Are you a Cloud, DevOps or SRE leader looking to compare Terraform Cloud vs. Terraform Enterprise to see which one is good for your team?

In this guide, I’m going to compare the 3 IaC solutions’ features, integrations, and pricing structures, and introduce you to an alternative that offers a more unified, flexible control plane for cloud infrastructure (ControlMonkey: that’s us).

TL;DR

• Terraform Cloud focuses solely on Terraform execution mechanics, such as remote runs, state management, VCS workflows, and collaboration within Terraform Cloud.

However, the platform is not responsible for your cloud’s reality beyond Terraform: there’s no ownership of unmanaged resources, no built-in recovery of your cloud configuration, and no remediation once drift or manual changes occur.

• Terraform Enterprise is an enterprise-grade deployment of Terraform Cloud. The main benefit is that it’s a self-hosting option, with enhanced security enforcement around Terraform execution.

Despite its stronger controls, the solution is still execution-centric. It does not expand into cloud-wide visibility and configuration recovery.

• ControlMonkey is an end-to-end infrastructure governance and resilience platform that goes beyond Terraform execution. 

Our platform scans your cloud accounts, generates Terraform code for existing resources, automatically detects and remediates drift, and provides infrastructure DR.

I’d go for ControlMonkey if I needed cloud-wide visibility into managed and unmanaged resources, wanted automatic Terraform code generation for existing infrastructure, required drift remediation and disaster recovery, and needed governance without writing custom policy code.

Terraform Cloud vs. Terraform Enterprise vs. ControlMonkey: Features

• Terraform Cloud gives you managed Terraform runs, remote state, and basic collaboration around Terraform code. However, it stops at Terraform execution. The platform doesn’t deal with what’s actually running in your cloud, and doesn’t have cloud disaster recovery once things change outside Terraform.
• Terraform Enterprise adds enterprise controls on top of Terraform Cloud, such as self-hosting and stronger policy enforcement. Despite those additions, it’s still Terraform execution focused and doesn’t really solve cloud visibility or configuration recovery.
• ControlMonkey focuses on what happens after Terraform runs. This includes cloud visibility, automatic Terraform code generation, drift remediation, and backup/recovery of cloud and SaaS configurations. It’s a better fit for teams that want to actually own their infrastructure in production, not just run Terraform pipelines and hope nothing drifts.

Stop Managing Terraform. Start Controlling Your Cloud.

ControlMonkey gives you cloud visibility, auto-generated Terraform code, drift remediation, and built-in recovery.  So you own what runs in production, not just the pipeline.

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	ControlMonkey	Terraform Cloud	Terraform Enterprise
Cloud Asset Inventory & Terraform Coverage	Full cloud scanning and Terraform coverage insights. The platform also detects unmanaged resources.	No cloud account scanning. The platform lacks visibility into unmanaged resources.	No cloud account scanning. The platform lacks visibility into unmanaged resources.
Terraform Code Generation	Automatically generates Terraform code & state from existing cloud resources.	No automatic code generation.	No automatic code generation.
Daily Cloud Backups & Disaster Recovery	Daily infrastructure configuration backups with full cloud disaster recovery and instant rollback.	No built-in backups or disaster recovery.	No built-in backups or disaster recovery.
Drift Detection & Remediation	Continuous drift detection with automated remediation and rollback.	Detects drift but requires manual intervention.	Detects drift but requires manual intervention.
ClickOps Scanner & Unsupervised Operations Detection	Detects unsupervised manual operations from the cloud console.	Not supported.	Not supported.
Policies for Security, Cost & Compliance	Out-of-the-box Security & Compliance guardrails. No need to code and maintain policies.	Requires Sentinel or OPA policy authoring and maintenance.	Requires Sentinel and OPA policy authoring & maintenance.
IaC framework support	Terraform, OpenTofu, and Terragrunt.	Terraform only.	Terraform only.
Code Scanning for Compliance	Scans existing IaC code for misconfigurations and policy violations.	Requires manual policy enforcement.	Requires manual policy enforcement.
Pricing Model	Fixed, predictable pricing.	Resources Under Management (RUM) model. Costs scale with resource count.	Custom enterprise pricing. Typically per workspace.
Deployment Model	Saas/Hybrid (private runner)/ Self-hosted	Saas/Hybrid (private runner)	Self-hosted

Terraform Cloud’s Features

Managed Terraform runs with state

Terraform Cloud provides a managed environment for running Terraform plans and applying them remotely.

The platform centralizes Terraform state storage, locking, and concurrency control, reducing the risk of state corruption.

This removes the need for teams to manage their own remote backends or execution infrastructure.

Even though this simplicity is a major win for smaller or less mature teams, it can feel restrictive for advanced CI/CD setups.

VCS-driven workflows for plan and apply with team collaboration

Terraform Cloud integrates deeply with version control systems, such as GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. 

Your team will be able to trigger infrastructure runs based on pull requests and merges, enabling code review workflows for infrastructure changes. 

Multiple teams can collaborate on shared infrastructure through workspaces without stepping on each other’s changes.

Policy checks during Terraform execution with Sentinel and OPA

Terraform Cloud uses Sentinel and OPA to enforce policy-as-code for infrastructure changes.

Your team will be able to define compliance, security, and cost policies that run automatically during Terraform workflows.

Note that Sentinel and OPA policies must be written, maintained, and versioned by your team.

Terraform Enterprise’s Features

Everything in Terraform Cloud, plus self-hosted deployment

As the self-hosted distribution of Terraform Cloud, it adds enterprise controls, including RBAC, private registries, self-hosting, and stronger policy enforcement.

The platform offers a private instance of the application with no resource limits and additional enterprise-grade architectural features. 

Organizations with strict data residency requirements, air-gapped environments, or regulated industries will be able to maintain complete control over infrastructure orchestration.

Enterprise controls, such as RBAC, SSO, audit logging, and private module registry

Terraform Enterprise includes SAML single sign-on, role-based access control, and comprehensive audit logging. 

These features can help your organization integrate with existing identity providers, enforce least-privilege access patterns, and maintain detailed records of all of your infrastructure changes.

The private module registry allows sharing approved infrastructure patterns across your different departments and teams.

Advanced policy enforcement and governance around Terraform execution

Combined with Sentinel policy-as-code, you can standardize provisioning and enforce your company’s governance at scale.

However, this will still require dedicated resources to write, test, and maintain policy code. 

Despite stronger controls, Terraform Enterprise remains execution-centric and does not expand into cloud-wide visibility, configuration recovery, or automated drift remediation.

ControlMonkey’s Features: How Is It Fundamentally Different From Terraform Cloud & Terraform Enterprise?

ControlMonkey offers the best alternative to both Terraform Cloud and Terraform Enterprise in 2026 because it addresses a fundamentally different challenge than just running Terraform.

Instead of giving you faster Terraform plans and applies, ControlMonkey gives you full cloud visibility, automatic Terraform code generation, built-in drift remediation, and infrastructure disaster recovery.

While Terraform Cloud and Terraform Enterprise focus on executing Terraform workflows, ControlMonkey helps you:

• Automatically discover everything running in your cloud, including unmanaged and shadow infrastructure.
• Transforms existing infrastructure into production-grade Terraform code and state files with a single click.
• Detect and automatically remediate drift rather than simply sending alerts.
• Recover safely from misconfigurations or accidental deletions using daily cloud configuration backups with one-click recovery.
• Execute Terraform workflows in a governed, gated and audited way.

And all of that without manually writing OPA or Sentinel policies.

Let’s go over ControlMonkey’s features to see why companies like Intel, AWS and Comcast can’t imagine their cloud without our platform:

Full Cloud Visibility & Automatic Terraform Code Generation

ControlMonkey establishes direct connections to your cloud environments across AWS, Azure, and GCP, as well as third-party platforms like Datadog, Cloudflare, Okta, and MongoDB.

It performs continuous scanning to build a comprehensive, live inventory of every resource in your infrastructure.

The dashboard distinguishes between IaC-managed resources and those operating outside of Terraform to bring shadow IT and configuration blind spots into the light.

What sets ControlMonkey apart from both HashiCorp platforms is its ability to auto-generate production-quality Terraform code and state files from resources that already exist in your cloud. 

This cloud-to-code capability eliminates the tedious, mistake-prone process of manually writing Terraform for legacy infrastructure so you can accelerate your IaC adoption.

Drift Detection, Automated Remediation & Rollback

ControlMonkey monitors your cloud environment for configuration drift, whether caused by manual console changes, misconfigurations, or security issues.

Both Terraform Cloud and Terraform Enterprise offer drift detection, but they stop at notification.

ControlMonkey goes further by automatically remediating it through Git-based pull requests and safe rollbacks.

This approach transforms drift from a recurring alert into a resolved incident, cutting down on outages, service interruptions, and late-night firefighting.

Take a look at how Terraform AI detects drift between your code and deployed infrastructure using remote state in our video guide:

Built-In Governance With AI-Powered Guardrails

ControlMonkey delivers enterprise-level governance capabilities without forcing your team to write and maintain OPA or Sentinel policies from scratch.

Our platform includes out-of-the-box security, compliance, and cost guardrails, along with AI-powered Quality Gates and IaC risk scoring.

Before any infrastructure change reaches production, ControlMonkey automatically assesses it for risk and policy compliance.

Our platform also maintains a full audit trail to support compliance requirements like PCI DSS and SOC 2.

See how Windward uses ControlMonkey to provision Amazon Bedrock in a self-serve, governed and private way, without compromising on security, compliance, or costs.

Compared to Terraform Cloud and Enterprise, this approach delivers faster adoption and lower operational overhead, especially for teams that don’t have dedicated policy engineers.

Infrastructure Resilience & Disaster Recovery

ControlMonkey treats infrastructure resilience as a core capability rather than an add-on or an afterthought.

Our platform captures daily snapshots of your cloud configurations, so that it can be possible (and easy) to roll back to any previous known-good state instantly when misconfigurations or accidental deletions occur.

Beyond your primary cloud resources, you can also back up configurations from third-party services, including Datadog, Cloudflare, Okta, Confluent, Temporal, and more.

This built-in disaster recovery layer is something neither Terraform Cloud nor Terraform Enterprise offers natively.

Integrations: Terraform Cloud vs. Terraform Enterprise vs. ControlMonkey

Terraform Cloud Integrations

Terraform Cloud focuses on tight integration within the HashiCorp ecosystem while also supporting common DevOps tools. 

Its native integrations are mainly around VCS providers (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket), Terraform Registry, and webhooks.

