What’s not easy is figuring out which one of these you should use. All of these tools can be used to manage infrastructure as code. All of them are open source, backed by large communities of contributors, and work with many different cloud providers (with the notable exception of CloudFormation, which is closed source and AWS-only). All of them offer enterprise support. All of them are well documented, both in terms of official documentation and community resources such as blog posts and StackOverflow questions. So how do you decide?

What makes this even harder is that most of the comparisons you find online between these tools do little more than list the general properties of each tool and make it sound like you could be equally successful with any of them. And while that’s technically true, it’s not helpful. It’s a bit like telling a programming newbie that you could be equally successful building a website with PHP, C, or Assembly — a statement that’s technically true, but one that omits a huge amount of information that would be incredibly useful in making a good decision.

In this post, we’re going to dive into some very specific reasons for why we picked Terraform over the other IAC tools. As with all technology decisions, it’s a question of trade-offs and priorities, and while your particular priorities may be different than ours, we hope that sharing our thought process will help you make your own decision