Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Terraform VS Encore.dev

Compare Terraform VS Encore.dev and see what are their differences

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Terraform logo Terraform

Tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently.

Encore.dev logo Encore.dev

Encore Cloud helps you scale your engineering, not your DevOps.
  • Terraform Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-24
  • Encore.dev Encore Cloud Dashboard
    Encore Cloud Dashboard //
    2025-02-12

Encore Cloud automates infrastructure and DevOps, letting you ship 3x faster with 90% less DevOps work, using your own cloud on AWS & GCP. ✓ Get enterprise-grade infrastructure without the complexity and DevOps overhead ✓ Enable safe AI-assisted development with built-in guardrails ✓ Gain full visibility across your stack with built-in Service Catalog, API documentation, and tracing

Key Features:

Production-Ready AI Assisted Development: Encore's parser validates all generated code to ensure it correctly implements service and API definitions, infrastructure integrations, etc.

No boilerplate: Encore drastically reduces the boilerplate needed to set up a production ready backend application. Define backend services, API endpoints, and call APIs with a single line of Go code.

Distributed Tracing: Encore instruments your application for excellent observability. Automatically captures information about API calls, goroutines, HTTP requests, database queries, and more. Automatically works for local development as well as in production.

Infrastructure Automation: Encore automatically provisions and manages your cloud infrastructure. Works with all the major cloud providers and you deploy to your own account (AWS/Azure/GCP).

Simple Secrets: Easily store and securely use secrets and API keys. Never worry about how to store and get access to secret values again.

Service Catalog and Automatic API Documentation: Encore parses your source code to understand the schemas for all your APIs and automatically generate interactive API Documentation.

Encore.dev

Website
encore.dev
$ Details
freemium $99.0 / Monthly (Pro, per user)
Platforms
AWS Cloud Web Browser Google Cloud Platform GCP CLI
Release Date
2021 May

Terraform features and specs

  • Infrastructure as Code
    Terraform allows you to define your infrastructure in configuration files that can be versioned and stored in a version control system. This makes it easy to track changes, roll back if necessary, and collaborate with team members.
  • Multi-Cloud Support
    Terraform supports various cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and others. This allows you to manage your entire infrastructure using a single tool, regardless of the underlying provider.
  • Immutability
    Terraform promotes immutable infrastructure, meaning once a component is created, it is not modified in place but replaced if changes are needed. This leads to more predictable and stable deployments.
  • State Management
    Terraform maintains the state of your infrastructure, which helps in tracking resource changes over time and making incremental updates. This is crucial for applying changes in a controlled manner.
  • Community and Ecosystem
    Terraform has a large and active community, along with a rich ecosystem of providers and modules. This makes it easier to find support, share solutions, and leverage pre-built components.

Possible disadvantages of Terraform

  • Complex State Management
    While state management is a significant feature, managing state files can become complex and risky. Issues like state file corruption or sharing between team members can lead to challenges.
  • Learning Curve
    Terraform has a steep learning curve for beginners, especially those who are not familiar with infrastructure as code concepts or the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL).
  • Partial Updates
    Terraform's plan and apply operations are not atomic, meaning that partial updates can sometimes leave your infrastructure in an inconsistent state if an error occurs during execution.
  • Dependency Management
    Managing dependencies between resources can be challenging in Terraform. Misconfigured dependencies can lead to issues during resource creation, deletion, or updates.
  • Cost Management
    While Terraform is excellent for provisioning resources, it does not have built-in cost management or optimization features. Users need to rely on third-party tools to manage and optimize costs.

Encore.dev features and specs

  • Infrastructure Automation
    Encore Cloud automates infrastructure provisioning and deployment in your cloud on AWS and GCP.
  • Automatic API Documentation
    Encore Cloud automatically provides API documentation and a complete Service Catalog for your entire system.
  • Observability
    Encore Cloud provides distributed tracing, metrics, and logs, without requiring any manual instrumentation.
  • AI Enablement
    The Open Source Encore framework extends the capabilities of AI coding tools like Cursor and Copilot, enabling them to create both application and infrastructure.
  • Preview Environments
    Encore Cloud sets up dedicated Preview Environments for each pull request.

Possible disadvantages of Encore.dev

  • Learning Curve
    New users may face a steep learning curve due to the unique concepts and abstractions introduced by Encore.dev.
  • Limited Language Support
    Encore.dev may have limited support for programming languages compared to more established platforms, which could be a drawback for developers using unsupported languages.
  • Opinionated Framework
    The framework is opinionated, which means it imposes specific ways of accomplishing tasks that may not align with all developers' preferences or existing workflows.
  • Dependency on Platform
    Relying on Encore.dev for backend development may lead to platform lock-in, making it difficult to switch to other solutions in the future.
  • Customization Limitations
    The abstraction layers, while simplifying development, may limit customization and flexibility for developers who need more control over the infrastructure and configuration.

Terraform videos

Wampler Terraform | Reverb Tone Report Demo

More videos:

  • Review - MOD PEDAL POWERHOUSE! Wampler TERRAFORM
  • Demo - IT'S FINALLY HERE! | Wampler Terraform Demo | It's as good as you hoped!!!

