| --- |
| page_title: Terraform vs. Alternatives |
| description: An overview of how Terraform compares to alternative software and tools. |
| --- |
| |
| # Terraform vs. Alternatives |
| |
| Terraform provides a flexible abstraction of resources and providers. This model |
| allows for representing everything from physical hardware, virtual machines, and |
| containers, to email and DNS providers. Because of this flexibility, Terraform |
| can be used to solve many different problems. This means there are a number of |
| existing tools that overlap with the capabilities of Terraform. We compare Terraform |
| to a number of these tools, but it should be noted that Terraform is not mutually |
| exclusive with other systems. It can be used to manage a single application, or the |
| entire datacenter. |
| |
| Learn how Terraform compares to: |
| |
| - [Chef, Puppet, etc.](/terraform/intro/vs/chef-puppet) |
| - [CloudFormation, Heat, etc.](/terraform/intro/vs/cloudformation) |
| - [Boto, Fog, etc.](/terraform/intro/vs/boto) |
| - [Custom Solutions](/terraform/intro/vs/custom) |
