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Terraform vs. Pulumi

    Pulumi and Terraform are both infrastructure as code technologies that have similarities but many fundamental differences. For example, Pulumi is open source and offers the flexibility to use any programming language for managing infrastructure. This makes Pulumi widely accessible to developers and DevOps engineers from any background. However, Terraform requires a proprietary domain-specific language (DSL) and is not open source. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore their key differences, similarities, and real-world scenarios, mapping Terraform concepts to Pulumi to help you choose the right infrastructure as code platform to meet your needs.

    What is Pulumi?

    Pulumi is an open source infrastructure as code platform that helps teams tame the cloud’s complexity using the world’s most popular programming languages (TypeScript, Go, .NET, Python, and Java) and markup languages (YAML, CUE).

    What is Terraform?

    Terraform provides infrastructure as code software for cloud service management with a consistent CLI workflow. Terraform allows you to write, plan, and apply changes to deliver infrastructure as code.

    Hi, my name's Lee, and if you're a Terraform user who's curious about Pulumi, here's some things that you need to know.

    If you've used Terraform, you've probably used the HCL 2 configuration language, which allows you to define the infrastructure in a DSL, in a domain-specific language. Pulumi uses languages that you're already using in your application life cycle. So you can write code in Python, you can write code in TypeScript, you can write code in Java, in .NET, and in Go, and you can also use YAML as a mechanism to offer those infrastructure as code programs. What that means is it's more familiar. You're already using these languages elsewhere, whether it's in your CI pipelines or whether it's in your application code. Pulumi brings this familiarity to your infrastructure. Something else that's really important to know about Pulumi is that it is declarative. So you use an imperative language to offer the code, and Pulumi's engine turns that code into a declarative graph that is executed. So you can always be sure when you run a Pulumi program over and over and over again that it is gonna have the same result and the same effect. This is very similar to Terraform, but that authoring experience is different, meaning that you get a more improved experience.

    The next important thing to know about Pulumi is how you execute that infrastructure as code. So with Terraform, you use the Terraform command line tool, and it creates that infrastructure. So you would usually do that from your laptop or from a CICD pipeline. Pulumi also supports this workflow, however, with Pulumi's automation API, because you're using those familiar programming languages, you can embed Pulumi into any workflow you choose. So common use cases here are like creating Heroku and platform-as-a-service-like experiences, or embedding Pulumi directly into a webpage. If you wanna create a platform that provisions infrastructure, Pulumi will allow you to do that very, very easily.

    So the authoring and the execution experience are the two main differentiators when it comes to Pulumi. But there's also some awesome other great differentiators that you might be familiar with. One thing that I use is they tell us they love is the fact that Pulumi encrypts all secrets in transit and at rest. It is not possible for you to look at a secret value without the encryption key. This gives you an amazing piece of mind, because you can know things like database passwords and private keys. You can star them in your state, where they are encrypted. They are not viewable in plain text. So anybody who gets access to the state will not be able to view those secrets.

    Another key differentiator is the way that you would write policy in Pulumi. Pulumi supports policy as code. So you can define the policy again in familiar languages. You can write policies in JavaScript, you can write policies in Python, and you can also use open policy agents Rego language to define those policies. Again, this gives you the familiarity of using tools and mechanisms that you already have at your disposal. Another key differentiator with Pulumi is the support for native providers. Native providers are generated directly from a cloud provider's API, which means when a cloud provider adds support for a new feature or a new resource, Pulumi gets access to that feature extremely quickly. With Terraform, cloud provider APIs are often supported by the community, and could take a little bit of time to become available in Terraform. One of my favorite features of Pulumi is the ability to adopt existing infrastructure into infrastructure as code. Terraform supports importing infrastructure like Pulumi, but the differentiator is that Pulumi also generates the code that matches the resource that you have imported.

    There are many more awesome features in Pulumi, but the final one that I want talk about is the ability to manage state. Terraform will often require you to manipulate state in order to move resources around in your code. Pulumi allows you to use aliases, which means that you do not need to manually modify state in order to move a resource. This can save a lot of time and be very, very productive.

