Vagrantvs
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean: The developer cloud
Vagrant
Development environments made easy
As of 30 August 2026, Vagrant is free to use. Vagrant is a tool for building and maintaining portable virtual development environments. Softwr lists it under Cloud. Vagrant is made by HashiCorp, launched in 2010, available on Linux, Windows, macOS.
Overview
What Vagrant does
Vagrant is a tool for building and maintaining portable virtual development environments. Vagrant reduces development environment setup time, increases development productivity, and makes the works on my machine problem a non-issue.
What people use it for
- Reproducible local development environments defined in a Vagrantfile
- Provisioning identical VMs across VirtualBox, VMware and Hyper-V for a team
- Sandboxing multi-machine setups on a developer laptop
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 Vagrant.
- Vagrant 2.4.3 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 Vagrant to third parties on a hosted or embedded basis in a paid product that competes with IBM's paid versions of Vagrant
- Each version converts to the MPL 2.0 Change License only four years after that version is first published
- Uses that fall outside the Additional Use Grant require a separately negotiated licence from the licensor
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Vagrant
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.
- VagrantvsGrafana Cloud
Grafana Cloud: Composable observability platform
- VagrantvsNeon
Neon: Serverless Postgres for modern developers
- VagrantvsAWS (Amazon Web Services)
AWS (Amazon Web Services): The leading cloud computing platform
Pricing
What Vagrant costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Open Source
Free
- Development environment provisioning
- Multiple providers
- Provisioner support
- Community support
Capabilities
Features
Box management
Provider support
Multi-machine setups
Provisioners
Networking
Synced folders
Snapshots
Plugins
VirtualBox
Integration with VirtualBox
VMware
Integration with VMware
Docker
Integration with Docker
AWS
Integration with AWS
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.
Behind it
Who makes Vagrant
- Company
- HashiCorp
- Based in
- San Francisco, CA
Keep looking
Where to go from Vagrant
- Vagrant alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Vagrant pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Vagrant badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Cloud softwareThe full category
- Best Cloud softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Cloud software for
Compare Vagrant with
- DigitalOcean
- Neon
- AWS (Amazon Web Services)
- Grafana Cloud
- Pulumi
- Portworx
- Serverless Framework
- Podman
- Caddy
- Rancher
- Infracost
- Porter
- SST
- Tencent Cloud
- Terragrunt
- Thanos
- Zeabur
- Zipkin
Other Cloud software
Kubernetes-native storage and data services, priced by the node hour
From $0.33/node hour11 researched notesBuild and deploy serverless applications on AWS Lambda
Free, then $4/credit9 researched notesCloud cost estimates in pull requests, with governance in the paid tier
Free, then $250/mo12 researched notes
Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Vagrant, 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 Vagrant
Vagrant alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
Vagrant pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare Vagrant
Put it head to head with anything we hold
Vagrant badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
Best Cloud software alternatives
Open source distributed block storage for Kubernetes, incubating at the CNCF
Open source, no licence fee
Deployment platform that provisions and operates Kubernetes inside your own cloud account
quoteCloud cost estimates in pull requests, with governance in the paid tier
Free open source tool, then per month by run volume
Free self-hosted platform built on Docker Swarm with a dashboard and automatic certificates
Open source, no licence fee
Open source self-hosted platform that deploys applications and databases to servers you already own
Open source, no licence fee