HashiCorp declarative IaC for provisioning across 4,000+ providers. HCL syntax, plan/apply lifecycle, modular composition. Now under IBM. Source code switched from MPL to BUSL in 2023 (driver of the OpenTofu fork). HCP Terraform adds remote state, policy-as-code, agents, and run tasks. AI features focus on Stacks and provider workflows.
No pricing data on file.
HashiCorp Terraform remains the dominant declarative IaC tool for multi-cloud and SaaS resource management. The provider ecosystem — over 4,000 official and community providers — is the structural moat: anything with an API likely has a Terraform provider, from AWS, Azure, and GCP to PagerDuty, Datadog, and Snowflake. The 2023 BSL license change pushed part of the open-source community to OpenTofu, but Terraform still gets new features first, and HCP Terraform's Stacks, ephemeral workspaces, and Sentinel policy-as-code round out the enterprise story.
High fit for platform teams managing multi-cloud or hybrid estates where a single tool with a single state model matters more than per-cloud depth. AWS-only shops sometimes pick CloudFormation or CDK; multi-cloud and SaaS-heavy organizations almost always end up on Terraform regardless of how they started.
Watch out for: state file management is the single biggest source of operational pain — locking, drift, secrets in state, and the eternal question of monolithic versus split states. The BSL license restricts hosting Terraform-as-a-service, which is precisely why managed competitors and OpenTofu now exist, so factor licensing into any productization plans.