    Pulumi vs. Terraform: Similarities

    Similarities between Terraform and Pulumi include the ability to create, deploy, and manage infrastructure as code on any cloud. Both Terraform and Pulumi follow a desired state infrastructure as code model, where the IaC code represents the desired state of the infrastructure. The deployment engine compares this desired state with the current state of the stack and determines the necessary actions, such as creating, updating, or deleting resources. Both Terraform and Pulumi support many cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, plus other services like CloudFlare, Digital Ocean, and more. Finally, with Pulumi you get access to all Pulumi providers as well as support for all open source Terraform providers.

    Pulumi vs. Terraform: Key Differences

    Pulumi and Terraform differ in that Terraform is not open source, using the Business Source License model and requires the use of a domain-specific language: HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL). In contrast, Pulumi is fully open source Apache 2.0 licensed and allows you to use familiar general purpose languages like Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Go, .NET, Java, and markup languages like YAML, with the tools you already use to accomplish the same goals. Terraform recently released the beta of a development kit that allows you to use programming languages that compile to HCL.

    Here is a summary of the key differences between Pulumi and Terraform:

    FeaturePulumiTerraform
    OSS LicenseYes, Apache License 2.0No, Business Source License 1.1
    Language SupportPython, TypeScript, JavaScript, Go, C#, F#, Java, YAMLHashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL)
    IDE SupportCode completion, strong typing, error squiggles, rich resource documentation, etc.Limited
    State ManagementManaged through Pulumi Cloud by default, self-managed options available.Self-managed by default, managed SaaS offering available.
    Provider SupportNative cloud providers with 100% same-day resource coverage plus Terraform-based providers for additional coverage.Support across multiple IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS providers.
    Cloud Native SupportRichly typed. Includes CRDs & in-cluster operator support for GitOps delivery.Core API typed. Generic support for CRD.
    Dynamic Provider SupportYesNo
    Infrastructure Reuse and ModularityFlexible. Reuse functions, classes, packages, and Pulumi components.Constrained. Can only reuse Terraform modules.
    Testing and ValidationUnit, property, and integration testing. Supports popular test frameworks.Integration testing only
    Modes of ExecutionRun CLI commands or initiate commands programmatically with Automation API.Run CLI commands or perform remote runs with SaaS offering.
    Embed within Application CodeYes, via Automation APINo
    Third-party CI/CD Tools SupportYesYes
    Policy as CodeYesYes
    Secrets ManagementYes. Secrets are encrypted in transit and in the state file.No. Secrets are stored in a separate product (Vault). There is no way to encrypt them in the state file.
    Audit CapabilitiesYesLimited
    Adopt Existing ResourcesYes. Generates code as part of the import process.Yes. No code generation capabilities.
    AliasesYesLimited
    TransformationsYesNo
    Import Code from other IaC ToolsYesNo

    Getting started with Pulumi is easy. If you have experience with Terraform and already have HCL, you can convert it to Pulumi. Follow our comprehensive guides in our Migration Hub to use our self-service migration tools or work with our Expert Services teams that can help you with migration and training. As part of Pulumi Enterprise and Business Critical Editions, Terraform workspace migrations are bundled as part of the onboarding process.

    If you would like to see how other Pulumi customers have migrated from Terraform to Pulumi, see the Atlassian case study and the Green Park Sports case study. If you would like to deploy a simple program, follow our Get Started guide:

    Get Started with Pulumi

    Use Pulumi's open-source SDK to create, deploy, and manage infrastructure on any cloud.

    AWS
    Azure
    Google Cloud
    Kubernetes

    The following sections go into further detail on the differences between Pulumi and Terraform.

    Language Support

    Terraform requires that you and your team write programs in a custom domain-specific language (DSL) called HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL). In contrast, Pulumi lets you use programming languages like Python, Go, JavaScript, TypeScript, C#, and Java. Because of the use of familiar languages, you get familiar constructs like conditionals, loops, functions, and classes. This significantly improves the ability to cut down on boilerplate and enforce best practices. With HCL, it is common to copy and paste blocks of HCL code between different projects. Pulumi’s supported programming languages have been built over multiple decades to tame complexity at scale—the very complexity modern cloud architectures operating at global scale need to tackle. Instead of creating a new ecosystem of modules and sharing, Pulumi lets you leverage existing package management tools and techniques.

