What users are saying about

Consul vs Terraform

Consul
16 Ratings
Terraform
61 Ratings

Consul

16 Ratings
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Score 8.5 out of 100

Based on 16 reviews and ratings

Terraform

61 Ratings
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Score 9.2 out of 100

Based on 61 reviews and ratings

Likelihood to Recommend

Consul

Consul looks to me like an amazing solution to store configuration data. In huge cloud environments like what we are using nowadays, it is quite important to have a reliable source of parameters to our distributed applications, easily scalable and also, easy to change parameters spreading them efficiently over our entire environment.

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Erlon Sousa Pinheiro | TrustRadius Reviewer
Erlon Sousa Pinheiro
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Terraform

8 because it's currently best-in-class and is completely essential to use in contrast to not expressing your infrastructure as code. That said, new contenders are nipping at its heels, and I expect stronger tools to emerge in the coming years. Hopefully the Terraform team is able to keep pace.

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Jude Allred | TrustRadius Reviewer
Jude Allred
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Pros

Consul

  • Service Health: Using Consul for service health/discovery has been critical to our success in a hybrid environment
  • K/V Store: The Consul K/V store is the best solution out there for our particular use case, which is as a locking mechanism to coordinate otherwise random runs of our configuration management system. This has allowed us to have peace of mind of system availability in our on-prem infrastructure.
  • API: The Consul API as a whole is excellent and extremely easy to work with
  • Documentation: Hashicorp really does documentation well. Their examples are easy to follow and everything is written in a manner that is easy to understand for beginners with the tool.

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
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Terraform

  • Terraform is cloud agnostic. Just select the suitable provider for the cloud and it will do the job.
  • Templating is possible to make the Terraform templates reusable.
  • Variables can be created to make the templates generic so that it can be reused for different environments or resources.

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Abdullah Khawer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Abdullah Khawer
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Cons

Consul

  • We would like to see more out of the box training for Consul use.
  • Best practice examples would be nice for routing.
  • The agent could be easier to run.

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Eric Krueger | TrustRadius Reviewer
Eric Krueger
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Terraform

  • The errors generated by the plan and preview commands are pretty cryptic, it can be hard for newcomers to the scripting language to understand how to address problems.
  • Access controls around workspaces is limited which makes it harder to secure reduce the scope of teams ability.
  • Analytics around user usage, applies and plans would be helpful for managemenet.

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Ben Carter | TrustRadius Reviewer
Ben Carter
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Usability

Consul

Consul 10.0
Based on 1 answer
Consul's API is extremely user friendly. While their web interface isn't quite as "mature", it's still pretty easily navigated for the average person. Together they make a pretty easy to pick up and use tool.

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
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Terraform

Terraform 8.0
Based on 1 answer
I love Terraform and I think it has done some great things for people that are working to automate their provisioning processes and also for those that are in the process of moving to the cloud or managing cloud resources. There are some quirks to HCL that take a little bit of getting used to and give picking up Terraform a little bit of a learning curve, thus the rating

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
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Performance

Consul

No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic

Terraform

Terraform 9.4
Based on 6 answers
Terraform's performance is quite amazing when it comes to deployment of resources in AWS. Of course, the deployment times depend on various parameters like the number of resources to deploy and different regions to deploy. Terraform cannot control that. The only minor drawback probably shows up when a terraform job is terminated mid way. Then in many cases, time-consuming manual cleanup is required.

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Dhruba Jyoti Nag | TrustRadius Reviewer
Dhruba Jyoti Nag
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Support Rating

Consul

Consul 8.3
Based on 4 answers
I've never used paid support from HashiCorp, but I consider its support a good one, since they provide a lot of free resources for the community and there are good user groups supporting you on several sorts of issues. Also, HashiCorp is known as a company with a strong relationship with the community, that is easily noticed by the events HashiCorp promotes over the world.

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Erlon Sousa Pinheiro | TrustRadius Reviewer
Erlon Sousa Pinheiro
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Terraform

Terraform 6.9
Based on 9 answers
I have yet to have an opportunity to reach out directly to HashiCorp for support on Terraform. However, I have spent a great deal of time considering their documentation as I use the tool. This opinion is based solely on that.I find the Terraform documentation to have great breadth but lacking in depth in many areas. I appreciate that all of the tool's resources have an entry in the docs but often the examples are lacking. Often, the examples provided are very basic and prompt additional exploration. Also, the links in the documentation often link back to the same page where one might expect to be linked to a different source with additional information.

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Michael Jenkins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Michael Jenkins
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Alternatives Considered

Consul

We studied Zoekeeper, trying to decide which could become our service broker tool of choice. But although it is meant to be a very high performance tool, it got immensely shadowed by the vast plethora of available tools that Consul offers. The monitoring, health checking tools, as well as the key-value data storage and gossip clustering functionalities just could not be beaten

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Claudio Fernando Maciel | TrustRadius Reviewer
Claudio Fernando Maciel
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Terraform

Terraform is a tool that is particularly well suited to managing infrastructure specifically. It brings "Infrastructure-as-code" to a level that hasn't been achieved with either Puppet or CloudFormation. The former is more accurately aimed at managing the deployment of code on an instance, managing dependencies and configuration files. The latter can manage infrastructure, but is AWS specific, and does not handle company wide infrastructure well nor does it provide a simple way to maintain a history or implement a code review process (ala pull requests). Terraform can start managing individual pieces of infrastructure, and gradually grow to encompass your entire infrastructure stack as needs require. It can refer to existing infrastructure without exerting control over that infrastructure, and being a text based tool, is amenable diffs, source control, and code reviews. It plays particularly well with Kubernetes, as you can use Terraform to stand up the infrastructure that Kubernetes runs on, and manage the permissions that Kubernetes apps require

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
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Return on Investment

Consul

  • Consul has paid for itself just in monitoring and keeping us notified alone.
  • Configuration changes can be monitored and will make even your Security team smile.
  • The time saving tools will help make even a lean IT team work like a larger force.

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Eric Krueger | TrustRadius Reviewer
Eric Krueger
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Terraform

  • Our deployments are more reliable. This way we avoid having unexpected outages due to misconfiguration performed manually.
  • Agility. While doing this using our previous way, we used to spend hours to deploy a new environment. With Terraform it is just a few minutes.
  • Better control! We can track every single change in our environment by our control versioning system.

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Erlon Sousa Pinheiro | TrustRadius Reviewer
Erlon Sousa Pinheiro
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Pricing Details

Consul

General

Free Trial
—
Free/Freemium Version
—
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—
Entry-level set up fee?
No

Consul Editions & Modules

—
Additional Pricing Details
—

Terraform

General

Free Trial
—
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—
Entry-level set up fee?
No

Terraform Editions & Modules

Edition
Free$01
Team & Governance$202
BusinessContact sales team
  1. per month
  2. per user/per month
Additional Pricing Details
—

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