven decision points, from login to apply.
Sentinel or OPA between plan and apply.
Module registry
Private registry. Every version provisions and destroys real resources before it ships.
Package manager with terraform test on branch-published modules.
Pricing model
Plan and worker based. You pay for capacity.
Per resource per hour, billed on hourly peak, partial hours billed full.
Drift detection
Scheduled detection, optional auto-reconciliation through your plan policies.
Refresh-only detection. No remediation.
GitOps workflows for Terraform and OpenTofu
Plan on every pull request, apply on merge, with policies that decide what each Git event triggers.
Connect GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or Azure DevOps
Connect GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, or your own Git server, and run Terragrunt on top of any of them.
Test always
Get continuous delivery for Terraform with native pull request integrations and push policies that support any Git workflow, including monorepos.
Orchestration your team can trust
Purpose-built orchestration for infrastructure. Collaborate across teams, build the right controls for your organization, and get live insight into infrastructure state and usage, with cost estimates on every plan.
The control you need with the insights you’ve been missing
Policy as code with OPA and Rego
Guardrails written in Rego, evaluated by Open Policy Agent, at seven decision points from login to apply. Your teams deploy to any cloud without waiting on you to review the diff.
Resource visualization across every stack
Spacelift shows every resource across your stacks in one place, so you can navigate your infrastructure without stitching together four consoles.
Drift detection that fixes what it finds
Drift detection runs on a schedule you set, and reconciliation runs fix what it finds. Those runs are tracked runs, so your plan and approval policies still apply. You find out when something changes out of band, before your users do.
Cost estimates on every plan
Our Infracost integration puts a cost estimate on every run once enabled and surfaces it in the pull request, so you see what a change costs before you approve it.
Powering platform teams everywhere
“Our team includes developers distributed around the world across American, Australian, and European time zones. Spacelift has given us a lot of additional trust in each other. Because we have guardrails and defined workflows set up it allows us to have shared visibility into what we’re all doing.”
“With Spacelift, we can have an overarching collection of policies that govern when and how everything runs. This stuff is radically further ahead than the way 99% of companies use Terraform.”
"Spacelift has helped us set up a flexible and productive Infrastructure as Code environment. It makes the basics like setting up and iterating on plans simpler and quicker, which has allowed us to focus on larger engineering concerns. And when things in our infrastructure go wrong, that’s when Spacelift really shines!"
"Spacelift has enabled Checkout to scale from a handful of deployments per day to averaging over 500 per day."
IaC was just the beginning
Work together to build the platform your teams need with the control and insights that make it all possible.
Book a demo with our engineers to see how Spacelift can unlock Terraform at scale
See Spacelift in action
See Spacelift in action