Terraform vs OpenTofu in 2026: Which Should You Choose?

If you are standing up infrastructure as code today, you have a choice you did not have a few years ago: Terraform or OpenTofu. Both speak (almost) the same language, both manage the same clouds, and both will happily run your plan and apply. So which one should you actually pick?

Here is the short version, then the reasoning.

The short version

• New project, no strong vendor ties? Default to OpenTofu. It is open source (MPL 2.0, under the Linux Foundation), feature-compatible, and free of licensing risk.
• Already deep in Terraform Cloud / HCP, or you depend on a Terraform-only feature? Stay on Terraform — there is no urgency to move.
• Either way, write portable HCL. The expensive mistake is not the tool; it is infrastructure nobody can reproduce.

How we got here

Terraform was open source (MPL 2.0) for most of its life. In 2023 HashiCorp relicensed it under the Business Source License (BSL), which restricts competing commercial use. The community responded with OpenTofu, a fork that stayed open source and is now governed by the Linux Foundation. For most teams the BSL change is irrelevant — but if you build a product on top of Terraform, it matters, and OpenTofu removes the question entirely.

Feature parity

For the day-to-day — providers, modules, remote state, plan/apply, workspaces — OpenTofu and Terraform are interchangeable. OpenTofu has shipped its own additions (state encryption, early variable evaluation, provider-defined functions) and Terraform continues to evolve too. The gap in either direction is small and rarely decides a real project.

# This module is identical under both tools.
module "vpc" {
  source  = "terraform-aws-modules/vpc/aws"
  version = "~> 5.0"
  name    = "prod"
  cidr    = "10.0.0.0/16"
}

Migrating an existing project

For most stacks, migration is close to a drop-in:

1. Pin your provider and module versions.
2. Install OpenTofu and run tofu init against your existing state.
3. Run tofu plan and confirm no changes are proposed.
4. Swap the binary in CI and keep your remote state backend as-is.

The risk is not the engine — it is unpinned versions and untested pipelines. We always migrate behind a green plan and a rollback path, never on a Friday.

Our recommendation

We deliver new client infrastructure as OpenTofu by default: open source, no licensing overhang, and identical ergonomics. When a client is already standardized on Terraform and happy, we leave it — the tool is rarely the bottleneck. What matters far more is that every resource lives in reviewed code, runs through CI/CD, and is owned by you.

That is exactly how we run our DevOps and Cloud engagements — Terraform or OpenTofu, applied through pipelines, with state you control. If you want a second opinion on your IaC setup, get in touch.