What is Terraform?
Terraform is an infrastructure-as-code tool: infrastructure across supported providers is described in HCL configuration, and Terraform computes a plan of changes before applying them, tracking state to manage resources over time. Since version 1.6 (August 2023), Terraform is licensed under the Business Source License 1.1, which the Open Source Initiative does not recognize as open source, though free use for most internal purposes is still permitted. HashiCorp and Terraform's license are now owned by IBM, which completed its acquisition of HashiCorp in February 2025. OpenTofu is a separately governed, fully open-source (MPL-2.0) fork for teams that require an OSI-approved license.
Read the full overview
Sources checked 27 September 2026: official website, documentation.
Key capabilities
- Declarative config: Infrastructure defined in HCL across many providers.
- Plan/apply workflow: Preview changes before they are applied.
- State management: Tracked state used to reconcile desired vs. actual infrastructure.
Multi-provider infrastructure provisioning and state management are its core areas.
Choose Terraform for multi-cloud or multi-provider infrastructure-as-code with a large provider ecosystem, while confirming the Business Source License terms fit your use case (managing your own infrastructure is permitted; offering Terraform itself as a competing hosted service is not).
Given the 2023 license change, confirm whether your organization's use case (including any internal platform-as-a-service offering) stays within the Business Source License's Additional Use Grant, or evaluate OpenTofu as an alternative.
Technical details
- Access
- Self-hosted
- Source model
- Other license
- Founded
- 2014
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, California, USA
- Pricing model
- Freemium
- Starting price
- 0 USD
- API
- Available
- Website
- www.terraform.io ↗
Official resources
What to verify for your environment
Start from the users, systems and operating responsibilities the tool needs to support.
- Confirm current features, licensing and support terms with the publisher.
- Validate deployment, data location, access control, backup and recovery requirements.
- Test integrations, export paths and a representative operational workflow before committing.
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Reviews of Terraform
Infrastructure as Code done right4/5 starsTerraform manages our entire multi-cloud infrastructure. The declarative approach and state management make infrastructure changes predictable and reviewable. The HCL language is easy to learn. Main complaint: state file management can be tricky in large teams.
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