    IDE Support

    Terraform has plugins for some IDEs. However, the features are varied and limited. With Pulumi, you can tap into decades of innovation with great IDEs. The IDEs automatically provide code completion, strong typing, error squiggles, rich resource documentation, and more.

    State Management

    The Terraform engine takes care of provisioning and updating resources. With Pulumi, you use general purpose languages to express desired state, and Pulumi’s engine similarly gives you diffs and a way to robustly update your infrastructure.

    By default, Terraform requires that you manage concurrency and state manually, by way of its “state files.” Pulumi, in contrast, uses the free Pulumi Cloud to eliminate these concerns. This makes getting started with Pulumi, and operationalizing it in a team setting, much easier. For advanced use cases, it is possible to use Pulumi without the Pulumi Cloud, which works a lot more like Terraform, but requires you to manage state and concurrency issues. Pulumi errs on the side of ease-of-use.

    For more information on how Pulumi manages state or how to use different backends, see State and Backends.

    Provider Support

    Pulumi supports over 150 of the leading cloud providers and modern cloud SaaS offerings including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Auth0, CloudFlare, Confluent Cloud, Datadog, DigitalOcean, Docker, GitHub, Kong, MinIO, MongoDB Atlas, PagerDuty, Snowflake, Spot by NetApp, and SumoLogic. Pulumi also has native providers for AWS, Azure, Google, and Kubernetes that provide same-day support for every new release. For more information on Pulumi providers, see Pulumi Registry.

    Pulumi also has deep support for cloud native technologies like Kubernetes, and supports advanced deployment scenarios that cannot be expressed with Terraform. This includes Prometheus-based canaries, automatic Envoy sidecar injection, and more. Pulumi is a proud member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

    Using Terraform Providers

    Pulumi is able to adapt any Terraform Provider for use with Pulumi, enabling management of any infrastructure supported by the Terraform Providers ecosystem using Pulumi programs.

    Indeed, some of Pulumi’s most interesting providers have been created this way, delivering access to robust, tried-and-true infrastructure management. The Terraform Providers ecosystem is mature and healthy, and enjoys contributions from many cloud and infrastructure leaders across the industry, ourselves included.

    Most Pulumi users don’t need to know about this detail, however we are proud to be building on the work of others, and contributing our own open source back to this vibrant ecosystem, and thought you should know.

    In the event you’d like to add new providers, or understand how this integration works, check out the Pulumi Terraform bridge repo. This bridge is fully open source and makes it easy to create new Pulumi providers out of existing Terraform Providers.

    Converting From Terraform to Pulumi

    The Pulumi CLI can be used to convert Terraform HCL to Pulumi via pulumi convert --from terraform. To learn more, see Converting Terraform HCL to Pulumi in our Adopting Pulumi user guide.

    For an example of how to do a Terraform-to-Pulumi conversion, see our article, Converting Full Terraform Programs to Pulumi.

    Using Pulumi and Terraform Side-by-Side

    Pulumi supports consuming local or remote Terraform state from your Pulumi programs. This helps with incremental adoption, whereby you continue managing a subset of your infrastructure with Terraform while you incrementally move to Pulumi.

    For example, maybe you would like to keep your VPC and low-level network definitions written in Terraform so as to avoid any disruption, or maybe some of the team would like to stay on Terraform for now and make a shift in the future. Using the state reference support described previously, you can author higher-level infrastructure in Pulumi that consumes the Terraform-provisioned VPC information (such as the VPC ID, Subnet IDs, etc.), making the co-existence of Pulumi and Terraform easy to automate.

    To learn more, see Referencing Terraform State in our Adopting Pulumi user guide.