The platform’s cloud and SaaS access happens through Terraform providers during plan/apply, not through ongoing platform-level integrations.

Some of the notable integrations include:

• GitHub.
• GitLab.
• Bitbucket.
• AWS.
• Azure.
• Google Cloud.
• Slack.
• Sentinel.
• Vault.
• Consul.

The platform also does not provide native discovery, inventory, or continuous monitoring integrations with cloud accounts or SaaS services.

Terraform Enterprise Integrations

Terraform Enterprise includes the same VCS and registry integrations as Terraform Cloud, with added support for enterprise auth, SSO, and self-hosted environments.

The Enterprise version is designed to integrate with internal enterprise systems (IAM, networking, compliance tooling) needed for on-prem or regulated deployments.

However, it still relies on Terraform providers for cloud and SaaS interaction, without native platform-level integrations for asset discovery or configuration tracking.

ControlMonkey Integrations

ControlMonkey offers direct integrations with cloud providers (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) for asset discovery and configuration tracking.

Our platform integrates with Terraform Cloud & Terraform Enterprise, Git providers, and CI/CD pipelines during migration and parallel operation.

Here’s what other integrations our platform includes:

• 3rd-party vendors like DataDog, Cloudflare, Snowflake, Dynatrace, Databricks, and MongoDB.
• Remote state backends like AWS S3 bucket, Azure Storage account, and Gitlab State Management.
• Version Control Systems (VCS) like GitHub Enterprise Server, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps.
• ‘’Bring your own pipeline’’ tools like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines, Atlantis, and Gitlab CI.

What’s more, ControlMonkey also supports integrations with third-party and SaaS platforms (for configuration backup, drift, and recovery), and not just Terraform-managed resources.

Pricing: Terraform Cloud vs. Terraform Enterprise vs. ControlMonkey

Terraform Cloud Pricing

Terraform Cloud’s pricing is based on a Resources Under Management (RUM) model and offers a free trial for up to $500 worth of credits.

The platform has multiple paid plans:

• Standard: Starts at $0.10 per resource per month, adding team management, cost estimation, drift detection, and Silver support.
• Plus: Starts at $0.47 per resource per month, offering unlimited policies, run tasks, audit logs, and HCP Waypoint.
• Premium: Starts at $0.99 per resource per month, for advanced governance, self-service workflows, and premium features.

Your costs will then scale with the number of cloud resources (instances, clusters, etc.) your team manages.

Terraform Cloud Pricing for a growing start-up

For example, a growing start-up with 2,500 managed resources (i.e., has outgrown the free tier of 500 resources) and is on the Essentials tier at $0.0001359 per managed resource per hour, they’d be paying:

• $0.34 per hour. (2,500 × $0.0001359)
• $245/month. ($0.34 × 24 × 30)
• $2,940/year.

However, an enterprise with advanced governance needs and 50,000 managed resources on its Premium tier at ~$0.99 per resource per month:

• The monthly cost would be 50,000 × $0.99 = ~$49,500/month.
• And the annual cost: ~$594,000/year.

Many users have recently become unhappy with HCP Terraform’s ending free plan, with one noting that they calculated their Terraform Cloud bill will go from $0 to $15,000+ annually due to the number of resources under management.

‘’Just calculated that our Terraform Cloud bill will go from $0 to over $15,000 annually, because of the number of resources under management – 80% of which are literally GraphQL operation mappings to data sources.’’ – Reddit Thread.

Are you tired of Terraform Cloud’s unpredictable pricing?

ControlMonkey provides everything Terraform Cloud provides plus, cloud-wide visibility and IaC coverage, drift remediation, and disaster recovery at a predictable cost.

Move to ControlMonkey

Terraform Enterprise Pricing

Terraform Enterprise’s pricing is TFC’s self-managed option and comes with custom and premium support.

The plan is a nice option for enterprises requiring self-managed IBM Terraform to meet security, compliance, and operational needs.

ControlMonkey Pricing

Our platform offers only 2 pricing plans:

• Startup: $800 for up to 10 users, up to 5,000 cloud assets, up to 500 deployments/month, and access to our Terraform code generator, Terraform CI/CD, policy enforcement, drift detection and remediation capabilities, self-service dashboard, RBAC, and self-hosted agent.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing for unlimited cloud assets, users, and deployments, and adds specialized support.

What makes ControlMonkey pricing stand out is that it is fixed and predictable, whereas Terraform Cloud pricing fluctuates based on resource count.

ControlMonkey is built to manage what happens after Terraform runs, providing cloud-wide visibility, drift remediation, and disaster recovery at a predictable cost.

You can also apply for startup pricing by sending us your company name and size, and register for a free trial.

What are customers saying about Terraform Cloud, Terraform Enterprise, and ControlMonkey?

TL;DR:

• Terraform Cloud reviews praise its ability to automate and standardize infrastructure provisioning across cloud environments, but users are not happy with the recent price spikes.
• Terraform Enterprise customers report challenges with the plan/apply workflow, including limited real-time feedback and longer troubleshooting cycles.
• ControlMonkey users are satisfied with its ability to streamline Terraform deployments and generate code automatically, though some would like to see support for more IaC frameworks.

Terraform Cloud Reviews (Hashicorp Terraform)

G2 Rating: 4.7/5.

What users love:

• The software’s ability to automate and standardize infrastructure provisioning across cloud environments.
• How easy it is to configure Terraform in Jenkins, Azure DevOps, and Git Actions.
• Its cloud-agnostic support that lets users manage AWS, Azure, GCP, and more using a single tool.

‘’What I like best about HashiCorp Terraform is its ability to automate and standardize infrastructure provisioning across cloud environments.’’ – G2 Review.

Common complaints:

• Recent price spikes as a result of TFC ending the support of their free plan. Cost can now be substantial for smaller organizations.
• Resolving state file conflicts during team collaboration can be tricky if proper remote backend configuration is not set up.
• Its exclusive focus on Terraform code means it does not natively support other IaC tools.

‘’Also, resolving state file conflicts during team collaboration can be tricky if proper remote backend configuration is not set up.’’ – G2 Review.
ControlMonkey Reviews

Terraform Enterprise Reviews

G2 Rating: 4.7/5.

What users love:

• How they can spin up the required infrastructure within minutes.
• Modular structure that helps maintain reusable and scalable configurations.
• Its Terraform configuration, which uses the HCL language compared to other IaC tools, which use plain YAML/JSON.

‘’We can spin up required infrastructure within in minutes, absolutely easy to use application with abundant documentation available online.’’ – G2 Review.

‘’Terraform’s modular structure helps maintain reusable and scalable configurations, and its cloud-agnostic support allows me to manage AWS, Azure, GCP, and more using a single tool.’’ – G2 Review.

Common complaints:

• Slow, non-real-time feedback during plan/apply, especially at scale.
• State file management in larger organizations needs careful handling and secure backend configuration to avoid conflicts and ensure consistency.
• The rigid two-step plan/apply workflow and reliance on logs or third-party tools make it harder to quickly understand progress and troubleshoot during large or complex runs.

‘’Terraform’s plan and apply workflow is a two-step process where the first step involves generating an execution plan that shows the changes that will be applied to the infrastructure. The second step is to apply the changes to the infrastructure. During the execution of these steps, Terraform may not provide real-time feedback about the progress, and this can cause delays in getting feedback, especially in larger deployments. As the deployment size increases, the time taken to complete the changes can also increase, leading to longer feedback loops.’’ – G2 Review.

‘’It requires careful handling and secure backend configuration to avoid conflicts and ensure consistency.’’ – G2 Review.

ControlMonkey Reviews

G2 Rating: 5/5.

What users love:

• Our platform’s ability to streamline Terraform deployments.
• How ControlMonkey simplifies pull request reviews and lets members deploy infrastructure independently to reduce bottlenecks.
• Releasing faster to production, without compromising on security or compliance.
• How our automatic Terraform code generation automatically generated the Terraform code for thousands of resources.

‘’What I like best about Control Monkey is its ability to streamline our Terraform deployments. It has significantly improved our infrastructure management by making the process more efficient and secure. Additionally, it simplifies Pull Request reviews and allows team members to deploy infrastructure independently, reducing bottlenecks.’’ – G2 Review.

‘’The ControlMonkey platform was everything my team needed in order to manage and scale our AWS environments. We use ControlMonkey as an Infrastructure CI/CD solution, and that helps us to release faster to production, without compromising on security or compliance. Thanks to ControlMonkey we successfully shifted our mindset and strategy from ClickOps to fully GitOps. The team there is super strong, and every feature we requested was developed in a week, which really blew my mind.’’ – G2 Review.

Common complaints:

• How the platform currently supports only Terraform, OpenTofu, and Terragrunt.
• No on-premise deployment options, which are now already supported.

‘’Currently supporting only Terraform/OpenTofu/Terragrunt. I’d like to see them supporting more IaC Frameworks.’’ – G2 Review.

Which platform should you choose for cloud infrastructure management?

If you’ve read through this guide so far and you’re still not sure, here’s a quick use case summary to help you see the 3 platforms from a bird’s eye view:

ControlMonkey is the right choice if you:

• Need full cloud account scanning and an accurate inventory so that your team can find unmanaged resources and eliminate shadow infrastructure.
• Need visibility into what’s actually running in your cloud, not just what’s in Terraform state.
• Want drift, ClickOps, and manual changes to be detected and handled, not just flagged.
• Are looking for IaC automation with out-of-the-box compliance packages and control policies.
• Care about recovery and rollback of real cloud and SaaS configuration when things break.

Terraform Cloud is the right choice if you:

• Mainly want a managed way to run ONLY Terraform with remote state and VCS workflows.
• Have relatively clean environments  with no drifts and limited manual changes.
• Are focused on standardizing Terraform execution, not Day-2 operations at scale

Terraform Cloud isn’t the best option if you:

• Are dealing with frequent drift, ClickOps, or legacy infrastructure.
• Need real disaster recovery beyond re-applying Terraform code.
• Want visibility and control outside Terraform runs.
• Need governance delivered as out-of-the-box AI-powered guardrails instead of maintaining Sentinel or custom policy code.
• Afraid of vendor lock-in and license/pricing changes.

Struggling with Drift, ClickOps, and Zero Cloud Visibility?

ControlMonkey eliminates drift, detects manual changes, delivers real disaster recovery, and adds AI guardrails – so you control your cloud beyond Terraform runs.

