AWS CloudFormation vs. HashiCorp Vagrant

HashiCorp Vagrant

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
AWS CloudFormation	Score 8.2 out of 10	N/A	AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators a way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in a predictable fashion. Use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run an application. Users don’t need to figure out the order for provisioning AWS services or the subtleties of making those dependencies work.…	$0
HashiCorp Vagrant	Score 9.0 out of 10	N/A	Vagrant is a tool designed to create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments. It leverages a declarative configuration file which describes all software requirements, packages, operating system configuration, and users.	N/A

Pricing

AWS CloudFormation

HashiCorp Vagrant

Editions & Modules

Free Tier - 1,000 Handler Operations per Month per Account: $0.00
Handler Operation: $0.0009
per handler operation

No answers on this topic

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
AWS CloudFormation	HashiCorp Vagrant
Free Trial
Yes	No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes	Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

There is no additional charge for using AWS CloudFormation with resource providers in the following namespaces: AWS::*, Alexa::*, and Custom::*. In this case you pay for AWS resources (such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, etc.) created using AWS CloudFormation as if you created them manually. You only pay for what you use, as you use it; there are no minimum fees and no required upfront commitments. When you use resource providers with AWS CloudFormation outside the namespaces mentioned above, you incur charges per handler operation. Handler operations are create, update, delete, read, or list actions on a resource.

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	AWS CloudFormation	HashiCorp Vagrant
Considered Both Products	AWS CloudFormation Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudFormation The only real comparison would be to Terraform, which is another IaC technology at the infra level. Terraform is cloud-agnostic, which means most popular cloud providers are supported. While AWS CloudFormation is AWS-only. Although, if you consider CDK, CDK for Terraform … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudFormation Since the product I'm involved is primarily hosted on AWS we use CloudFormation but in some other products where we have hybrid cloud deployments we prefer terraform which is opensource. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudFormation Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudFormation As we have our whole infrastructure on AWS, that is why we selected AWS CloudFormation. AWS CloudFormation is better integrated with AWS services than other available products and also provides visibility and tracking on AWS. AWS CloudFormation is free while Terraform … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudFormation We didn't look into anything else as Cloudformation was "built-in" for AWS, it just kind of made sense to go with that. Terraform was something that we briefly looked into Terraform but decides to stick with Cloudformation because our task was relatively "simple". Apparently if … Incentivized Helpful? Manuela Jacqueline Mercado Rodríguez Senior Full Stack Developer Chose AWS CloudFormation AWS CloudFormation has more features and robustness. It is suited for professional projects since it provides stability and a wide variety of options for configurations. These include not only dividing stacks by specific code changes, but also in regions. This allows more … Incentivized Helpful?	HashiCorp Vagrant Brendon Brown Front End Developer / Marketing Technologist Chose HashiCorp Vagrant Docker has a few advantages, especially with the disk size bloat brought on by Vagrant's hosting an entire OS and project in a VM. It relies on native tools, however, and may not support every software. Vagrant provides uniformity, efficiency and repeatability within team work … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HashiCorp Vagrant Fast[er] to implement than Docker. Even consuming a lot of resources, consume less resources than Docker. Cheaper than Azure, since [it] is free. Incentivized Helpful? Josh Stapp Sr. Software Engineer Chose HashiCorp Vagrant I liked lando better because lando seemed extremely easy to setup compared to other VM's and it seemed faster though that project was simpler. Virtualbox I ran on windows and it has a gui and has often been slow. The vagrant boxes I used did well but had slightly more … Incentivized Helpful? Hernán Silva Senior Front-end developer Chose HashiCorp Vagrant Docker feels lighter, faster, but Vagrant offers better support across platforms, which is a must in my company where there are users on Linux, Mac OS and Windows. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HashiCorp Vagrant Virtualbox and VMware were easier products to set up but did not stack up against Vagrant with the customization and the ability to specifically test and work with our code base. Virtualbox and VMware were more generic solutions that may be easier but they did not fulfill the … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HashiCorp Vagrant MAMP is a much simpler solution than Vagrant. Pretty much anyone should be able to get MAMP up and running quickly, and it's much easier to maintain. However, MAMP is fairly limited to specific versions of software and runs within macOS, so it won't always completely be an … Incentivized Helpful? Collin Berg Freelance Web Developer Chose HashiCorp Vagrant Previously I had used MAMP and DesktopServer. MAMP was constantly giving me MySQL problems and is frustrating in that it limits how many installs you can have. DesktopServers was a little better, but broke when i switched to High Sierra OSX. Their website and support were very … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HashiCorp Vagrant I like Vagrant much more than Docker. In my opinion it's easier and more flexible to configure a Vagrant machine how i like it compared to Docker. Of course Docker executes faster, but with Vagrant only the machine creation or booting process is slower, normally you don't … Incentivized Helpful? Chris Putnam Senior Web Developer Chose HashiCorp Vagrant There's not much that I'm aware of that really does exactly what Vagrant does. Many of its tasks could be accomplished manually or via custom scripts. However, with Vagrant, automation is within easy grasp as well as a large community of experts who have pre-built solutions … Incentivized Helpful? Joey Yax Web Developer Chose HashiCorp Vagrant Vagrant is a little different than other options out there. It blurs the lines between the server environment and the local environment. Options like MAMP and XAMPP allow a developer to run a local version of Apache, MySQL and PHP locally, but it's all based on the local … Incentivized Helpful? Charles Anderson VP Engineering Chose HashiCorp Vagrant Vagrant is more of a meta-tool compared to traditional VM software. It provides a layer on top of VMware or VirtualBox. Configurations in a Vagrantfile are so much easier to manage than complete VMs. Incentivized Helpful? Claudio Fernando Maciel Sr. Software Developer Chose HashiCorp Vagrant In comparison to Docker, Vagrant is a lot easier to create its [containers] boxes, than it is with Docker. Our company already dealt with and its devops team knew somewhat well the way of Vagrant, so it was quite natural to go Vagrant when trying to choose which would be our … Incentivized Helpful? Andrew Shell Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Chose HashiCorp Vagrant By default Vagrant uses VirtualBox but compared to using VirtualBox directly, I've found using Vagrant makes things easier. For one, you can commit your Vagrant configuration to GitHub and manage changes that way. I'm not sure how you'd handle updated virtual machines to all … Incentivized Helpful?

