# OpenTofu

20 Hacker News commenters recommended OpenTofu and 3 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Open-source Terraform fork under Linux Foundation governance, backed by former Terraform users and adding features HashiCorp has not built.

## Why people recommend it

- Community-governed fork backed by Terraform users (3 comments): "we have OpenTofu under LF governance, backed by virtually everybody who was using Terraform before" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46143972)) "I'm glad open tofu and valkey and Linux exist to serve as a counter example" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50020646)) "OpenTofu is already the de facto fork." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46227684))
- Useful features missing from Terraform (3 comments): "That also includes a new “enabled” meta argument, so you don’t have to hack around conditional resources with count = 0." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223110)) "OpenTofu now supports client side encryption for the state files" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46201421)) "The lack of ephemeral values was a major blocker." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223725))
- Pairs well with Ansible and Git (3 comments): "Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and modern tools like opentofu, ansible, combined with frontier AI models and harnesses gives you superpowers in this space." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48557190)) "use a combination of OpenTOFU (Terraform) and Salt or Ansible, all versioned with Git" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50291589)) "Ansible and OpenTofu/Terraform is where it is at." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47581499))
- Well-regarded tool in its space (2 comments): "It built a very nice project that seemed idiomatic from my experience." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419073)) "it's far and away the least bad tool I've used in the space" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47082246))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Terraform](https://hackerapproved.com/p/terraform.md): 128 recommend
- [Pulumi](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pulumi.md): 44 recommend
- [AWS CDK](https://hackerapproved.com/p/aws-cdk.md): 29 recommend
- [SST](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sst.md): 9 recommend
- [Stelvio](https://hackerapproved.com/p/stelvio.md): 8 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "OpenTofu", https://hackerapproved.com/p/opentofu/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).