Book intro meeting

Terraform Enterprise is the right choice if you:

• Need Terraform Cloud capabilities deployed in a self-hosted or regulated environment.
• Are committed to Terraform as your primary and long-term IaC framework, and to IBM as your primary vendor

Terraform Enterprise isn’t the best option if you:

• Expect it to solve cloud visibility, recovery, or Day-2 operational gaps.
• Want ownership of infrastructure outside Terraform execution.
• Are trying to reduce operational complexity rather than add another control plane.
• Are dealing with frequent drift, ClickOps, or legacy infrastructure that exists outside of Terraform.
• Afraid of vendor lock-in and license/pricing changes.

Migrate to Terraform in a single click with ControlMonkey

Terraform Cloud and Terraform Enterprise improve how you run Terraform workflows, but many organizations still face challenges with visibility, drift, and disaster recovery in real-world cloud environments.

ControlMonkey goes beyond optimizing Terraform workflows by helping make cloud environments secure, resilient, and governable.

Our platform brings together full cloud visibility, automatic Terraform code generation, built-in drift remediation, and infrastructure disaster recovery into a single, easy-to-use platform. 

As a result, you will no longer need to stitch together multiple tools, maintain custom CI/CD pipelines, or write complex OPA or Sentinel policies.

ControlMonkey is designed for teams that are frustrated with:

• Not knowing what infrastructure exists or what is unmanaged.
• Ongoing Terraform drift and ClickOps causing instability.
• Lack of disaster recovery for cloud configurations.
• Heavy governance complexity.
• Using multiple disconnected tools to manage infrastructure.
• Feeling locked in inside Terraform Cloud or equivalent.

You can book a meeting with our team to see how we can help you save thousands of hours by migrating to Terraform in a single click with ControlMonkey.

Are you looking for the best Terraform Cloud alternatives in 2026 to manage infrastructure at scale, improve collaboration, and enforce consistent IaC workflows?

In this article, I’ll go over the 10 best alternatives to Terraform Cloud in 2026 that can help you manage infrastructure as code, automate provisioning workflows, and maintain a secure, scalable infrastructure.

TL;DR

• ControlMonkey is the best Terraform Cloud alternative in 2026 for teams that want full cloud visibility, automatic Terraform code generation, a predictable pricing structure, 24/7 VIP support, built-in drift remediation, and disaster recovery.
• Platforms like Spacelift, Pulumi, env0, and Scalr are strong choices for teams that want advanced IaC orchestration, multi-IaC support, policy as code, cost controls, or a drop-in replacement for Terraform Cloud’s remote backend.
• For CI/CD-first or DIY approaches, CircleCI, Jenkins, Gitlab CI, and GitHub Actions work well if you want to run Terraform as part of broader pipelines and are comfortable managing state, governance, and security yourself.

On the open-source side, Terrateam and Atlantis are best for teams that want GitOps-driven Terraform automation with full self-hosting control, but are willing to take on the operational overhead of running, securing, and scaling the platform.

Struggling to keep up with cloud infrastructure?

ControlMonkey generates Terraform code automatically to give you full coverage and operational control.

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Why look for Terraform Cloud alternatives?

Most customers are generally satisfied with Terraform Cloud’s remote Terraform execution and how it provides a consistent, declarative way to manage infrastructure across multiple cloud providers.

However, as priorities shift toward infrastructure resilience, better drift visibility, and faster onboarding of new team members, several limitations begin to surface:

#1: Terraform Cloud Pricing structure after the end of free plan

Terraform Cloud uses a Resources Under Management (RUM) model, with pricing starting at $0.10/month/resource in its Essentials plan.

That means cost scales with the number of infrastructure resources (e.g., instances, IAM users, security groups and rules, buckets, etc.) rather than users or pipelines.

While this initially appears affordable, it can grow unexpectedly expensive as environments scale, and your organization becomes operationally dependent on Terraform Cloud (which can result in vendor lock-in that might be hard to escape).

Here are the numbers on how expensive Terraform Cloud can get for some teams:

The real-world cost of TFC would be $75,000/year minimum for its Plus plan, and $150,000/year minimum for its Enterprise plan.

Apart from this, many users are unhappy about the end of the HCP Terraform Free plan, with one noting that they calculated their Terraform Cloud bill will go from $0 to $15,000+ annually due to the number of resources under management.

“Just calculated that our Terraform Cloud bill will go from $0 to over $15,000 annually, because of the number of resources under management – 80% of which are literally GraphQL operation mappings to data sources.” Reddit Thread.

#2: There’s no built-in capability to roll back to a previously working state if the deployment fails (Cloud Disaster Recovery)

Unlike some other Hashicorp Terraform Cloud alternatives on the market, the platform doesn’t give you a native, simple “rollback to last known good state” button.

You’ll have to either try to revert the code, re-run applies, use state versioning, or manually roll back via Terraform.

‘’No built-in ability to roll back to a previously working state if the deployment fails.’’ – Capterra Review.

#3: State management complexity & drift visibility challenges

Last but not least, some users are not happy with TFC’s state management complexity and its drift detection capabilities.

While Terraform Cloud can detect drift, identifying the root cause and resolving it can require manual effort.

‘’Managing state files can be complex, especially in team environments, and drift detection can be challenging.’’ – Capterra Review.

What are the 10 best alternatives to Terraform Cloud in 2026?

The best alternatives to Terraform Cloud in 2026 are ControlMonkey, Spacelift, and Pulumi.

Here’s a comprehensive Terraform Cloud alternatives comparison of the 10 solutions I short-listed:

Platform	Best For	Pricing
#1: ControlMonkey	Teams that want full cloud visibility, automatic Terraform code generation, built-in drift remediation, and true infrastructure disaster recovery beyond just running Terraform.	Startup: $800/month (up to 10 users, 5,000 assets, 500 deployments) Enterprise: Custom pricing.  No free tier.
#2: Spacelift	Teams that need multiple non-mainstream IaC ( Aniseble, Bicep, Cloudformation), but are willing to accept the lack of daily cloud backup capabilities, lack of account scanning capabilities, automatic Terraform code generation, and out-of-the-box drift auto-remediation or disaster recovery.	Free forever (2 users). Paid plans start at $399/month. Higher tiers are custom-priced.
#3: Pulumi Cloud	Teams are ready to replace Terraform with a programming language-based IaC approach, even though they’ll trade off full account scanning for unmanaged resources.	Free plan available. Team: $40/month. Enterprise: $400/month. Business Critical: Custom pricing.
#4: env0	Platform teams that care about cost controls, self-service provisioning, and policy enforcement, but it might not be a good solution if your main problem is IaC coverage, preventing drift, and cloud DR.	Cloud Compass: $1,500/month. Cloud Navigator & Cloud Pilot: Custom pricing.
#5: Circle CI	DevOps teams that want to run Terraform inside a powerful general-purpose CI/CD system, even though they’ll need to build and maintain all infrastructure governance, state management, and drift handling themselves.	Free plan available. Paid plans start at $15/month (credit-based). Enterprise and Server: Custom pricing.
#6: GitHub Actions	Teams that prefer a fully DIY, GitHub-native Terraform workflow and are comfortable taking on long-term technical debt and missing native IaC state management and governance features.	Free plan available. Team: $4/user/month. Enterprise: $21/user/month.
#7: Scalr	Teams looking for a drop-in Terraform Cloud backend replacement with predictable run-based pricing, provided they don’t need multi-IaC support or cloud visibility beyond Terraform itself.	Free plan (up to 50 runs). Paid plans start around $390/month for 400 runs.
#8: Terrateam	Teams that want a GitOps-driven, open-source Terraform automation platform and are willing to handle the operational overhead of installing, securing, and scaling it themselves.	Community Edition: Free. Paid plans start at $224/month. Self-hosted enterprise: $1,087.50/month.
#9: Atlantis	Teams that want a completely free and simple GitOps automation tool for Terraform, as long as they accept the absence of RBAC, policy enforcement, drift detection, and managed support.	Free & open source. Infrastructure and operational costs can apply.

Let’s go over the 3 platform features, starting with Spacelift:

Alternative to Terraform Cloud#1: ControlMonkey

ControlMonkey offers the best alternative to Terraform Cloud in 2026 because it offers cloud leaders the full range of visibility, automation and resilience capabilities needed to govern cloud at scale.

As the only fully end-to-end Terraform-first automation platform, ControlMonkey gives you full cloud visibility, automatic Terraform code generation, built-in drift remediation, and infrastructure disaster recovery out of the box.

So while Terraform Cloud focuses on executing Terraform workflows, ControlMonkey offers:

• One-click Terraform code generation & import that lets you convert existing resources into clean, maintainable Terraform configuration files and state in minutes instead of months of manual work.
• Total cloud visibility: Our platform scans cloud accounts and shows exactly what is (and isn’t) covered by Terraform.
• Built-in drift remediation: TFC can detect drift, but ControlMonkey can automatically remediate it safely, not just alert you.
• AI-powered guardrails & automated enforcement that help you prevent risky or non-compliant changes before they reach production.
• 100% Cloud infrastructure resilience with daily cloud configuration backups and full cloud disaster recovery, so you can recover from misconfigurations or accidental deletions without weeks of rebuild.
• Multi iac Framework – ControlMonkey Support more than Terraform with OpenTufo and Terragrunt support and the ability to migrate from one to another with 1-Click generation.
• Migrating TFC Projects, workspaces and module registry to ControlMonkey in a click of a button.
• 24/7 VIP support that you can rely on over Microsoft Teams, Slack, email and ticketing.

And all of that without writing OPA or Sentinel policies, maintaining custom CI/CD pipelines, or stitching together multiple point tools.

Let’s go over ControlMonkey’s features in more detail to see why teams at Intel, AWS and Comcast can’t imagine their cloud without ControlMonkey:

Automatically Generate Terraform Code

ControlMonkey connects directly to your cloud accounts (AWS, Azure, GCP) and 3rd party vendors (Datadog, Cloudflare, Okta, MongoDB and more) and continuously scans them to create a complete, real-time inventory of all resources.

Our platform then shows what infrastructure is already managed by IaC and what’s unmanaged to help you eliminate blind spots and shadow IT.

Unlike Terraform Cloud, which doesn’t have built-in Terraform code generation, ControlMonkey can automatically generate production-ready Terraform code and state files for existing resources.

This “Cloud-to-Code” approach will help you remove the manual, error-prone work of onboarding legacy infrastructure into IaC and accelerate standardization.

Drift Detection, Automated Remediation & Disaster Recovery

ControlMonkey will continuously monitor your cloud environments for configuration drift, regardless of whether it was caused by manual console changes, misconfigurations, or security issues.

