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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    IBM Terraform

    Score8.7 out of 10
    N/AIBM Terraform (formerly Hashicorp Terraform) is a cloud infrastructure automation tool used to create, change, and improve production infrastructure, and it allows infrastructure to be expressed as code. It is available Open Source, and via Cloud and Self-Hosted editions.

    $0

    Pantheon

    Score10 out of 10
    N/APantheon is a WebOps platform for operating WordPress, Drupal, and Next.js websites. The platform supports the deployment, scaling, maintenance, security, and performance management of web applications. Key Capabilities Website operations: Pantheon manages operational requirements associated with uptime, performance, security, and scaling for supported websites. Framework support: The platform supports WordPress, Drupal, and Next.js…

    $29

    per month

    Pricing
    IBM TerraformPantheon
    Editions & Modules
    Open Source
    $0
    Team & Governance
    $20/user
    per user/per month
    Enterprise
    Contact sales team
    Basic
    $29
    per month
    Performance
    $114
    per month
    Elite
    Contact for quote
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    IBM TerraformPantheon
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Best Alternatives
    IBM TerraformPantheon
    Small Businesses
    HashiCorp Vagrant
    Score9 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    HashiCorp Vagrant
    Score9 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Enterprises
    AWS CloudFormation
    Score8.2 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    IBM TerraformPantheon
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.8
    (33 ratings)
    8.0
    (68 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    8.8
    (8 ratings)
    9.8
    (29 ratings)
    Performance
    9.4
    (3 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.0
    (6 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    9.2
    (3 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    IBM TerraformPantheon
    Likelihood to Recommend
    IBM
    Anything that needs to be repeated en masse. Terraform is great at taking a template and have it be repeated across your estate. You can dynamically change the assets they're generating depending on certain variables. Which means though templated assets will all be similar, they're allowed to have unique properties about them. For example flattening JSON into tabular data and ensuring the flattening code is unique to the file's schema.
    Incentivized
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    Pantheon
    Pantheon is excellent for medium-large websites that require high availability and a managed workflow. It would be inappropriate for small websites because of the cost or for situations where more control of the environment is appropriate. We find it useful because we rarely do anything outside of the Drupal application.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    IBM
    • 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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    Pantheon
    • Effective use of our codebase deployment and implementation.
    • The dashboard functionality and general stability and security are excellent.
    • The server is quite consistent, and if you need assistance from the support team, they are very quick to respond.
    • Automatic updates let me ensure that my customers have safe websites without increasing my own expense.
    • The team offers excellent assistance and help for chat.
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    Cons
    IBM
    • The language itself is a bit unusual and this makes it hard for new users to get onboarded into the codebase. While it's improving with later releases, basic concepts like "map an array of options into a set of configurations" or "apply this logic if a variable is specified" are possible but unnecessarily cumbersome.
    • The 'Terraform Plan' operation could be substantially more sophisticated. There are many situations where a Terraform file could never work but successfully passes the 'plan' phase only to fail during the 'apply' phase.
    • Environment migrations could be smoother. Renaming/refactoring files is a challenge because of the need to use 'Terraform mv' commands, etc.
    Incentivized
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    Pantheon
    • Pricing structure has too large of a jump between Basic and Performance plans
    • Have run into issues with prescribed WP updates not working through dashboard and having to do manually.
    • Pantheon site dashboard occasionally is unavailable (the site is never affected though)
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    Likelihood to Renew
    IBM
    Still the best provisioning tool out there and good support from the community as well in terms of shared knowledge
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    Pantheon
    The environment is stable and we have not had any issues/downtime. The annual cost is reasonable.
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    IBM
    The syntax itself is pretty straightforward. The documentation is well-maintained & easy to follow. Most cloud providers, even smaller ones, maintain official provider libraries, making discovery & learning a breeze. Some, like GCP, even provide high-level libraries on top of their own more primitive provider, making building complex infra much more manageable. The language itself is cloud-agnostic, so you can literally manage resources from multiple providers in a single Terraform repo.
    Read full review
    Pantheon
    Pantheon is an easy system, especially to the users with previous experience with other similar platform and the interface is clear enough to easily understand how things operates. On the Cloud deployment everything also works effectively and the technical team from Pantheon community are very helpful on providing the necessary assistant to their customers.
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    Performance
    IBM
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Pantheon
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    IBM
    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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    Pantheon
    Even tier 1 Pantheon chat and ticket support are knowledgeable, competent, and useful. They routinely understand and promptly resolve urgent, complex, and/or unusual issues that other hosts need to escalate to tier 2 or tier 3 support personnel. I honestly can't think of a truly negative or disappointing support experience in the years I've used Pantheon hosting for client websites.
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    Implementation Rating
    IBM
    Implementation is straight forward. Never had issues as the team is already very familiar with Terraform installation from previous projects and roles
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    Pantheon
    Once the environments were up and running, the implementation was easy to synchronize with latest data prior to switchover.
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    Alternatives Considered
    IBM
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Pantheon
    Although it may seem a good fit for a company that needs extra control over the deployment process and development process, for a firm that is mainly concentrating on SEO, it would be an overkill. Pantheon provides that sweet automation that allows us to shed some weight on development and focus on our business activities.
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    Return on Investment
    IBM
    • 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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    Pantheon
    • Pantheon allows ordinary sites to excel esp if there is consistent development going on behind the scenes.
    • Website management is super easy and the hosting fee gets paid off as you save on developer hours.
    • Expensive for those who are not consistently developing on the platform, there are other options out there at better price points.
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots

    IBM Terraform Screenshots

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

    Pantheon Screenshots

    Screenshot of where to find out in seconds if a site is ready to launch. Launch Check can be used to get recommendations and discover site issues fast with reports based on over 50 automated checks.Screenshot of the Developer Dashboard, used to build, launch, and run Drupal and WordPress sites. Interface via SFTP or Git, deploy and scale sites, and access tools like backups and one-click core updates. Add team members and control access.