terraform

Terraform is the infrastructure-as-code tool that defined the category — 4,800+ providers, the largest IaC talent pool, and HCL configs that every DevOps engineer can read. Then HashiCorp switched from MPL to BSL, and the open-source community responded with OpenTofu.

OpenTofu is the Linux Foundation fork — drop-in compatible with Terraform ≤1.5, MPL-licensed, growing 300% annually, and now a CNCF Sandbox project. Pulumi lets you write IaC in TypeScript, Python, or Go instead of HCL but has a smaller provider ecosystem (150 vs 4,800).

Use Terraform if your team already knows it and you're on Terraform Cloud. Use OpenTofu for new projects where you want the same workflow without BSL restrictions.

The catch: BSL means you can't build competing commercial services on Terraform. HashiCorp (now IBM) is raising Terraform Cloud prices ~18% annually. OpenTofu added features Terraform doesn't have (state encryption), but tutorials and Stack Overflow answers still reference Terraform. The talent pool is shared, but the ecosystem is splitting.