Spaceliftvs
Atlantis
Atlantis: Open source, free, and runs Terraform from pull request comments if orchestration depth is not the requirement
Spacelift
Infrastructure-as-code orchestration for Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi and Kubernetes
As of 31 August 2026, Spacelift is free to use. A managed control plane for infrastructure pipelines, priced on run concurrency rather than on seats, with one published figure and three tiers that require a sales conversation. Softwr lists it under Developer Tools. Spacelift is made by Spacelift, Inc., available on Web, Self-hosted, Cloud.
Overview
What Spacelift does
Spacelift runs infrastructure-as-code pipelines as a managed service, covering Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Kubernetes through Helm and Kustomize, Ansible and Terragrunt, connected to GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps or a raw Git remote. Its argument is that general purpose continuous integration was built for application builds and handles infrastructure state, drift and approval gates badly. The pricing unit is the thing to understand before evaluating anything else. Users are unlimited on every paid tier, and what is metered is private workers, which cap how many runs execute in parallel. Business includes three, Enterprise five to thirty. Scaling deployment throughput therefore means moving up a tier rather than adding seats, which is the opposite of how most engineering tools are budgeted and produces a very different curve at a large organisation. It is also one of the few commercial vendors that sponsors OpenTofu directly, which matters as a hedge for anyone uncomfortable with Terraform under IBM and the Business Source Licence. The company raised a 51 million dollar Series C led by Five Elms Capital in July 2025, and the pricing shape reflects that: a free tier for two users, then a substantial jump.
What people use it for
- Platform teams running infrastructure changes through approval gates rather than through application CI
- Organisations standardising Terraform and OpenTofu across many teams with policy enforcement
- Estates needing private runners so cloud credentials never leave the network
- Teams wanting drift detection and reconciliation rather than plan-time checks alone
The honest half
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 Spacelift.
- Users are unlimited and private workers are metered, so deployment concurrency rather than headcount drives the bill, which inverts how most engineering budgets are built and is easy to under-forecast.
- There is no affordable paid entry point. The free tier stops at two users and the next tier is a five-figure commitment with nothing in between.
- Three of the five tiers are quote-only, so a shortlist cannot be costed without entering a sales process with each vendor on it.
- The self-hosted build lags the hosted one, has no public worker pool and lacks the Azure and Google Cloud integrations available in the SaaS product, with OIDC federation offered as the workaround.
- Stacks, Rego policies, Blueprints, Spaces and Spacelift-managed state are proprietary constructs, so leaving means rebuilding the orchestration layer rather than pointing it at a different runner.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Spacelift
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.
- SpaceliftvsPulumi
Pulumi: Choose when defining infrastructure in a general purpose language matters more than orchestrating existing Terraform
- SpaceliftvsHarness
Harness: Broader delivery platform where infrastructure pipelines sit alongside application deployment
Pricing
What Spacelift costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Free
Free
- Two users
- Public workers only
- No private workers
Starter Plus
On request
- Unlimited users
- Two public workers
- One to two private workers
- The pricing page prints a figure without stating a period
Business
On request
- Unlimited users
- Three private workers
- Quoted
Enterprise
On request
- Unlimited users
- Five to thirty private workers
- Self-hosted option
- Quoted
Capabilities
Features
Multi-tool orchestration
Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, Ansible and Terragrunt in one control plane
Policy as code
Rego policies gating plan approval, run initiation and access
Private workers
Runners inside your own network so credentials and state never leave it
Spaces
Multi-tenancy for separating teams, environments and blast radius
Blueprints
Templated stacks so a team can provision without writing the pipeline
Drift detection
Scheduled reconciliation against real infrastructure state
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 is Spacelift priced?
By tier and by private worker count rather than per user. Users are unlimited on every paid plan. The published figure on the pricing page carries no period label, and the FAQ describes the tier as an annual subscription, so confirm the period in writing.
Does it support OpenTofu?
Yes, and Spacelift sponsors the OpenTofu project, which is a substantive hedge for anyone avoiding Terraform under the Business Source Licence.
Is there a self-hosted version?
Yes, described as carrying Enterprise functionality, but it is priced on request and lags the hosted product on cloud integrations.
Why not just use the CI system we already have?
That is the real comparison. General purpose CI handles state, drift, approval gates and concurrency control for infrastructure poorly, and whether that is worth a five-figure floor depends on how much infrastructure change your organisation actually ships.
What happens to our pipelines if we leave?
They do not port. Rego policies, Blueprints, Spaces and managed state are Spacelift constructs and the orchestration has to be rebuilt elsewhere.
Keep looking
Where to go from Spacelift
- Spacelift alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Spacelift pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Spacelift badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Developer Tools softwareThe full category
- Best Developer Tools softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Developer Tools software for
Compare Spacelift with
- Atlantis
- Earthly
- Harness
- Cortex
- OpsLevel
- Backstage
- Okteto
- Ona (formerly Gitpod)
- HCP Terraform
- Azure DevOps
- ConfigCat
- Frappe
- Dagger
- Deno
- Fig
- Git
- GoLand
- Frappe
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Spacelift, 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.
More on Spacelift
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Spacelift pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare Spacelift
Put it head to head with anything we hold
Spacelift badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
Best Developer Tools software alternatives
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