HashiCorp Terraform vs. HashiCorp Vagrant

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
HashiCorp Terraform
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Terraform from HashiCorp is a cloud infrastructure automation tool that enables users to create, change, and improve production infrastructure, and it allows infrastructure to be expressed as code. It codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned. It is available Open Source, and via Cloud and Self-Hosted editions.
$0
HashiCorp Vagrant
Score 9.9 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
HashiCorp TerraformHashiCorp Vagrant
Editions & Modules
Open Source
$0
Team & Governance
$20/user
per user/per month
Enterprise
Contact sales team
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
HashiCorp TerraformHashiCorp Vagrant
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
HashiCorp TerraformHashiCorp Vagrant
Considered Both Products
HashiCorp Terraform
Chose HashiCorp Terraform
We have used Vagrant to develop our application in a virtual box environment and prepare it to be packed with Packer. The image created from these two tools will be deployed by Terraform.

We are using Consul for service discovery and as a job locking so we don't have two jobs or …
HashiCorp Vagrant
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.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
HashiCorp TerraformHashiCorp Vagrant
Small Businesses
HashiCorp Vagrant
HashiCorp Vagrant
Score 9.9 out of 10
HashiCorp Terraform
HashiCorp Terraform
Score 8.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Ansible
Ansible
Score 8.9 out of 10
Ansible
Ansible
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
Ansible
Ansible
Score 8.9 out of 10
Ansible
Ansible
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
HashiCorp TerraformHashiCorp Vagrant
Likelihood to Recommend
6.5
(25 ratings)
8.0
(14 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(1 ratings)
5.5
(1 ratings)
Performance
9.4
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.4
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.2
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
HashiCorp TerraformHashiCorp Vagrant
Likelihood to Recommend
HashiCorp
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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HashiCorp
I would recommend this tool to a colleague looking to create a repeatably deployable local dev environment based on their staging and production environments. I would recommend this mostly for individuals or teams requiring environments with server-side software such as php, et al. There are likely less processor-heavy and smaller tools for simpler projects.
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Pros
HashiCorp
  • 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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HashiCorp
  • Vagrant is decentralized so anyone can make a container package to get a project started. you aren't limited to wordpress, or even one style of wordpress install (you can make a sage.io wordpress environment).
  • Vagrant easily lets you set ports and URLs for local development.
  • I have yet to have a problem with Vagrant, as opposed to MAMP and DesktopServer, which both gave me SQL or other issues.
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Cons
HashiCorp
  • 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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HashiCorp
  • Because Vagrant is a low-level tool with many ways to configure it, there is a steep learning curve. You don't just have to learn (or install) Vagrant, but also Virtualbox, Ansible and possibly some Vagrant plugins to keep boxes up to date.
  • Support on Windows doesn't seem great. I'm a Mac guy, so it's been very difficult getting things to work as expected when a developer wants to work on Windows.
  • Perhaps I didn't configure it correctly, but the default shared folders are not the best for performance. There are also frequently weird issues regarding file permissions.
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Likelihood to Renew
HashiCorp
No answers on this topic
HashiCorp
Vagrant is fast, versatile and does exactly what we need it to do: spin up virtual servers for local development fast and without trouble.
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Usability
HashiCorp
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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HashiCorp
A GUI would be nice for entry level users.
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Performance
HashiCorp
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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HashiCorp
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
HashiCorp
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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HashiCorp
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
HashiCorp
Terraform is the solid leader in the space. It allows you to do more then just provisioning within a pre-existing servers. It is more extensible and has more providers available than it competitors. It is also open source and more adopted by the community then some of the other solutions that are available in the market place.
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HashiCorp
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 problems than lando.
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Return on Investment
HashiCorp
  • we are able to deploy our infrastructure in a couple of ours in an automated and repeatable way, before this could take weeks if the work was done manually and was a lot of error prone.
  • having the state file, you can see a diff of what things have changed manually out side of Terraform which is a huge plus
  • if state file gets corrupted, it is very hard to debug or restore it without an impact or spending hours ..
  • writing big scale code can be very challenging and hard to be efficient so it's usable by the whole team
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HashiCorp
  • Vagrant is free - It requires a bit of extra technical knowledge in terms of setup, but since it costs nothing it's an excellent resource
  • It can be time consuming to learn, but once you get a good handle on it you're in good shape.
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ScreenShots

HashiCorp Terraform Screenshots

Screenshot of Terraform StateScreenshot of Terraform RunsScreenshot of Terraform VariablesScreenshot of Terraform WorkspacesScreenshot of Terraform Cost Estimation