While Terraform Cloud can detect drift, ControlMonkey goes further by automatically remediating it through Git-based pull requests and safe rollbacks.

When our platform detects a mismatch, our Remediation Engine offers one-click fixes to bring infrastructure back into compliance.

This helps you turn drift from an alerting problem into a resolved issue, reducing outages, downtime, and ‘’firefighting’’.

Apart from this, you’ll get access to our ClickOps scanner that automatically identifies unsupervised manual operations from the cloud console.

Built-In Compliance & Governance With AI-Powered Guardrails

ControlMonkey provides enterprise-grade governance without requiring your team to write or maintain OPA or Sentinel policies like you’d have to do with Terraform Cloud.

Our platform includes AI-powered security, compliance, and cost guardrails out-of-the-box, along with Quality Gates and IaC risk scoring.

The way it works is that our platform scans existing IaC code for misconfiguration and policy violations.

Guardrails are then applied automatically during CI/CD, so that nothing non-compliant ever gets deployed.

ControlMonkey also keeps a complete audit trail for compliance frameworks, such as PCI DSS or SOC 2.

See Windward’s success story that uses ControlMonkey to provision Amazon Bedrock in a self-serve, governed and private way, without compromising on security, compliance, or costs.

Infrastructure Resilience & Disaster Recovery

ControlMonkey backs up your entire cloud & SaaS vendors’ footprint daily for instant rollback and recovery from misconfigurations or accidental deletions.

You’ll be able to back up not only your cloud resources, but all other 3rd party vendors, such as Datadog, Cloudflare, Okta, Confluent, Temporal and more.

The problem we solve is that, without comprehensive state and configuration backups, your cloud environments can face higher risks of data loss and slower recovery times.

We treat infrastructure resilience as a first-class feature rather than an add-on or a nice-to-have.

Pricing Compression 

ControlMonkey does not have a free tier or PLG pricing model.

Our platform offers only 2 pricing plans:

• Startup: $800 for up to 10 users, up to 5,000 cloud assets, up to 500 deployments/month, and access to our Terraform code generator, Terraform CI/CD, policy enforcement, drift detection and remediation capabilities, self-service dashboard, RBAC, and self-hosted agent.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing for unlimited cloud assets, users, and deployments, and adds specialized support.

What makes ControlMonkey’s pricing stand out to TFC is that it’s fixed, whereas Terraform Cloud’s price can fluctuate at any time.

You can also apply for startup pricing by sending us your company name and size, and register for a free trial.

What makes ControlMonkey different from Terraform Cloud?

ControlMonkey goes beyond Terraform Cloud by not only running Terraform but also discovering unmanaged resources, auto-generating Terraform code to help you prevent and remediate drift, providing backups and disaster recovery, enforcing policies, and offering full cloud operability and resilience.

Our platform makes your entire cloud operable, resilient, and governable,  end-to-end. 

While Terraform Cloud is a great execution engine, ControlMonkey is the solution that finds your real infrastructure, turns it into clean Terraform, prevents and fixes drift, and protects you from outages.

Here’s how the 2 platforms compare head-to-head:

Capability	ControlMonkey	Terraform Cloud
Cloud Asset Inventory & Terraform Coverage	Full cloud scanning & Terraform coverage insights. Our platform detects unmanaged resources.	No cloud account scanning capability: lacks visibility into unmanaged resources.
Terraform Code Generation	Automatically generates Terraform code and state from your existing cloud resources.	No automatic code generation. You’ll have to manually create it.
Daily Cloud Backups & Disaster Recovery	Daily infra configuration backups & full cloud disaster recovery with instant rollback.	No built-in backups or disaster recovery.
Drift Detection & Remediation	Continuous drift detection with automated remediation and rollback.	Detects drift but requires manual intervention.
ClickOps Scanner	Detects unsupervised manual operations from the cloud console.	Not supported.
Policies for Security, Cost & Compliance	Out-of-the-box AI guardrails. You’ll not have to code your entire policy inside the tool from scratch.	Requires Sentinel for policy authoring & maintenance.
Terraform Modules Insights	Identifies outdated modules across your code.	Not supported.
Periodic Code Scanning for Compliance	Scans existing IaC code for misconfigurations & policy violations.	Partly. Requires manual policy enforcement.
CI/CD Flexibility	You can use ControlMonkey’s out-of-the-box IaC CI/CD pipeline or integrate with your existing pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, etc.) to enforce your policies.	Partly. Replacement for existing CI/CD pipelines for IaC.
Support & Account Management	24/7 VIP customer support in all plans.	Premium support is included in the IBM Terraform Enterprise plan.
Pricing Structure	Starts from $800/month for up to 5,000 cloud assets and up to 10 users. You can also apply for startup pricing.	You can choose between a Pay-as-You-Go (PAYG) model, single and multi-year plans, and fully customizable pricing plans. Billing starts at $0.10 per resource/month on the Standard plan.

Pros & Cons to choose ControlMonkey over TFC

✅ The only fully end-to-end Terraform-first automation platform.

✅ Automatic cloud-to-code conversion that lets you generate production-grade Terraform code and state for existing resources.

✅ Real-time drift detection & automatic drift remediation and rollback.

✅ AI-powered guardrails & automated enforcement of policies.

✅ 24/7 premium customer support.

✅ Predictable pricing structure with a fixed plan, so you do not face sudden price changes.

✅ ControlMonkey has a partnership with all 3 cloud vendors, including Azure, GCP, and AWS.

✅ Switching from Terraform Cloud to ControlMonkey is also going to be a breeze.

❌ The platform currently supports only Terraform, OpenTofu, and Terragrunt.

Alternative to Terraform Cloud #2: Spacelift

Best for: Teams that need to support multiple non-mainstream IaC (Aniseble, Bicep, Cloudformation). 

Why replace:  Spacelift is very good in cloud gov, but they do not solve cloud visibility or cloud resilience.

The platform doesn’t have:

• Cloud account scanning capabilities.
• Terraform code generation.
• Automatic drift remediation.
• Built-in disaster recovery.

This means teams still don’t know what’s unmanaged, broken, or recoverable in their cloud.

ControlMonkey offers end-to-end Terraform automation that connects IaC code with cloud insights, helping you always have your cloud configuration backed up and ready for disaster recovery. We also have an AI Co-pilot that closes skills gaps in context to your Git and Cloud Account. 

Similar to: Env0

Spacelift is an infrastructure orchestration platform built for continuous delivery of IaC. 

It acts as a control plane for Terraform and other IaC tools, offering policy as code, drift detection, and configurable concurrency, so that your teams can scale safely while keeping developer workflows predictable.

Spacelift Features

• Spacelift connects to IaC, VCS, configuration management, observability tools, control solutions, and cloud providers to help your team deliver secure infrastructure more quickly.
• Support for multiple IaC frameworks, including Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, CloudFormation, and Terragrunt.
• Policy as code and fine-grained access controls to help your team enforce guardrails and approvals.
• You’ll get drift detection and state insights to surface unexpected differences between declared and actual infrastructure.

Tired of manually writing and maintaining your policy code?

ControlMonkey provides AI-powered, built-in governance, including out-of-the-box security policies, IaC risk scoring, and automated guardrails for every infrastructure change

Explore a Demo

Spacelift Pricing

Spacelift offers a free plan that includes 2 users, 1 API key, access to its Spaces, IaC support, cloud integrations, and workflow customization.

To get more users and capabilities, there are 4 paid plans:

• Starter: Starts at $399/month, and includes up to 10 users, 2 public workers, OIDC integrations, a private module registry, webhooks, a Policy as Code engine, notifications, and custom tasks.
• Starter+: Custom pricing and adds unlimited users, 1 private worker, and drift detection.
• Business: Custom pricing, which includes up to 3+ private workers, blueprints, advanced scheduling, a private provider registry, targeted replans, and better customer support.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing, which includes up to 5+ private workers, concurrent VCS connections, audit trails, MFA, OIDC API keys, and more.

Spacelift Pros & Cons

✅ Multi-IaC support that makes it easier to standardize workflows.

✅ Granular governance and policy as code features that are designed for audit-ready environments.

✅ Predictable pricing model that focused on concurrency and workers rather than hidden resource-based fees.

❌ Can be more expensive for very small teams compared to other Spacelift alternatives on the market.

❌ Doesn’t offer built-in automated drift remediation or daily state backup and disaster recovery out of the box.

❌ Spacelift does not have built-in Terraform code generation, requiring engineers to manually create and maintain configurations.

❌ Spacelift detects drift but requires manual intervention to resolve it.

❌Spacelift does not offer cloud account scanning for Terraform coverage, leaving users without a clear view of unmanaged resources.

Alternative to Terraform Cloud #3: Pulumi Cloud

Best for: Teams looking to replace their whole IaC from Terraform or OpenTufo to Pulumi. 

Why replace: Teams often look to replace Pulumi Cloud when they need full cloud inventory scanning to find shadow infrastructure and when they’re looking to combine continuous drift detection with automated remediation.

Similar to: Spacelift.

Pulumi is a cloud infrastructure platform that provides an end-to-end environment for managing infrastructure as code, with support for multiple cloud providers, team collaboration, and automated deployments.

Unlike the Pulumi open source SDK that you might be familiar with, this is the platform that includes dashboards, access controls, policy enforcement, and versioning, which makes it a good option for enterprise teams managing production workloads.

Pulumi Cloud Features

• You’ll be able to write infrastructure code in standard programming languages, such as TypeScript, Python, Go, C#, Java, or YAML, instead of DSLs.
• You can create reusable infrastructure components that can be used in any language.
• The platform is GitOps & CI/CD native: your team can review changes in pull requests, run tests in CI, and then ship through GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins, or any CI/CD system.

Pulumi Cloud Pricing

Pulumi has a free plan, which includes IaC state management, unlimited projects, unlimited updates, and up to 500 deployment minutes.

To get more resources, you’ll have to be in one of its 3 paid tiers:

• Team: $40/month with 500 resources included for up to 10 users, which adds secure collaboration and CI/CD, AI assistance with its Pulumi Neo, resource search, webhooks, and automatic secrets rotation.
• Enterprise: $400/month with 2,000 resources included for unlimited users, which adds SAML/SSO and RBAC, UDP, audit logs, drift detection and remediation, and time-to-live stacks.
• Business Critical for custom resources, which adds a self-hosting option, compliance policies, organization-wide policy enforcement, automatic group and user sync, audit logs export, volume pricing, and access to a private Slack.

