Packer

Build automated machine images

As of 30 August 2026, Packer is free to use. Packer is an open source tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. Softwr lists it under Cloud. Packer is made by HashiCorp, launched in 2013, available on Linux, Windows, macOS.

Visit siteVisit Packer

Overview

What Packer does

Packer is an open source tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. Packer can manage machine images for cloud providers and virtualization platforms.

What people use it for

Building identical machine images for multiple clouds from one template
Baking golden AMIs and VM images into a CI pipeline
Creating immutable infrastructure artifacts consumed by Terraform

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Packer.

Packer 1.10.0 and later is licensed under the Business Source License 1.1 with IBM Corporation as licensor, not an OSI open source licence
The Additional Use Grant forbids offering Packer to third parties on a hosted or embedded basis in a paid product that competes with IBM's paid versions of Packer
Each version converts to the MPL 2.0 Change License only four years after that version is first published, and the Change Date is set separately per version
Alternative licensing for uses outside the grant must be arranged with the licensor rather than taken under the public licence

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Packer

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

Packervs
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean: The developer cloud
Packervs
Grafana Cloud
Grafana Cloud: Composable observability platform
Packervs
Neon
Neon: Serverless Postgres for modern developers
Packervs
AWS (Amazon Web Services)
AWS (Amazon Web Services): The leading cloud computing platform

Pricing

What Packer costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Open Source

Free

Multi-platform image building
Template-driven
Provisioner support
Community support

Capabilities

Features

Image building
Multi-platform support
Provisioners
Builders
Post-processors
Variables
Data sources
Validation
AWS
Integration with AWS
Azure
Integration with Azure
GCP
Integration with GCP
Docker
Integration with Docker

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

How much does HashiCorp Packer cost?

Packer does not publish specific pricing on its website. The open-source Packer tool is free, while HCP Packer (HashiCorp's cloud-hosted version) offers a free trial, but detailed pricing requires contacting HashiCorp.

Source

Behind it

Who makes Packer

Company: HashiCorp
Based in: San Francisco, CA

Keep looking

Where to go from Packer

Best Cloud software for

Compare Packer with

Other Cloud software

AWS (Amazon Web Services)
The leading cloud computing platform
Free plan12 researched notes
DigitalOcean
The developer cloud
Free, then $4/mo12 researched notes
Grafana Cloud
Composable observability platform
Free, then $19/mo13 researched notes
Neon
Serverless Postgres for modern developers
Free plan10 researched notes
Pulumi
Modern infrastructure as code using programming languages
Free plan15 researched notes
Serverless Framework
Build and deploy serverless applications on AWS Lambda
Free, then $4/credit9 researched notes
Rancher
Kubernetes management platform for multiple clusters
Open source9 researched notes
Puppet
Infrastructure automation for enterprises
Free plan10 researched notes
SST
Build full-stack apps on your own infrastructure
Free plan8 researched notes
Buildah
Build OCI container images without a daemon or a Dockerfile
Open source8 researched notes
Terragrunt
The Open Source IaC Orchestrator Platform Teams Trust
Free plan8 researched notes
Portworx
Kubernetes-native storage and data services, priced by the node hour
From $0.33/node hour11 researched notes
Cilium
eBPF-based networking, observability and security for Kubernetes
Open source7 researched notes
Contabo
Affordable high-performance VPS hosting
From €4.5/mo11 researched notes
Coolify
Open source self-hosted platform that deploys applications and databases to servers you already own
Free, then $5/mo12 researched notes
Crossplane
The Cloud-Native Framework for Platform Engineering
Free plan8 researched notes
Dokku
Single-server platform that accepts a git push and runs Heroku buildpacks on Docker
Open source12 researched notes
containerd
Industry-standard container runtime, and the engine inside Docker
Open source10 researched notes

Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Packer, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.