OpenTofu

OpenTofu is an open-source infrastructure-as-code tool that enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. Born as a fork of Terraform in August 2023 after HashiCorp changed Terraform's license from MPL 2.0 to the Business Source License (BSL), OpenTofu is developed under the Linux Foundation with backing from over 1,500 community members and companies including Spacelift, env0, Harness, Scalr, and others. With over 25,000 stars as of 2026, OpenTofu maintains full backward compatibility with Terraform through version 1.5.x while adding new community-driven features. Key features include: declarative infrastructure-as-code (describing infrastructure using HashiCorp Configuration Language HCL or JSON, with resources like virtual machines, databases, networks, and DNS records managed as code), provider ecosystem (compatible with all existing Terraform providers for AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Docker, and hundreds of other services), state management (tracking infrastructure state in a state file that can be stored locally or remotely in S3, GCS, Azure, Consul, or HTTP backends with locking), plan and apply workflow (previewing changes before execution with the plan command, then applying changes with the apply command), resource graph (building a dependency graph of all resources and creating, modifying, or destroying them in the correct order), module system (reusing infrastructure configurations via reusable modules shared through the OpenTofu Registry), workspace support (managing multiple environments like dev, staging, and production from the same configuration), native state encryption (a community-driven feature not available in Terraform, encrypting state files at rest for enhanced security), and full CLI compatibility with Terraform commands.