Pulumi Cloud Pros & Cons

✅ Access to organization-wide policy enforcement capabilities.

✅ Drift detection and remediation

✅ More affordable than other alternatives on the market with a generous free plan.

❌ Lack of full cloud inventory scanning.

❌ Higher cost compared to its self-managed open source SDK usage.

❌ They lack Terraform state backup capabilities, increasing the risk of data loss and recovery delays.

Alternative to Terraform Cloud #5: env0

Best for: Teams that care about cost controls, self-service provisioning, and policy enforcement.

Why replace: If your main problems are IaC coverage, preventing drift, and cloud DR, env0 won’t solve them end-to-end. You’ll still need separate tooling (or manual effort) for cloud account scanning, Cloud-to-Code onboarding, and reliable rollback/disaster recovery when infrastructure changes go wrong.

Similar to: Spacelift.

Env0 is an infrastructure automation platform that lets you empower your developers to deploy infrastructure fast and safely without losing control in the process.

The platform lets you track IaC coverage, detect ClickOps assets, and codify resources into Terraform or OpenTofu with its Cloud Compass, making it one of the best OpenTofu alternatives to Terraform Cloud.

Env0 Features

• Pre-deployment cost estimation that shows infrastructure spending changes before applying Terraform plans, with the ability to block deployments exceeding budget thresholds.
• Policy-as-code engine supporting OPA and custom policies to enforce security, compliance, and cost guardrails across all deployments.
• Drift detection and scheduled destroy workflows to automatically terminate unused environments and reduce cloud waste.
• Multi-IaC support, including Terraform, Terragrunt, Pulumi, CloudFormation, and Kubernetes manifests in a unified platform.

Env0 Pricing

Env0 has 3 packages that you can choose from:

• env zero Cloud Compass: $1,500/month, which lets you track IaC coverage, MCP server, IaC code generator, drift risk and basic drift cause.
• env zero Cloud Navigator: Custom pricing, which adds IaC automation & GitOps, basic drift management, basic visibility & dashboards, a private registry, access controls (RBAC), governance & compliance, and ready-to-use policies.
• env zero Cloud Pilot: Custom pricing, which adds cloud analyst (AI agent & dashboards), advanced drift cause analysis, remediation, & monitoring, cost management, self-hosted VCS, and a proof-of-value guarantee.

Env0 Pros & Cons

✅ Reusable templates, Git-based workflows, and built-in guardrails like RBAC, scoped variables, and policy-as-code.

✅ Flexible self-service model that reduces bottlenecks for developer teams needing quick environment access.

✅ Supports multiple IaC tools beyond Terraform.

❌ Do not offer cloud account scanning for Terraform coverage, leaving users without a clear view of unmanaged resources.

❌ Do not have built-in Terraform code generation, requiring engineers to manually create and maintain configurations.

❌ lack Terraform state backup capabilities, increasing the risk of data loss and recovery delays

❌ Need to write and maintain OPA policies.

❌ Higher starting cost than other tools on the market, which is why some users have been looking for env0 alternatives.

❌ Steeper learning curve for teams unfamiliar with policy-as-code and custom workflow configuration.

Alternative to Terraform Cloud #6: Circle CI

Best for: CircleCI is a simple CI/CD platform best suited for small teams in less complex environments. While it can be used to run Terraform, it was not designed for cloud infrastructure management and is often chosen when teams want to reuse their CI/CD budget rather than invest in a dedicated infrastructure platform.

Why replace: Teams will need to replace CircleCI when Terraform/OpenTufo usage grows beyond simple action of simple pipelines and they need more infrastructure governance, drift control, and Cloud back-up instead of maintaining custom scripts and workflows.

Similar to: GitHub Actions.

CircleCI is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that lets you automate the process of building, testing, and deploying code. 

While Terraform Cloud focuses on infrastructure provisioning workflows, CircleCI excels at general CI/CD orchestration and can run Terraform plans as part of broader pipelines.

Circle CI Features

• Automated CI/CD pipelines that build, test, and deploy code every time changes land in a repository, reducing manual effort and errors.
• High concurrency and parallelism for running many jobs simultaneously to speed feedback loops and reduce queuing.
• Reusable orbs (shared configuration packages) that help you standardize common CI/CD tasks and accelerate setup.
• Insights, caching, and analytics to understand pipeline performance and improve efficiency over time.

Circle CI Pricing

CircleCI uses a credit‑based pricing model where teams purchase credits that cover monthly active users, compute time, add-on features, and additional network & storage use.

There are 4 pricing plans that you can choose from Circle CI:

• Free: $0/month with up to 6,000 build minutes, 5 active users, access to Docker, Windows, Linux, Arm, macOS, and self-hosted runners, and 30x concurrency.
• Performance: Starts at $15/month with 30,000 credits, up to 80x concurrency, optional 8×5 support add-on, and larger resources.
• Scale: Enterprise‑focused plans with customizable credits, advanced controls, all environments, and an optional 24/7 support add-on.
• Server: Self‑hosted option with unlimited build minutes, 30 user seats, and custom pricing for private deployments behind a corporate firewall or BYO hardware.

Circle CI Pros & Cons

✅ Strong support for CI/CD automation across languages and environments.

✅ High concurrency and parallelism that reduce pipeline bottlenecks.

✅ You can deploy the platform on your premises or in your private cloud.

❌ Credit‑based pricing can be hard to predict and monitor, especially for heavy usage scenarios.

❌ Primary focus is general CI/CD, so the platform lacks the infrastructure governance and state management features built into dedicated IaC platforms.

Alternative to Terraform Cloud #7: GitHub Actions

Best for: Teams that prefer a fully DIY, GitHub-native Terraform workflow.

Why replace: Your team would have to take on long-term technical debt and miss out on native IaC state management and governance features.

Similar to: Jenkins.

GitHub Actions is a workflow automation and CI/CD platform built into GitHub that lets you define how code builds, tests, and deploys should run using YAML‑based workflows stored in the same repositories as the code. 

The platform might not be an infrastructure provisioning platform by itself, but it can serve as a powerful automation layer that can run Terraform workflows as part of broader CI/CD pipelines.

GitHub Actions Features

• By embedding Terraform plan and apply steps within Actions workflows, you’ll be able to unify application delivery and infrastructure provisioning automation under one system. 
• CI/CD pipeline execution that builds, tests, and deploys code on GitHub’s hosted runners or self‑hosted machines.
• Matrix builds and parallelism, allowing tests and jobs to run across multiple environments, languages, and configurations simultaneously.
• The platform can be self‑hosted or with GitHub‑hosted runners, which can give you flexibility between cloud execution and in‑house infrastructure.

Building your own pipeline using open-source CI tools like GitHub Actions will give you total control. 

But is this DIY approach worth it? In our Terraform DIY vs. Buy article, we dive deeper into the 2 approaches.

GitHub Actions Pricing

GitHub Actions is free for public repositories using standard GitHub-hosted runners and for all self-hosted runners. 

Private repositories receive free monthly quotas of compute minutes, artifact storage, and cache storage based on their plan (for example, 2,000 minutes and 500 MB storage on the Free plan), which reset each billing cycle. 

Usage beyond these quotas is billed per minute by runner type (such as $0.006/min for Linux) and for storage using an hourly GB-Hours model across artifacts, caches, and GitHub Packages. 

Storage charges accrue continuously during the cycle, and deleting data only stops future charges, not already accrued usage.

GitHub Actions Pros & Cons

✅ A strong alternative for teams that prefer to manage all automation inside GitHub.

✅ Massive ecosystem of reusable actions and event triggers makes it easy to automate many aspects of software delivery beyond just CI/CD.

✅ Flexible execution on GitHub‑hosted runners or self‑hosted infrastructure gives teams control over performance and cost.

❌ Going for this option means you lose the dedicated state management and governance features that Terraform Cloud and other similar platforms provide.

❌ A DIY approach with GitHub Actions will have technical debt, as custom scripts and configurations will require ongoing updates.

Alternative to Terraform Cloud #8: Scalr

Best for: Teams looking for a drop-in Terraform

Why replace: You might need multi-IaC support or cloud visibility beyond Terraform itself.

Similar to: env0, Spacelift.

Scalr is an infrastructure automation platform that focuses specifically on managing Terraform and OpenTofu workflows at scale. 

Rather than being a generic CI/CD tool or a coding SDK, Scalr is a full IaC orchestration platform designed to replace or extend Terraform Cloud’s capabilities by giving you backend flexibility, governance, policy integration, and predictable cost control.

Scalr Features

• Remote operations and state backend flexibility: Acts as a remote operations backend for Terraform/OpenTofu while allowing you to choose Scalr’s managed backend or any supported Terraform backend (e.g., AWS S3, and Azure Blob).
• Policy as Code (OPA) and compliance checks: Native Open Policy Agent integration with pre‑plan and post‑plan checks stored in version control supports automated compliance and guardrails.
• Drift detection and reporting: Detects configuration drift and surfaces insights within dashboards and reporting, often without billing against run quotas.
• VCS and CLI integrations: Integration with Git providers for GitOps workflows, plus native Terraform/OpenTofu CLI support to reuse existing workflows.

Scalr Pricing

Scalr’s pricing is run‑based: you pay for Terraform/OpenTofu runs (plans and applies) rather than per user, per resource, or by environment.

There’s a free plan for up to 50 runs, and from there on, the pricing scales with qualifying runs.

For example, with $390/month (billed monthly), you’d get 400 extra runs.

In any case, you’d get up to 5 concurrent runs, no charge for extra concurrency or workers as you scale, no charge for users, workspaces, or resources under management, enterprise-level support, no charge for private agents, and no charge for SAML.

Scalr Pros & Cons

✅ A true drop‑in remote backend replacement for Terraform Cloud.

✅ Flexible backend options and hierarchical governance.

✅ Atlantis-style or GitOps: both apply-before-merge and merge-before-apply are supported on the platform.

❌ Run‑based pricing may still be higher than expected for very high‑frequency apply environments.

❌ The platform’s specificity on Terraform/OpenTofu rather than multi‑IaC tool support may limit utility for teams using tooling like Pulumi or CloudFormation.❌ Terraform run control ≠ cloud control – does not control what happens outside the run.

What are the best open source alternatives to Terraform Cloud?

The best open source alternatives to Terraform Cloud are Terrateam and Atlantis, with their self-hosted workflows without relying on HashiCorp’s hosted service.

Let’s go over both of them in more detail: 

Open source alternative to Terraform Cloud #9: Terrateam

Best for: Organizations that want a GitOps-driven, open-source Terraform automation platform.

Why replace: Teams might look to replace Terratem due to its operational overhead of installing, securing, and scaling IaC themselves.

Similar to: Atlantis.

Terrateam is an open‑source infrastructure orchestration platform that brings GitOps principles to Terraform and other IaC workflows by automating plans and applies through pull requests and merge requests. 

It’s not just the IaC technology itself (like Terraform or OpenTofu), but a full platform that integrates with GitHub or GitLab to manage, review, and execute infrastructure changes as native version‑controlled workflows, all of which are under an open‑source license.

Terrateam Features

• Runs Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, CDKTF, Terragrunt, and other CLI‑based IaC tools automatically based on pull request or merge request events.
• Your devs will be able to provision and modify infrastructure through self-service workflows with built-in guardrails.
• Drift detection and cost insights: You’ll be able to detect infrastructure drift and estimate cost impact for proposed changes directly in pull requests.
• You’ll be able to implement automated governance and secure collaboration with policy enforcement and audit trails.

Terrateam Pricing

Terrateam has a community edition, which is free and open source, which allows teams to self‑host without paying licensing fees. 

You can run the platform using Docker, Kubernetes, or other infrastructure with your own runners.

There is also a self-hosted SaaS and a VCS-native app that you can purchase, which offers additional enterprise‑grade features, such as centralized configuration.

There are 4 pricing plans that you can choose from Terrateam:

• Startup: Free forever, which includes pull request automation for Terraform, Monorepo and workspace execution, concurrent plans across PRs, custom workflows and hooks, and unlimited users, runs, and runners.
• Growth: $224/month, which includes scheduled drift detection and alerts, programmatic config generation, customer-owned plan storage, apply requirements, email support, and 90-day audit retention.
• Regulated: $563/month, which includes API access, CODEOWNERS integration, role-based access control, gatekeeper approval and overrides, centralized config, and 365-day audit retention.
• Corporate: $1,087.50/month, which adds MSA support, security questionnaires, a dedicated Slack channel, architecture reviews, and procurement-friendly invoicing.

There’s also a self-hosted option, where you can run Terrateam in your own infrastructure. 

The OSS version covers core workflows for unlimited runs and users and private runners, while the paid edition adds governance controls and costs $1,087.50/month.

Terrateam Pros & Cons

✅ See cost estimates directly in pull requests and detect drift early.

✅ Deploy Terrateam where you need it, including in your cloud, your VPC, or on-premises.

✅ You can validate every change against your security and compliance policies.

❌ Requires more DevOps work to install and operate compared to fully managed SaaS platforms.

❌ Some advanced governance and centralized features may require the paid Enterprise Edition.

Open source alternative to Terraform Cloud #10: Atlantis

Best for: Developers who want a completely free and simple GitOps automation tool for Terraform.

Why replace: Teams typically replace Atlantis because it lacks RBAC, policy enforcement, drift detection, and managed support. Also, they weren’t comfortable with managing state, governance, and security themselves.

Similar to: Terrateam.

Atlantis is an open‑source platform that automates Terraform plan and Terraform apply based on pull or merge requests, integrating tightly with GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps. 

It’s designed to keep infrastructure change workflows visible and collaborative by running Terraform commands in a consistent environment and posting plan outputs as comments in pull requests.

Atlantis Features

• GitOps‑driven Terraform orchestration: Listens to Git events, such as pull request creation or update, and runs Terraform plan and, upon approval, Terraform apply.
• Automated plan outputs in VCS: Atlantis posts Terraform plan results directly into pull request comments for review, making changes easy to discuss.
• Supports locking of Terraform state files during runs to help avoid conflicts, though you’ll have to configure a remote backend yourself.
• Self‑hostable: Deployable on VMs, Kubernetes, or containers with full control over infrastructure, credentials, and upgrades.

Atlantis Pricing

Atlantis is free and open source. 

You can self‑host it and provide your own compute resources for runners, webhooks, and state backends, such as S3, GCS, or Azure Blob. 

There are no licensing fees, though beware that operational and hosting costs can apply based on your team’s infrastructure choices.

Atlantis Pros & Cons

✅ A straightforward open‑source alternative to Terraform Cloud’s automation features for teams that prefer self‑hosting and maximum control over their tooling.

✅ Integrates tightly with Git workflows to keep IaC reviews and change automation within version control.

✅ Your developers will be able to safely submit Terraform pull requests without credentials.

❌ Your team will have to manage deployment, scaling, upgrades, and security, which can increase your operational burden, which is why some users have been looking for Atlantis alternatives.

❌ There’s going to be no native role‑based access control, advanced policy enforcement, drift detection, or dedicated support that many commercial platforms include. 

Gain full control of your cloud with no more blind spots with ControlMonkey

With Terraform Cloud’s often unpredictable pricing, complexity, and lack of cloud account scanning, some customers have been looking to switch.

The good news is that it’s not 2020 anymore, and there’s a variety of Terraform Cloud alternatives for IaC management: from DIY open source alternatives to enterprise-grade solutions that can support your full IaC workflow.

ControlMonkey stands out as the best alternative to Terraform Cloud, as it doesn’t just optimize Terraform workflows.

It makes your cloud safe, resilient, and governable with 100% infrastructure resilience.

Our platform combines full cloud visibility, automatic Terraform code generation, built-in drift remediation, and infrastructure disaster recovery into a single, easy-to-use platform.

That means your team no longer has to stitch together multiple tools, maintain custom CI/CD pipelines, or write complex Sentinel policies.

If you’re tired of Terraform Cloud’s:

• Lack of cloud account scanning makes it unclear what infrastructure exists or what’s unmanaged.
• Terraform drift and ClickOps are constantly breaking things.
• Lack of disaster recovery for your cloud configurations.
• Governance and state management complexity.
• Lock-in, which made one of our customers feel like they were being held captive when they were on Terraform Cloud.
• Overall value for money.

You know what they say: no one got fired for buying IBM. The same situation applies to Terraform Cloud, as it’s been the enterprise go-to option for quite some time now.

However, new competitors have emerged on the market, such as Spacelift and ControlMonkey, which may not be backed by IBM but offer interesting use cases and different pricing models.

In this comparison guide, I’ll try my best to accurately and without bias compare Spacelift and Terraform Cloud, including their core capabilities, pricing structures, and integrations, to help you make a better-informed decision for your cloud automation strategy.

I’ll also cover their G2 reviews because this wouldn’t be a comprehensive comparison if I hadn’t included real customer opinions.

I’d also like to introduce you to an alternative that addresses some of the gaps between these 2 tools with a more unified and flexible control plane for cloud infrastructure: ControlMonkey (that’s us).

TL;DR

• Spacelift offers a comprehensive IaC orchestration platform designed for teams that want flexibility across multiple IaC frameworks. The tool stood out to me with how fast it runs Terraform and how it can integrate into existing workflows. However, its downsides are that it stops at execution with no cloud visibility, no IaC onboarding, and no automated drift recovery.

I’d go for Spacelift if I already have clean Terraform code, rely on custom CI/CD pipelines, need multi-IaC support (Pulumi, CloudFormation, Ansible, etc.), and if I’m looking for on-premise deployment.

• Terraform Cloud is all about Terraform execution and collaboration. The tool is integrated with the Terraform CLI and HashiCorp ecosystem, and is a really good option for teams starting fresh with Terraform. Despite this, the tool provides no visibility into unmanaged infrastructure, has no drift remediation.

I’d go for Terraform Cloud if my infrastructure were already fully managed in Terraform, and if my primary need were remote runs and Terraform collaboration.

• ControlMonkey is a cloud infrastructure control plane that we built to bring real-world cloud environments under Terraform safely. The way it works is that on top of the IaC Automation, it provides tools like Terraform Cloud and Spacelift, it scans your cloud accounts, shows what is currently managed and unmanaged, automatically generates Terraform code for existing resources, and begins enforcing governance, drift remediation, and disaster recovery.

I’d go for ControlMonkey if my main issues were dealing with cloud sprawl, unmanaged resources, frequent (and expensive) drift, governance complexity, and if I wanted visibility and compliance at scale, as well as cloud DR backup.

Spacelift vs. Terraform Cloud vs. ControlMonkey: Features

• Spacelift has custom CI/CD integrations, self-hosting, and supports multiple IaC frameworks. However, it lacks some key features, such as cloud account scanning, Terraform code generation, drift remediation, state storage, and built-in disaster recovery.
• Terraform Cloud is really good at tiering Terraform execution and collaboration with policy management in Terraform through Sentinel, but it has a fundamental assumption that infrastructure is already neatly governed and organized in Terraform. The tool does not offer cloud scanning, Terraform code generation, drift remediation with state recovery, or disaster recovery.
• ControlMonkey delivers an all-in-one infrastructure governance and resilience platform on top of Terraform and OpenTofu. Our platform combines full cloud inventory, automatic Terraform code & state generation, drift detection and remediation (unlike Spacelift and Terraform Cloud), daily cloud infrastructure backups, disaster recovery, self-service blueprints, and AI compliance guardrails to provide you with total cloud control without having to use multiple tools or write custom policies.

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	ControlMonkey	Spacelift	Terraform Cloud
Cloud Asset Inventory & Terraform Coverage	Full cloud scanning & Terraform coverage insights. The tool detects unmanaged resources.	No cloud account scanning. The tool lacks visibility into unmanaged resources.	No cloud account scanning. The tool lacks visibility into unmanaged resources.
Terraform Code Generation	Automatically generates Terraform code & state from existing cloud resources.	No automatic code generation. Manual creation is required.	No automatic code generation. You’ll have to manually create it.
Daily Cloud Backups & Disaster Recovery	Daily Infra configuration backups & full cloud disaster recovery with instant rollback.	No built-in backups or disaster recovery.	No built-in backups or disaster recovery.
Drift Detection & Remediation	Continuous drift detection with automated remediation and rollback.	Detects drift but requires manual intervention.	Detects drift but requires manual intervention.
ClickOps Scanner & Unsupervised Operations Detection	Detects unsupervised manual operations from the cloud console.	Not supported.	Not supported.
Policies for Security, Cost & Compliance	Out-of-the-box AI guardrails. You’ll not have to code your entire policy inside the tool from scratch.	Requires OPA policy authoring & maintenance.	Requires Sentinel and OPA policy authoring & maintenance.
Terraform Modules Insights	Identifies outdated modules across your code.	Not supported.	Not supported.
Multi-IaC Support	Only supports Terraform, OpenTofu, and Terragrunt.	Supports multiple IaC tools (Terraform, Terragrunt, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Ansible, Helm, Kubernetes-native IaC).	Terraform only.
Deployment	There is a full self-hosted & on-premises deployment option.	There is a full self-hosted & on-premises deployment option.	SaaS-only. You can use Terraform Enterprise as a self-hosted option
Periodic Code Scanning for Compliance	Scans existing IaC code for misconfigurations & policy violations.	Requires manual policy enforcement.	Requires manual policy enforcement.
CI/CD Flexibility	You can use ControlMonkey’s out-of-the-box IaC CI/CD pipeline or integrate with your existing pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, etc.) to enforce your policies.	Replacement for existing CI/CD pipelines for IaC.	Replacement for existing CI/CD pipelines for IaC.

