The best iac tools, according to hackers
10 iac tools were recommended on Hacker News between November 2025 and November 2026. We rank them by how many separate people recommend each one, and 2 earn the Hacker Approved badge.
Top picks
The two most recommended iac tools with the badge. Each figure is 5 people. RecommendsCriticizes One comment
Real languages instead of HCL
Recommended for letting engineers write cloud infrastructure in ordinary programming languages instead of HCL or YAML. Critics say that freedom allows complexity that is harder to keep simple.
Community-governed fork backed by Terraform users
Open-source Terraform fork under Linux Foundation governance, backed by former Terraform users and adding features HashiCorp has not built.
All 10 iac tools, ranked
Select a column heading to sort. Approval share is recommenders out of everyone who gave an opinion; the tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs. Months counts the months, out of 13, in which someone recommended it.
| Rank | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Terraform | 128 | 84 | 60% | 12 | — | — |
| 2 | Pulumi | 44 | 8 | 85% | 10 | — | Approved |
| 3 | AWS CDK | 29 | 15 | 66% | 7 | 5 yrs4 owners | — |
| 4 | OpenTofu | 20 | 3 | 87% | 9 | — | Approved |
| 5 | SST | 9 | 2 | 82% | 4 | — | — |
| Tied 6 | AWS CloudFormation | 8 | 15 | 35% | 6 | — | — |
| Tied 6 | Stelvio | 8 | 5 | 62% | 1 | — | — |
| Tied 8 | Crossplane | 7 | 2 | 78% | 4 | — | — |
| Tied 8 | Terraform CDK | 7 | 10 | 41% | 1 | — | — |
| 10 | CDKTF | 5 | 2 | 71% | 2 | — | — |
How we rank
Rank is the number of separate people who recommend a product in a Hacker News comment over the past year. Someone who praises the same iac tool in five threads counts once.
The badge goes to iac tools that at least 10 people recommend, with recommenders outnumbering critics at least 2 to 1, recommended in at least 4 of the 13 months.
Rankings are never for sale. We may earn a commission when you buy through our links. It never changes the order.