AWS CloudFormation vs. Spacelift

Spacelift

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
Spacelift	Score 10.0 out of 10	N/A	Spacelift is presented as a flexible management platform for Infrastructure as Code hosted in the cloud or on a private server, from the company of the same name headquartered in Redwood City. Designed so users can customize workflows, automate manual tasks, reduce errors, and improve security and auditability of infrastructure.	$250 per month

Pricing

AWS CloudFormation

Spacelift

Editions & Modules

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

Cloud: starting at $250
per month
Enterprise SaaS: starting at $2000
per month

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
AWS CloudFormation	Spacelift
Free Trial
Yes	Yes
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	Spacelift
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?	Spacelift No answer on this topic

Best Alternatives
	AWS CloudFormation	Spacelift
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	Spacelift
Likelihood to Recommend	8.0 (0 ratings)	- (0 ratings)
Usability	8.0 (0 ratings)	- (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	AWS CloudFormation	Spacelift
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	No answers on this topic
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	No answers on this topic
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	No answers on this topic
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	No answers on this topic
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	No answers on this topic
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	No answers on this topic
ScreenShots	AWS CloudFormation Screenshots