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Side-by-side comparison

Pick up to four tools and compare adoption, momentum and maintenance at a glance. The crown marks the leader in each row.

Defines AWS infrastructure in TypeScript, Python, Java or C# and synthesizes it to CloudFormation.

Declarative IaC with the largest provider ecosystem; owned by IBM (HashiCorp) and BSL-licensed since 2023.

Open-source (MPL) Linux Foundation fork of Terraform; drop-in compatible, adds state encryption and more.

IaC in TypeScript, Python, Go, C# or Java instead of a DSL, with managed state, policies and secrets.

Head to head

Metric	AWS CDK	Terraform	OpenTofu	Pulumi
Stars	13k	50.1k	30.8k	25.9k
Weekly downloads	6.8M	n/a	n/a	5.1M
Download growth	+25%	n/a	n/a	+55%
Popularity score	80/100	86/100	82/100	81/100
Forks	4.7k	10.6k	1.4k	1.5k
Open issues	2.9k	1.9k	376	2.5k
Last commit	1d ago	1w ago	2d ago	5d ago
Latest version	2.276.0	n/a	n/a	3.274.1
License	Apache-2.0	n/a	MPL-2.0	Apache-2.0
First released	2017	2014	2023	2016
Signals	Popular	Popular	Rising	None
Listed in	DevOps & Cloud › Infrastructure as Code	DevOps & Cloud › Infrastructure as Code	DevOps & Cloud › Infrastructure as Code	DevOps & Cloud › Infrastructure as Code

Hover for exact values; switch to log scale for tools of very different sizes. Not shown (no comparable download data): Terraform, OpenTofu.

Defines AWS infrastructure in TypeScript, Python, Java or C# and synthesizes it to CloudFormation.

Declarative IaC with the largest provider ecosystem; owned by IBM (HashiCorp) and BSL-licensed since 2023.

Open-source (MPL) Linux Foundation fork of Terraform; drop-in compatible, adds state encryption and more.

IaC in TypeScript, Python, Go, C# or Java instead of a DSL, with managed state, policies and secrets.

Metric	AWS CDK	Terraform	OpenTofu	Pulumi
Stars	13k	50.1k	30.8k	25.9k
Weekly downloads	6.8M	n/a	n/a	5.1M
Download growth	+25%	n/a	n/a	+55%
Popularity score	80/100	86/100	82/100	81/100
Forks	4.7k	10.6k	1.4k	1.5k
Open issues	2.9k	1.9k	376	2.5k
Last commit	1d ago	1w ago	2d ago	5d ago
Latest version	2.276.0	n/a	n/a	3.274.1
License	Apache-2.0	n/a	MPL-2.0	Apache-2.0
First released	2017	2014	2023	2016
Signals	Popular	Popular	Rising	None
Listed in	DevOps & Cloud › Infrastructure as Code	DevOps & Cloud › Infrastructure as Code	DevOps & Cloud › Infrastructure as Code	DevOps & Cloud › Infrastructure as Code

Hover for exact values; switch to log scale for tools of very different sizes. Not shown (no comparable download data): Terraform, OpenTofu.