    Cloud Native Support

    Pulumi supports the cloud native ecosystem. This includes a native Kubernetes provider with 100% Kubernetes API coverage in all languages, including compile-time type-checking. Pulumi also includes Helm 2 and 3 support, strongly typed CustomResourceDefinitions (CRDs), deploying Kubernetes YAML or Kustomize templates, as well as a YAML-to-Pulumi conversion tool that can translate any Kubernetes YAML into your desired language. Pulumi also offers playbooks with built-in best practices for production cluster deployments for AWS EKS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE. Pulumi also offers a Kubernetes operator that allows you to continuously deliver via GitOps. Terraform offers similar support for the Kubernetes core API and Helm but has generic support for CRDs, meaning no compile-time type-checking or auto-complete.

    Dynamic Provider Support

    Pulumi provides dynamic providers that allow you to extend your system by creating new kinds of custom resources by directly coding CRUD operations for the new resource in your Pulumi program. This can be used to support new resource types in addition to performing complex integrations like database migrations, configuration management for virtual machines, and more, all orchestrated alongside your IaC workflows. Terraform does not have a direct equivalent to Dynamic Providers and would require writing complex and proprietary modules in order to build custom resources with CRUD operations. To learn more, see Dynamic Providers.

    OSS License

    Terraform uses the Business Source License 1.1. Conversely, Pulumi open-source projects use the permissive and business-friendly Apache License 2.0. This includes the core Pulumi repo, all of the open-source Pulumi resource providers (such as the Azure Native provider), and other useful projects.

    Infrastructure Reuse and Modularity

    Pulumi promotes creating reusable and modular components which allows standard and well-architected infrastructure building blocks to be templatized and easily reused. With Pulumi, you can reuse functions, classes, and packages. Pulumi also has a built-in component model that lets you abstract and encapsulate complexity with higher-level abstractions. These components have a trackable state, appear in diffs, and use a logical name that tracks the resource identity across deployments. Pulumi also provides Pulumi Packages which allows you to author components in one language and make the component accessible in all the other languages that Pulumi supports. Terraform uses HCL which requires you to build proprietary modules and Go-based providers in order to build modular and reusable infrastructure. For more information about how to author reusable components, see Component Resources.

    Pulumi also provides the Pulumi Registry which is a searchable collection of Pulumi Packages published by Pulumi and our partners. With Pulumi Registry, you can easily find the package with the resources you need, install that package directly into your project, and start building.

    Testing and Validation

    Terraform supports integration testing. With Pulumi, you can take advantage of native testing frameworks and perform automated tests of your infrastructure because Pulumi uses general purpose programming languages to provision cloud resources. Pulumi provides unit tests (fast in-memory tests that mock all external calls), property tests (run resource-level assertions while infrastructure is being deployed), and integration tests (deploy ephemeral infrastructure and run external tests against it). For more information on how to run tests with Pulumi, see Testing.

    Modes of Execution

    Both Pulumi and Terraform can execute commands through their CLI. Terraform can also do remote operations through Terraform Cloud. Pulumi also provides two APIs by which you can execute Pulumi commands. First, the Automation API allows you to provision, update, and destroy infrastructure through Pulumi directly in your application code. This enables higher order orchestration workflows and dynamically managed infrastructure. Second, the REST API allows you to query and interact with state information, history, stack tags when using the Managed Pulumi Cloud. To learn more, see Automation API and REST API.

    Embed within Application Code

    Pulumi has the ability to embed Pulumi programs directly into your application code through the Automation API, a programmatic interface for running Pulumi programs without the Pulumi CLI. The Automation API is a strongly typed and safe way to use Pulumi in embedded contexts such as web servers without having to shell out to a CLI. You can easily create custom experiences on top of Pulumi that are tailored to your use-case, domain, and team. Terraform does not have an equivalent to Automation API. To learn more, see Automation API.

    Third-Party CI/CD Tools Support

    Pulumi integrates with existing CI/CD providers including AWS Code Services, Azure DevOps, CircleCI, CodeFresh, GitHub Actions, GitLab Pipelines, Google Cloud Build, Jenkins, Octopus Deploy, Jetbrains TeamCity, Spinnaker, and Travis. Pulumi allows you to use the same CI/CD system for your infrastructure as your application code. Terraform also has similar support with existing CI/CD providers.

