This category was reshaped by a licensing fight. In August 2023 HashiCorp relicensed Terraform under the Business Source License; the community forked it into OpenTofu; in February 2025 IBM closed a $6.4 billion acquisition of HashiCorp. Since then, most teams are on one of two tracks: migrating from Terraform to OpenTofu over the license concern, or adopting Pulumi for new projects while keeping Terraform for what already exists.
| Cost | State backend | |
|---|---|---|
| OpenTofu | $0 — no first-party SaaS | bring your own (S3, GCS, Azure Blob, or a third party) |
| Terraform | HCP Terraform on a "resources under management" model | HashiCorp-hosted, or self-managed |
| Pulumi | Pulumi Cloud $50/user/mo for team features | free with a self-hosted S3 backend |
OpenTofu is a drop-in Terraform replacement — same HCL, same providers, same workflow — and its true cost is zero because there's no SaaS layer at all; you point it at your own state bucket. For a team that just wants Terraform without the BSL and without a vendor relationship, it's the straightforward answer.
Pulumi is a genuinely different tool: you write infrastructure in real programming languages (TypeScript, Python, Go) instead of HCL. Pulumi Cloud is $50/user/month for the managed state and team features, or free if you self-host state in S3. The trade is a steeper concept curve for a more expressive model.
Terraform itself still works and HCP Terraform is a mature platform — the question is whether you're comfortable with the license and an IBM-owned roadmap.
New team, no baggage: OpenTofu if you like HCL, Pulumi if you'd rather write infrastructure in a real language. Existing Terraform shop: migrating to OpenTofu is low-risk and removes the license question entirely.