Pulumi and Terraform compared in infrastructure as code analysis

Infrastructure as code (IaC) tools are seeing increased re-evaluation due to economic pressures, compliance concerns, and operational toil. A comparison between Pulumi and HashiCorp's Terraform highlights distinct technical and licensing differences.

Pulumi offers a polyglot approach, allowing developers to use programming languages such as Python, TypeScript, Go, .NET, and Java. This enables the use of standard programming constructs like loops and functions. The recent Pulumi 3.140 release has expanded its ecosystem to include first-class support for HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL).

In contrast, Terraform relies on HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) and maintains a vast registry of thousands of providers. Following HashiCorp's acquisition by IBM, its managed service is branded as IBM HCP Terraform. A key differentiator for legal teams is the licensing: Pulumi's CLI and SDKs are distributed under the Apache 2.0 open-source license, while the Terraform CLI uses the Business Source License 1.1.