Best Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Tools in 2025 for DevOps

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has become a cornerstone of modern DevOps, enabling teams to provision and manage infrastructure through code. By treating infrastructure configurations as code, organizations achieve greater automation, consistency, and scalability in their environments. In 2025, several IaC tools stand out for their features and impact. This post highlights the top IaC tools of 2025, focusing on Spacelift, which leads the category and compares them with other popular solutions like Terraform, OpenTofu, and Pulumi. We’ll discuss key features, pros and cons, and ideal use cases for each, covering both open-source projects and enterprise-grade platforms.

Spacelift

Spacelift is an IaC orchestration platform that has emerged as a leader in 2025 for managing infrastructure deployments. It acts as a management layer for your IaC workflows, supporting multiple IaC frameworks – including Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, Ansible, and more – all in one place. Spacelift was even recognized with a CloudX 2025 award for cloud infrastructure, underscoring its leading role in the cloud ecosystem. DevOps teams use Spacelift to centrally coordinate infrastructure changes with robust controls, which helps resolve the “speed vs. control” paradox by accelerating delivery without compromising security or governance.

Key Features

• Multi-IaC Support: Manage different IaC tools under one roof, enabling cloud-agnostic operations.
• Policy as Code (OPA): Define fine-grained rules and enforce compliance across every change.
• Stack Dependencies: Automate multi-layer deployments by modeling infrastructure as a dependency graph.
• Drift Detection: Continuously monitor for and remediate configuration drift.
• Self-Service via Blueprints: Provide developers with pre-approved templates for safe self-service.
• Integrations & Extensibility: Offers unlimited integrations, webhooks, and custom runners.

Terraform

HashiCorp’s Terraform remains one of the most popular IaC tools in 2025, known for its declarative syntax and provider ecosystem. It allows teams to define desired state infrastructure in HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language), then provision resources across nearly every cloud provider.

Key Features

• Multi-cloud provider support.
• Declarative, immutable infrastructure approach.
• Robust state management.
• Huge library of community modules.
• Supported by Terraform Cloud/Enterprise for collaboration.

OpenTofu

OpenTofu emerged as a fork of Terraform after its license change, carrying forward the open-source tradition. It offers full compatibility with Terraform configurations while introducing community-driven enhancements.

Key Features

• Fully open-source (MPL 2.0).
• Compatible with Terraform syntax and modules.
• Adds state encryption and early variable validation.
• Backed by the Linux Foundation and community contributors.

Pulumi

Pulumi brings a unique approach: using real programming languages (Python, TypeScript, Go, C#, etc.) instead of DSLs to define infrastructure. This empowers developers to apply familiar coding practices to IaC.

Key Features

• Multi-language support.
• Full use of loops, conditionals, and functions.
• Secrets and state management built-in.
• Supports all major clouds, Kubernetes, and more.
• Open-source SDK with SaaS backend option

Conclusion

In 2025, Infrastructure as Code is both mature and evolving. Spacelift leads as the orchestration layer for multi-tool workflows, Terraform remains a trusted standard, OpenTofu ensures open-source continuity, and Pulumi offers developer-friendly flexibility.

Choosing the right tool depends on your team’s size, expertise, and governance needs. Many organizations combine tools for example, using Terraform or OpenTofu as the base IaC language and Spacelift as the orchestration platform or adopting Pulumi for specific code-heavy use cases.

The good news? No matter which tool you pick, IaC in 2025 empowers you to build, scale, and manage infrastructure with greater speed and reliability than ever before.