OpenTofu
Hacker ApprovedRanked 4 of 10 IaC tools by recommenders
Open-source Terraform fork under Linux Foundation governance, backed by former Terraform users and adding features HashiCorp has not built.
Open-source Terraform fork under Linux Foundation governance, backed by former Terraform users and adding features HashiCorp has not built.
23 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 20
- criticize it
- 3
- approval share
- 87%
Recommended in 9 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 20 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 6.7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 9 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Community-governed fork backed by Terraform users
“we have OpenTofu under LF governance, backed by virtually everybody who was using Terraform before”
Comment from 4 Dec 2025 in “Ghostty is now non-profit” “I'm glad open tofu and valkey and Linux exist to serve as a counter example”
Comment from 9 Oct 2026 in “Cloudflare acquires Deno” “OpenTofu is already the de facto fork.”
Comment from 11 Dec 2025 in “The future of Terraform CDK” Useful features missing from Terraform
“That also includes a new “enabled” meta argument, so you don’t have to hack around conditional resources with count = 0.”
Comment from 10 Dec 2025 in “The future of Terraform CDK” “OpenTofu now supports client side encryption for the state files”
Comment from 9 Dec 2025 in “IBM to acquire Confluent” “The lack of ephemeral values was a major blocker.”
Comment from 10 Dec 2025 in “The future of Terraform CDK” Pairs well with Ansible and Git
“Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and modern tools like opentofu, ansible, combined with frontier AI models and harnesses gives you superpowers in this space.”
Comment from 16 Jun 2026 in “Running local models is good now” “use a combination of OpenTOFU (Terraform) and Salt or Ansible, all versioned with Git”
Comment from 29 Oct 2026 in “If IPv4 were land” “Ansible and OpenTofu/Terraform is where it is at.”
Comment from 31 Mar 2026 in “From Proxmox to FreeBSD and Sylve in Our Office Lab” Well-regarded tool in its space
“It built a very nice project that seemed idiomatic from my experience.”
Comment from 5 Jun 2026 in “What was your "Oh Shit" moment with GenAI?” “it's far and away the least bad tool I've used in the space”
Comment from 20 Feb 2026 in “Almost Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years”
Other IaC tools people recommend
The four most recommended other IaC tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 10 IaC tools, rankedWhat people said
22 of the 28 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“use a combination of OpenTOFU (Terraform) and Salt or Ansible, all versioned with Git”
“I'm glad open tofu and valkey and Linux exist to serve as a counter example”
“Terraform and OpenTofu public registries support only GitHub”
“Terraform and Vault->OpenTofu and OpenBao”
“Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and modern tools like opentofu, ansible, combined with frontier AI models and harnesses gives you superpowers in this space.”
“It built a very nice project that seemed idiomatic from my experience.”
“Much better than messing with cloud consoles, and then your infrastructure self-documents.”
“Ansible and OpenTofu/Terraform is where it is at.”
“it's far and away the least bad tool I've used in the space”
“I think with the OpenTofu / Terraform support you're very close to enabling patterns that platform teams typically look for.”
“Worth switching to Opentofu only for this, then!”
“OpenTofu has issues in the area that have been open for years”
“OpenTofu is already the de facto fork.”
“The lack of ephemeral values was a major blocker.”
“That also includes a new “enabled” meta argument, so you don’t have to hack around conditional resources with count = 0.”
“there will probably be some tacit endorsement of OpenTofu by Hashicorp folks”
“OpenTofu now supports client side encryption for the state files”
“acting upon long-requested functionality that HashiCorp has refused to implement”
“we have OpenTofu under LF governance, backed by virtually everybody who was using Terraform before”
“No regrets; it's been great.”
“V1 of Stategraph is a drop-in TF/Tofu replacement”
“In Terraform/OpenTofu you just run into unreliable providers, 3rd party providers that make your supply chain a little questionable”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.