Encore.dev videos

Encore.ts is 9x faster than Express.js

More videos:

  • Tutorial - How to build and event-driven application with Encore
  • Demo - Encore Framework introduction

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Terraform and Encore.dev)
DevOps Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Backend Framework
0 0%
100% 100
Developer Tools
76 76%
24% 24
Continuous Integration And Delivery

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Terraform and Encore.dev

Terraform Reviews

Do not use AWS CloudFormation
Terraform, on the other hand, will occupy your shell until the directly-involved AWS service coughs up an error. No additional tooling is required. Terraform will just relay the error message from the affected service indicating what you’ve done wrong.
Top 5 Ansible Alternatives in 2022: Server Automation Solutions by Alexander Fashakin on the 19th Aug 2021 facebook Linked In Twitter
Although Terraform and Ansible are both server automation tools, there are still a few significant differences between the two. For example, Terraform is declarative while Ansible allows for both procedural configurations and declarative configurations. Also, Ansible works best as a configuration management tool while Terraform leans towards cloud orchestration.
35+ Of The Best CI/CD Tools: Organized By Category
Terraform is compatible with a wide range of Cloud providers, including Azure, VMWare, and AWS. If you’re subscribed to multiple cloud providers, Terraform is a great way to ensure that they have consistent configurations.
Why we use Terraform and not Chef, Puppet, Ansible, SaltStack, or CloudFormation
Example: Terraform and Ansible. You use Terraform to deploy all the underlying infrastructure, including the network topology (i.e., VPCs, subnets, route tables), data stores (e.g., MySQL, Redis), load balancers, and servers. You then use Ansible to deploy your apps on top of those servers.This is an easy approach to start with, as there is no extra infrastructure to run...
Ansible overtakes Chef and Puppet as the top cloud configuration management tool
Breaking these results down year-over-year, use of Ansible grew from 36% in 2018 to 41% in 2019--surpassing Chef, which grew from 36% to 37%, as well as Puppet, which grew from 34% to 37%. Rounding out the list is Terraform, which experienced a jump from 20% to 31%, and Salt, which increased in usage from 13% to 18%.

Encore.dev Reviews

10 Top Firebase Alternatives to Ignite Your Development in 2024
Encore is designed for startups building ambitious, event-driven, and distributed systems. If you’re a team that values speed, productivity, and code quality, Encore’s purpose-built tooling and streamlined workflows will help you move faster and build better backends.
Source: genezio.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Encore.dev should be more popular than Terraform. It has been mentiond 79 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Terraform mentions (32)

  • Scaffolding Serverless Web Application on AWS
    Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool that lets you build, change, and version infrastructure safely and efficiently. Terraform code is in the terraform directory. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Integrating Terraform with CI/CD Pipelines
    In recent years, there has been a significant shift towards automation of infrastructure deployment processes. One popular tool that has emerged as a key player in this space is Terraform, an open-source infrastructure as code (IaC) software tool developed by HashiCorp. This article will explore how Terraform can be integrated into continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines using GitHub Actions as an... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Deploying Your Outdoor Activities Map with Terraform
    Terraform is an open-source infrastructure-as-code software tool created by HashiCorp. It allows you to define and manage your infrastructure as code, making it easy to provision and manage resources across multiple cloud providers. With Terraform, you can ensure consistent and repeatable deployments, making it an ideal choice for automating your cloud infrastructure. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Trigger CI using Terraform Cloud
    Continuous Integration(CI) pipelines needs a target infrastructure to which the CI artifacts are deployed. The deployments are handled by CI or we can leverage Continuous Deployment pipelines. Modern day architecture uses automation tools like terraform, ansible to provision the target infrastructure, this type of provisioning is called IaaC. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • Using Let's Encrypt with the Puppet Enterprise console
    Had an itch I've been meaning to scratch for a while. I build my Puppet environment using Terraform, which makes it nice and easy to tear things down and rebuild them. That is great, but it does leave me with an issue when it comes to the console SSL certificates. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
View more

Encore.dev mentions (79)

  • How to use Logto for your Encore application
    Encore is a backend development platform that makes it easy to build production-ready APIs and microservices. - Source: dev.to / 24 days ago
  • How to build a Polling System with Node / TypeScript using Encore.ts
    Encore is an open-source backend framework for building scalable, distributed systems. It’s a dev-friendly tool that makes building robust, type-safe applications easy with it’s high-performance API framework. Whether you like TypeScript or Go, Encore supports both. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Rails for Everything
    I could really recommend Encore https://encore.dev/ that works best when you use their PaaS offering https://encore.cloud/ (think of NextJS & Vercel combo). One can argue it goes against some of the Go principles, but it's a really nice stack for solos or small teams without dedicated SREs. And as you grow you can BYOC & deploy it yourself or completely rewrite your API layer using Go stdlib. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • Next.js vs Encore.ts — When should you NOT use Next.js for Backend?
    In this article I will compare Next.js with Encore. I will show you how they differ and how they compliment each other. If you have a Next.js app and want to expand the backend functionality of that app then this article is for you! - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Launch Week Day 3: Open Source Independence
    Refocused encore.dev solely on the open source project, making navigation easier. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Terraform and Encore.dev, you can also consider the following products

Rancher - Open Source Platform for Running a Private Container Service

OpenShift - OpenShift gives you all the tools you need to develop, host and scale your apps in the public or private cloud. Get started today.

Puppet Enterprise - Get started with Puppet Enterprise, or upgrade or expand.

Cast.ai - CAST AI is an AI-driven platform designed to optimize cloud usage and reduce costs by over 60%. It is an all-in-one solution for Kubernetes monitoring, automation, optimization, and security.

Packer - Packer is an open-source software for creating identical machine images from a single source configuration.

AlwaysData - Simple, fast and managed hosting.User-friendly and full-featured administration panel SSD disks.Praised by developers.Many languages and database systems: SSH, API, IPv6.