    For more information on how to integrate your CI/CD system with Pulumi, see Continuous Delivery.

    Policy as Code

    Terraform provides policy as code through its Sentinel product, which is closed source and limited to Terraform Enterprise and Terraform Cloud. Sentinel also requires the use of a proprietary HashiCorp Sentinel Language. Pulumi, however, provides policy as code through CrossGuard which acts as programmable guardrails to enforce security, best practices, and cost across all infrastructure. CrossGuard is open source, free to use, and lets you write rules in Python, JavaScript, or Open Policy Agent (OPA) Rego. For more information on how to implement policy as code using Pulumi, see Policy as Code (“CrossGuard”).

    Secrets Management

    Pulumi always transmits and stores entire state files securely. However, Pulumi also supports encrypting sensitive values (e.g., database passwords, SaaS tokens, credentials files) as secrets for extra protection. Secrets are supported as a first-class primitive within Pulumi. Pulumi encrypts secrets in transit and at rest, and anything a secret touches (e.g., CLI outputs, Pulumi logs, Pulumi program, state file) is tainted and gets encrypted, which prevents you from accidentally disclosing a secret. Every stack has its own encryption key. Pulumi also provides an extensible encryption facility that allows you to elect to use your own keys managed by a 3rd party solution. Terraform manages secrets through Vault, a separate product. However, even when pulling secrets from Vault, secrets are stored as plaintext and not encrypted within the state file. For more information on storing secrets with Pulumi, see Secrets.

    Audit Capabilities

    Pulumi provides audit logs that enable you to track the activity of users within an organization. Audit logs capture the UNIX timestamp of the event, the user who invoked the action, the event that took place, and the source IP of the call the user made. These logs are available to organizations with an Enterprise level subscription. The logs are immutable and record all user actions. Terraform Cloud only provides a stream of audit events that describe changes throughout an organization with 14 days of retention. To learn more, see Audit Logs.

    Adopt Existing Resources

    Both Pulumi and Terraform support importing existing resources so that they can be managed by each. Pulumi also allows you to generate code in your language of choice from the existing state. Terraform only supports importing state but requires you to hand-author the HCL. To learn more, see Importing Infrastructure in our Adopting Pulumi user guide.

    Aliases

    Aliases help facilitate refactoring by allowing you to modify certain properties of a resource without risk of replacing it. With an alias, you can change the logical name of a given resource, change its parent (i.e., move it from one component to another), change its underlying resource type, or even move it to an entirely different project or stack. Both Pulumi and Terraform support the notion of resource renaming and reparenting, but Terraform does not currently support declaratively changing a resource’s underlying type or moving it to another workspace. To learn more, see Aliases in the Resource documentation.

    Transformations

    Transformations, which are unique to Pulumi, allow you to programmatically set or override the input properties of resources belonging to a particular collection, such as the child resources of a Pulumi component or even all of the resources belonging to a stack. Transformations make it easy to apply consistent settings across your infrastructure without having to manipulate the properties of individual resources. To learn more, see Transformations in the Resource documentation.

    Terminology and Commands

    If you’re familiar with Terraform, learning Pulumi terminology and commands is simple. Many of the existing Terraform vocabulary and commands that you already know have direct equivalents in Pulumi. To learn more, see Pulumi terms & command equivalents for a list of common Terraform terms and CLI commands along with their Pulumi equivalents.

    Import Code from Other IaC Tools

    Pulumi allows you to convert templates by Terraform HCL , Kubernetes YAML, and Azure ARM into Pulumi programs. This preserves existing program structure, which may be important if you carefully designed your existing infrastructure as code layout in terms of names, modules, and configurability. Conversion takes care of the static program structure and will automatically generate a new, fully-functional Pulumi program that matches the source infrastructure as code program. To learn more, see Conversion in our Adopting Pulumi user guide.

    Get Started with Pulumi

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