Best Alternatives
	AWS CloudFormation	HashiCorp Vagrant
Small Businesses	IBM Terraform Score 8.8 out of 10	IBM Terraform Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Ansible Score 9.1 out of 10	Ansible Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises	Ansible Score 9.1 out of 10	Ansible Score 9.1 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	AWS CloudFormation	HashiCorp Vagrant
Likelihood to Recommend	8.0 (0 ratings)	8.0 (0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	- (0 ratings)	9.0 (0 ratings)
Usability	8.0 (0 ratings)	5.5 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	AWS CloudFormation	HashiCorp Vagrant
Likelihood to Recommend	I still give it an 8 because it's one of those tools that just quietly does the heavy lifting for you but it can really test your patience when it breaks esp with deep nested stacks. It's perfect for projects where we need clean consistent environments every time. It's less ideal for quick experimental setups like new EC2 configs or Lambda permission tweaks. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	If you're writing software, particularly software that depends on other services (web servers or databases for example) then Vagrant is great. I know some people skip Vagrant and just set up virtual machines on their own, but I've found that Vagrant streamlines the process nicely and makes it easy to update or swap out versions. If you're a web developer (which I am) it's amazing. I can have several boxes configured for my different projects and I just spin them up or down based on what I'm working on. One scenario where this might not be ideal is if you're running Vagrant on a computer that has limited resources. Since you're running a virtual machine with its own operating system and such you'll want a host computer with enough RAM, hard drive space and CPU to run the virtual machine properly without killing the performance of the host. The virtual disks can also take up a lot of space if you're not careful so if you have many virtual machines provisioned and don't clean up the old ones that you're not using, you may find that your hard drive is full. Each of my Linux servers take up about 10GB of disk space. Incentivized Andrew Shell Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Read full review
Pros	IaC, transactional on top of that Support for "mainstream" general programming languages Sharable IaC "snippets" that can setup standardized environments for individuals quickly OOP techniques are available thanks to OOP languages Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Easy to create machines with different OS's, list of them can be found from Vagrant's website with configuration details. Flexible configuration, user can determine what software will be pre-installed to machine. Saves time because it doesn't need to be done manually every time. Easily manage full environments, not just single machines, with single command. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Cons	Error Description upon Failure Needs to be Improved. Slow to create, delete or update. Need to delete resources manually. It can ask before starting deletion whether to skip those resources or delete them. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Learning curve is steep - It can be challenging for someone to set up initially. After some coaching, the basics come pretty quickly though. Relies on external Virtual Machine applications - It would be great if Vagrant itself could run the virtual machine instead of leaning on other virtualization software. This is a small detail, but would make setup simple. Better support for running Incentivized Joey Yax Web Developer Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	No answers on this topic	Vagrant is fast, versatile and does exactly what we need it to do: spin up virtual servers for local development fast and without trouble. Incentivized Collin Berg Freelance Web Developer Read full review
Usability	You just have to learn how it thinks then you'll be set. That however comes with a learning curve. Writing YAML or jSON templates feels natural now but early on, even a small syntax mistake could break a whole stack. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	A GUI would be nice for entry level users. Incentivized Hernán Silva Senior Front-end developer Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Since the product I'm involved is primarily hosted on AWS we use CloudFormation but in some other products where we have hybrid cloud deployments we prefer Terraform which is opensource. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Docker has a few advantages, especially with the disk size bloat brought on by Vagrant's hosting an entire OS and project in a VM. It relies on native tools, however, and may not support every software. Vagrant provides uniformity, efficiency and repeatability within team work and for deployment and testing. Incentivized Brendon Brown Front End Developer / Marketing Technologist Read full review
Return on Investment	+ We can standup a VPC in minutes - It took a lot of inital time to set up + With logging/rollback, made testing much easier. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Saved lots of time by being able to set up a local env quickly Occasionally made troubleshooting bugs harder than it would have been using native Linux Clients had issues setting it up, which may have provided us some security in keeping their business Incentivized Josh Stapp Sr. Software Engineer Read full review
ScreenShots	AWS CloudFormation Screenshots