Let’s go over the 3 platform features, starting with Spacelift:

Spacelift’s Features

Multi-IaC Orchestration Engine

Spacelift’s biggest strength to me is that it supports a wide range of IoC tools, including Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Ansible, Helm, and Kubernetes.

 This makes the tool well-suited for organizations running hybrid or transitional IaC stacks rather than standardizing on a single framework.

Your team will be able to orchestrate infrastructure changes across different tools from one control plane, without forcing a rewrite of existing workflows.

When it comes to platform teams managing diverse environments, this flexibility is one of Spacelift’s strongest differentiators.

Spacelift is designed for teams that are not yet ready to commit to a single IaC standard, in contrast to Terraform Cloud, which is Terraform-only by design.

CI/CD-Aware Infrastructure Workflows

Spacelift’s CI/CD platform is purpose-built for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) that applies GitOps principles to infrastructure delivery.

Unlike generic CI/CD pipelines, it provides a dedicated execution environment, state handling, locking, and policy enforcement designed specifically for IaC workflows.

Spacelift integrates natively with version control systems (VCS) such as GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps to trigger infrastructure runs based on familiar Git events like pull requests, merges, and commits.

This can help you manage infrastructure changes using the same collaboration patterns they already use for application code, without embedding complex Terraform execution logic in traditional CI/CD pipelines.

External pipelines, such as GitHub Actions or Jenkins, can interact with Spacelift via APIs, webhooks, or automation scripts, delegating execution, state management, and governance to Spacelift while keeping higher-level orchestration in the pipeline.

This model is particularly well-suited for teams managing complex infrastructure, as it can help you centralize visibility, governance, and execution in one platform while maintaining flexibility to coordinate with broader CI/CD workflows.

Policy-as-Code With OPA

Open Policy Agent (OPA) is used by Spacelift to enforce governance guidelines throughout infrastructure modifications.

To manage security, compliance, approvals, and execution behaviour, your team can create unique policies.

Although this provides a great deal of flexibility, it also needs constant policy creation, testing, and upkeep.

This gives experienced DevOps teams with knowledge of policy engineering more precise control over infrastructure governance.

Self-Hosted & Enterprise Deployment Options

Spacelift offers a fully self-hosted, on-premises deployment option on top of its SaaS offering.

Because of this, I’ve noticed that organisations with stringent data residency requirements, air-gapped environments, and regulated industries find it appealing.

Without depending on a public SaaS platform, you can keep complete control over infrastructure orchestration.

Even though Terraform Cloud’s HCP Terraform Agents enable on-premise deployment, this feature is often a deciding factor for highly regulated, government, and financial services clients.

Terraform Cloud’s Features

Remote Terraform Execution & State Management

Terraform Cloud provides a managed environment for running Terraform plans and applying them remotely.

It centralizes Terraform state storage, locking, and concurrency control, reducing the risk of state corruption.

This removes the need for teams to manage their own remote backends or execution infrastructure.

For teams adopting Terraform for the first time, this significantly simplifies day-to-day operations.

Unlike Spacelift, Terraform Cloud is opinionated about where and how Terraform runs; everything flows through its managed execution model.

From what I’ve seen in the industry, this simplicity is a major win for smaller or less mature teams, but can feel restrictive for advanced CI/CD setups.

Tight Terraform CLI & Ecosystem Integration

Terraform Cloud is deeply integrated with the Terraform CLI and HashiCorp ecosystem.

Your developers will be able to run familiar Terraform commands while benefiting from centralized execution and collaboration features.

It also integrates with HashiCorp’s private module registry, providers, and tooling.

This makes Terraform Cloud a natural fit for organizations committed to HashiCorp’s first-party stack.

Policy-as-Code With Sentinel & OPA

Terraform Cloud uses Sentinel and OPA to enforce policy-as-code for infrastructure changes.

Teams can define compliance, security, and cost policies that run automatically during Terraform workflows.

Note that, while powerful, Sentinel and OPA policies must be written, maintained, and versioned by the team.
This approach works best for organizations with a dedicated platform or security engineering resources.

Collaboration, Workspaces & Access Controls

Terraform Cloud introduces workspaces to separate environments, teams, and infrastructure scopes.

It supports role-based access control, approval workflows, and audit logs for enterprise governance.

Multiple teams can collaborate on the tool’s shared infrastructure without stepping on each other’s changes (historically an issue of DevOps).

ControlMonkey’s Features: How Is It Fundamentally Different From Spacelift & Terraform Cloud?

ControlMonkey offers the best alternative to both Spacelift and Terraform Cloud in 2026 because it solves a bigger problem than just running Terraform.

Instead of giving you faster Terraform plans and applications, ControlMonkey gives you full cloud visibility, automatic Terraform code generation, built-in drift remediation, and infrastructure disaster recovery: all out of the box.

So while Spacelift and Terraform Cloud focus on executing Terraform workflows, ControlMonkey helps you:

• Automatically discover everything running in your cloud, including unmanaged and shadow infrastructure
• Convert existing cloud resources into clean Terraform code and state with one click
• Detect and automatically remediate drift, instead of just alerting on it
• Recover safely from misconfigurations or accidental deletions using daily cloud configurations backups and full cloud disaster recovery
• And executing Terraform workflows in a governed, gated and audited way.

And all of that without writing OPA or Sentinel policies, maintaining custom CI/CD pipelines, or stitching together multiple point tools.

In other words:

If Spacelift or Terraform Cloud help you run Terraform more efficiently,

ControlMonkey helps you make your cloud resilient and governable in real-world cloud environments, where infrastructure already exists, drift happens daily, and outages are expensive.

Tired of manually writing and maintaining your policy code?

ControlMonkey provides AI-powered, built-in governance, including out-of-the-box security policies, IaC risk scoring, and automated guardrails for every infrastructure change

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Let’s go over the tool’s features in more detail to see why teams at Intel, AWS and Comcast can’t imagine their cloud without ControlMonkey:

Full Cloud Visibility & Automatic Terraform Code Generation

ControlMonkey connects directly to your cloud accounts (AWS, Azure, GCP) and 3rd party vendors (Datadog, Cloudflare, Okta, MongoDB and more) and continuously scans them to create a complete, real-time inventory of all resources.

The platform clearly shows what infrastructure is already managed by IaC and what’s unmanaged, eliminating blind spots and shadow IT.

Unlike Spacelift and Terraform Cloud, ControlMonkey can automatically generate production-ready Terraform code and state files for existing resources.

This “Cloud-to-Code” approach removes the manual, error-prone work of onboarding legacy infrastructure into IaC and dramatically accelerates standardization.

Drift Detection, Automated Remediation & Rollback

ControlMonkey continuously monitors cloud environments for configuration drift, whether caused by manual console changes, misconfigurations, or security issues.

While Spacelift and Terraform Cloud can detect drift, ControlMonkey goes further by automatically remediating it through Git-based pull requests and safe rollbacks.

This turns drift from an alerting problem into a resolved one, significantly reducing outages, downtime, and on-call firefighting.

See how Terraform AI detects drift between your code and deployed infrastructure using remote state in our video guide:

Built-In Governance With AI-Powered Guardrails

ControlMonkey provides enterprise-grade governance without requiring your team to write or maintain OPA or Sentinel policies.

Our platform includes out-of-the-box security, compliance, and cost guardrails, along with AI-driven Quality Gates and IaC risk scoring.

Every infrastructure change is automatically evaluated for risk and compliance before being applied, and our tool keeps a complete audit trail for compliance frameworks like PCI DSS or SOC 2.

See how Windward uses ControlMonkey to provision Amazon Bedrock in a self-serve, governed and private way, without compromising on security, compliance, or costs.

Compared to Spacelift and Terraform Cloud, this delivers faster adoption and lower operational overhead, especially for teams without dedicated policy engineers.

Infrastructure Resilience & Disaster Recovery

ControlMonkey treats infrastructure resilience as a first-class feature rather than an add-on.

It maintains daily snapshots of cloud configurations, enabling instant rollback and recovery from misconfigurations or accidental deletions.
You can back up not only your cloud resources, but all other 3rd party vendors, such as Datadog, Cloudflare, Okta, Confluent, Temporal and more

Neither Spacelift nor Terraform Cloud provides native state backups or full cloud disaster recovery.

For DevOps & SRE teams running mission-critical infrastructure, this built-in recovery layer reduces operational risk and increases confidence in Terraform at scale.

Test your infrastructure configuration resilience posture across AWS, Azure, GCP, Cloudflare, Okta, and more with our free comprehensive assessment report.

Integrations: Spacelift vs. Terraform Cloud vs. ControlMonkey

Spacelift Integrations

Spacelift integrates deeply with modern DevOps and infrastructure tooling to support complex IaC workflows. 

It is designed to fit directly into existing engineering stacks with strong VCS and cloud provider support.

Some of the notable integrations include:

• GitHub.
• GitLab.
• Bitbucket.
• AWS.
• Azure.
• Google Cloud.
• Slack.
• Terraform.
• OpenTofu.
• Pulumi.
• Kubernetes.

Spacelift stands out by supporting multiple IaC frameworks beyond Terraform, including Pulumi and OpenTofu, for more flexible multi-tool workflows.

Terraform Cloud Integrations

Terraform Cloud focuses on tight integration within the HashiCorp ecosystem while also supporting common DevOps tools. 

Its integrations are optimized for Terraform workflows and policy-driven infrastructure management.

Some of the notable integrations include:

• GitHub.
• GitLab.
• Bitbucket.
• AWS.
• Azure.
• Google Cloud.
• Slack.
• Sentinel.
• Vault.
• Consul.

Terraform Cloud stands out with its deep integration with HashiCorp tools like Sentinel, Vault, and Consul to provide your team with strong governance and security features.

ControlMonkey Integrations

ControlMonkey integrates with modern cloud providers and DevOps pipelines to support IaC-driven infrastructure management at scale. 

Our enterprise-ready integrations can help your team maintain consistent governance across multiple environments.

Some of our notable integrations include:

• Cloud Providers like AWS, Azure, GCP, and VMware.
• 3rd-party vendors like DataDog, Cloudflare, Snowflake, Dynatrace, Databricks, and MongoDB.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools, including Terraform, Terragrunt, and OpenTofu.
• Remote state backends like AWS S3 bucket, Azure Storage account, and Gitlab State Management.
• Version Control Systems (VCS) like GitHub Enterprise Server, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps.
• ‘’Bring your own pipeline’’ tools like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines, Atlantis, and Gitlab CI.

ControlMonkey stands out with broad, enterprise-ready integrations and IaC support to manage cloud infrastructure consistently across providers and tools.

Pricing: Spacelift vs. Terraform Cloud vs. ControlMonkey

Spacelift Pricing

Spacelift offers a free-forever plan that includes 2 users, 1 API key, access to its Spaces, IaC support, cloud integrations, and workflow customization.

To get more users and capabilities, there are 4 paid plans:

• Starter: Starts at $399/month, and includes up to 10 users, 2 public workers, OIDC integrations, a private module registry, webhooks, a Policy as Code engine, notifications, and custom tasks.
• Starter+: Custom pricing and adds unlimited users, 1 private worker, and drift detection.
• Business: Custom pricing, which includes up to 3+ private workers, blueprints, advanced scheduling, a private provider registry, targeted replans, and better customer support.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing, which includes up to 5+ private workers, concurrent VCS connections, audit trails, MFA, OIDC API keys, and more.

Terraform Cloud Pricing

Terraform Cloud’s pricing is based on a Resources Under Management (RUM) model and offers a free trial for up to $500 worth of credits to use across the IBM HashiCorp Cloud Platform.

To get more, there are 4 paid plans to choose from:

• Standard: Starts at $0.10 per resource/month, adding team management, cost estimation, drift detection, and Silver support.
• Plus: Starts at $0.47 per resource/month, offering unlimited policies, run tasks, audit logs, and HCP Waypoint.
• Premium: Starts at $0.99 per resource/month, for advanced governance, self-service workflows, and premium features.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing, which adds premium support, making it ideal for enterprises requiring self-managed IBM Terraform to meet security, compliance, and operational needs.

Your costs will then scale with the number of cloud resources (instances, clusters, etc.) your team manages.

ControlMonkey Pricing

Unlike Spacelift and Terraform Cloud, ControlMonkey does not have a free tier or PLG pricing model.

Our platform offers only 2 pricing plans:

• Startup: $800 for up to 10 users, up to 5,000 cloud assets, up to 500 deployments/month, and access to our Terraform code generator, Terraform CI/CD, policy enforcement, drift detection and remediation capabilities, self-service dashboard, RBAC, and self-hosted agent.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing for unlimited cloud assets, users, and deployments, and adds specialized support.

What makes ControlMonkey’s pricing stand out to TFC is that it’s fixed, whereas Terraform Cloud’s price can fluctuate at any time.

You can also apply for startup pricing by sending us your company name and size, and register for a free trial.

What are customers saying about Spacelift, Terraform Cloud, and ControlMonkey?

TL;DR:

• Spacelift reviews praise how easy it is to start with Terraform and delegate all Terraform actions, but are not happy with how difficult it can be to configure the capabilities you need inside of the platform, and its rather limited control over the data users are storing.
• Terraform Cloud’s customers are happy with the tool’s ability to automate and standardize infrastructure provisioning across cloud environments, but are not happy with its initial learning curve and state file management that requires careful handling and secure backend configuration.
• ControlMonkey users are satisfied with its ability to streamline Terraform deployments and how the tool simplifies pull request reviews and allows team members to deploy infrastructure independently, but some users are not happy with the fact that the platform currently supports only Terraform, OpenTofu, and Terragrunt’s IaC frameworks.

Spacelift Reviews

G2 Rating: 5/5.

What users love:

• How easy it is to delegate all Terraform actions.
• Starting with Terraform is smooth.
• How the platform makes infrastructure management manageable.

‘’Delegation, I can delegate all Terraform actions – Infrastructure as a code to a dedicated place, important element state management, extremely easy to start the journey with Terraform (for example, to the people from Azure Bicep).’’ – G2 Review.

• It can be difficult to configure the capabilities you need inside of Spacelift (i.e., adding new configuration items).
• Users would like to see a little more control over the data they are storing.
• UI controls can feel clunky.

Common complaints:

‘’I find it sometimes quite difficult to configure the things we need in Spacelift. The configuration process can be challenging, especially when adding new configuration items, as the context needs to exist with those items in it.’’ – G2 Review.

‘’I would like to see a little more controllability over the data we are storing. Though Terraform allows us to control the building and deployment of our infrastructure, I always worry about data that is exposed to the service provider.’’ – G2 Review.

Terraform Cloud Reviews (Hashicorp Terraform)

G2 Rating: 4.7/5.

What users love:

• The platform’s ability to automate and standardize infrastructure provisioning across cloud environments.
• How easy it is to configure Terraform in Jenkins, Azure DevOps, and Git Actions.
• Its cloud-agnostic support that lets users manage AWS, Azure, GCP, and more using a single tool.

‘’What I like best about HashiCorp Terraform is its ability to automate and standardize infrastructure provisioning across cloud environments.’’ – G2 Review.

Common complaints:

• Steep learning curve for beginners, especially when working with advanced modules or custom providers.
• Resolving state file conflicts during team collaboration can be tricky if proper remote backend configuration has not been set up.
• State file management in bigger teams needs careful handling and secure backend configuration to avoid conflicts and ensure consistency.

‘’The learning curve can be steep for beginners, especially when working with advanced modules or custom providers.’’ – G2 Review.

‘’Also, resolving state file conflicts during team collaboration can be tricky if proper remote backend configuration is not set up.’’ – G2 Review.
ControlMonkey Reviews

G2 Rating: 5/5.

What users love:

• Its ability to streamline Terraform deployments.
• How the platform simplifies pull request reviews and allows team members to deploy infrastructure independently, reducing bottlenecks.
• Releasing faster to production, without compromising on security or compliance.

‘’What I like best about Control Monkey is its ability to streamline our Terraform deployments. It has significantly improved our infrastructure management by making the process more efficient and secure. Additionally, it simplifies Pull Request reviews and allows team members to deploy infrastructure independently, reducing bottlenecks.’’ – G2 Review.

‘’The ControlMonkey platform was everything my team needed in order to manage and scale our AWS environments. We use ControlMonkey as an Infrastructure CI/CD solution, and that helps us to release faster to production, without compromising on security or compliance. Thanks to ControlMonkey we successfully shifted our mindset and strategy from ClickOps to fully GitOps. The team there is super strong, and every feature we requested was developed in a week, which really blew my mind.’’ – G2 Review.

Common complaints:

• That the platform currently supports only Terraform, OpenTofu, and Terragrunt.
• No on-premise deployment options. [Already supported]

Which platform should you choose for cloud infrastructure management?

If you’ve read through the article so far and you’re still unsure, here’s a quick use case summary to help you see the 3 platforms from a bird’s eye view: ⬇️

ControlMonkey is the right choice if you:

• Need full cloud account scanning and an accurate inventory so you can find unmanaged resources and eliminate shadow infrastructure.
• Looking for best-in-class IaC automation with out-of-the-box compliance packages and control policies.
• Want automatic cloud-to-code conversion that generates production-grade Terraform code and state for existing resources to speed IaC adoption.
• Require real-time drift detection plus automatic drift remediation and rollback so incidents are fixed before they become outages.
• Care about resilience and want to make sure you can easily restore any resources getting deleted/wrongly updated.
• Need predictable pricing with a fixed plan so you do not face sudden price changes.

Spacelift is the right choice if you:

• Need broad multi IaC support and want a single orchestration plane for Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, CloudFormation, Pulumi, Ansible and Kubernetes tooling.
• Must run a self-hosted instance for strict compliance, regulatory or air gapped needs.
• Want a Git native, CLI-friendly workflow with tight control over run orchestration and custom policy workflows.
• Are standardizing on many IaC frameworks and need an orchestration layer that meets that diversity.

Spacelift isn’t the best option if you:

• Need automatic cloud scanning or Terraform code generation for existing, unmanaged resources.
• Looking for daily backups of your entire cloud and 3rd parties footprint
• Want built-in automated drift remediation or daily state backup and disaster recovery out of the box. Spacelift can detect drift, but remediation and state DR are not provided as out-of-the-box features (you’ll have to configure them).
• Want governance without investing in policy engineering since Spacelift typically requires writing and maintaining policy code, such as OPA.

Terraform Cloud is the right choice if you:

• Rely on HashiCorp native workflows and want the tightest Terraform CLI integration with remote execution, private module registry and Sentinel-style policy enforcement.
• Prefer a workflow that is fully Git native and leverages first-party Terraform features and agents.
• Are a small team or startup that benefits from Terraform Cloud’s product-led growth pricing options and free tier for early usage.

Terraform Cloud isn’t the best option if you:

• Looking for predictable pricing and are worried about a single-vendor lock-in and licensing changes.
• Have years of existing, manually created cloud resources and need a way to scan accounts and convert them into Terraform code automatically. Terraform Cloud does not provide cloud-to-code capabilities.
• Want automated drift remediation, daily state backups and full disaster recovery for your cloud.
• Need governance delivered as out-of-the-box AI-powered guardrails instead of maintaining Sentinel or custom policy code.

Migrate to Terraform  in a single click with ControlMonkey

ControlMonkey, Spacelift and Terraform Cloud help teams run Terraform workflows more efficiently, but many organizations are still struggling with visibility, drift, and disaster recovery in real-world cloud environments. 

ControlMonkey changes the game: it doesn’t just optimize Terraform workflows, it makes your cloud safe, resilient, and governable.

Our platform combines full cloud visibility, automatic Terraform code generation, built-in drift remediation, and infrastructure disaster recovery into a single, easy-to-use platform. 

That means teams no longer have to stitch together multiple tools, maintain custom CI/CD pipelines, or write complex OPA or Sentinel policies.

If you’re tired of:

• Not knowing what infrastructure exists or what’s unmanaged.
• Terraform drift and ClickOps are constantly breaking things.
• Lack of disaster recovery for your cloud configurations
• Heavy governance complexity.
• Using too many disconnected tools to manage infrastructure.