Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Terraform VS Vagrant

Compare Terraform VS Vagrant and see what are their differences

Terraform logo Terraform

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

Vagrant logo Vagrant

Tool for building and maintaining portable virtual development environments.
  • Terraform Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-24
  • Vagrant Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-02

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.

Vagrant features and specs

  • Environment Reproducibility
    Vagrant allows you to create and manage virtualized environments in a reproducible way, ensuring that development, testing, and production environments are consistent.
  • Cross-Platform Compatibility
    Vagrant is compatible with multiple operating systems and virtualization providers such as VirtualBox, VMware, AWS, and more, offering flexibility and broad usage.
  • Ease of Use
    Vagrant provides a simple command-line interface (CLI) for managing environments, which simplifies the setup and teardown processes for virtual machines (VMs).
  • Provisioning Support
    Vagrant supports various provisioning tools like shell scripts, Ansible, Chef, and Puppet, enabling automated setup of your development environment.
  • Version Control
    Vagrant files (Vagrantfile) can be version-controlled using systems like Git, making it easy to track and manage changes to your development environments.
  • Isolation
    Vagrant ensures that development environments are isolated from each other, preventing conflicts and making it easier to work on multiple projects simultaneously.

Possible disadvantages of Vagrant

  • Resource Intensive
    Because Vagrant relies on virtual machines, it can be resource-intensive, consuming significant amounts of CPU, memory, and disk space.
  • Performance Overhead
    Running virtual machines introduces a performance overhead compared to running services directly on the host machine, which can affect the speed and responsiveness of development tasks.
  • Learning Curve
    Despite its ease of use, Vagrant has a learning curve, especially for those who are not familiar with virtualization concepts or provisioning tools.
  • Dependency Management
    Vagrant environments depend on various tools and plugins, which can sometimes lead to compatibility issues or troubleshooting challenges.
  • Limited Containers Support
    Vagrant is primarily designed for virtual machines and may not be the best choice for container-based workflows, where tools like Docker are more commonly used.
  • Network Configuration
    Configuring network settings for Vagrant machines can be complex and may require additional setup, which can be cumbersome for users who need advanced networking options.

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!!!

Vagrant videos

Maxwell Vagrant review! - GTA Online guides

More videos:

  • Review - The Vagrant Review
  • Review - GTA ONLINE MAXWELL VAGRANT REVIEW

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Terraform and Vagrant)
DevOps Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Cloud Computing
76 76%
24% 24
Developer Tools
85 85%
15% 15
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 Vagrant

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%.

Vagrant Reviews

8 Best MAMP Alternatives (Definitive List)
Vagrant is unlike any other MAMP alternative on this list in that it doesn’t enable you to set up a pre-determined local software development stack. At its core, Vagrant is a virtualization tool that allows you to launch as many machines as you need with very little overhead. Depending on each project’s needs, you can assign a specific amount of hardware resources to each...
Source: kinsta.com
Docker Alternatives
An open-source software Vagrant is a tool developed for building, supporting and maintaining portable virtual environments for software development. The objective of this tool is to maximize the development productivity by trying to simplify Software Configuration Management of Virtualizations. The program is developed using Ruby. However, the ecosystem supports development...
Source: www.educba.com
Introduction to Top Open Source Virtualization Tools
Vagrant has a differentiating feature – Vagrant Share that enables users to share their running Vagrant environment via the internet. This makes it easy to collaborate and share on development environments thus creating consistent working environments for teams of software developers using a virtual machine. Vagrant can also work alongside configuration management tools like...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Terraform should be more popular than Vagrant. It has been mentiond 32 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 / 10 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

Vagrant mentions (4)

  • Running the OpenTelemetry Demo App on HashiCorp Nomad
    Vagrant (version 2.3.1 at the time of this writing). - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • What would a solid foundation of knowledge be for someone with little experience in IT.
    Learn: - How to connect to a "black screen" terminal using SSH - How to add websites, create a TLS certificate, install the certificate for the website, how to renew using LetsEncrypt - Follow a procedure to install a POP and IMAP mail account server with a simple local SMTP server (don't make it public, rest would be WAY too complicated. SMTP and spam filtering is very hard). Just take a procedure, follow the... Source: about 3 years ago
  • Second month in DevOps
    The end goal essentially was to be able to have Vagrant set up an operating system and deploy an app for us automatically. But the first roadblock actually came from somewhere I hadn't considered... My computer:. - Source: dev.to / almost 4 years ago
  • Anyone know why Vagga project died?
    Vagga is a fully-userspace container engine inspired by Vagrant and Docker, specialized for development environments built on rust that was in development since 2015 but stopped in the end of 2019 for some reason, anyone know why? Source: about 4 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Terraform and Vagrant, you can also consider the following products

Rancher - Open Source Platform for Running a Private Container Service

VirtualBox - VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as...

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

Docker - Docker is an open platform that enables developers and system administrators to create distributed applications.

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

Kubernetes - Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers