CircleCI vs Terraform
CircleCI
circleci.com
Terraform
developer.hashicorp.comSide by side
| Figure | CircleCI | Terraform |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $15/mo | $0.10/mo |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 10 |
| Spec score · Rollback Management | 8.1 (#8) | 8.6 (#2) |
| Compliance | CircleCI states that it is SOC 2 Type II compliant and has a FedRAMP Tailored designation. | HashiCorp states that Terraform is covered by SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, and ISO 27018 certifications. |
| Founded | 2011 | 2012 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Who it serves | CircleCI describes its tooling as serving developers, developer experience teams, and businesses seeking speed, focus, and control in software delivery. | HashiCorp describes Terraform Community Edition as a downloadable tool for practitioners and HCP Terraform’s free features as suitable for small teams, with paid collaboration and governance features for larger organizations. |
Plans
Terraform
- FreeFree
- StandardPriced on request
- PremiumPriced on request
- HCP Terraform FreeFree
- Terraform Community EditionFree
- HCP Terraform Essentials$0.10 a month
- HCP Terraform Standard$0.47 a month
- HCP Terraform Premium$0.99 a month
- EssentialsPrice not published
- Terraform EnterprisePriced on request
In their own words
CircleCI
CircleCI provides CI/CD tooling for engineering teams to ship code and validate changes. Smarter Testing includes test impact analysis, dynamic test splitting, and automatic reruns of failed tests. Execution options include Docker, Linux, Arm, Windows, macOS, and self-hosted runners. CircleCI Cloud supports repositories hosted on GitHub, GitLab, GitLab self-managed, Bitbucket Cloud, and Cursor Origin, which is in beta. Teams can use Orbs, shareable configuration packages, and private orbs are available across listed plans. CircleCI Deploys lets teams monitor incremental releases and roll back automatically. Security controls include encrypted source-code communication, restricted contexts, audit logging, isolated build sandboxes, and OpenID Connect support. CircleCI says it is SOC 2 Type II compliant and has a FedRAMP Tailored designation. Its API supports programmatic interaction with pipelines, projects, and organizations. A free plan is listed, and Performance starts at $15 a month. Free-plan credits expire after a month without rollover; paid credits roll over and expire after a year.
Terraform
Terraform is an infrastructure-as-code tool for defining, provisioning, and managing cloud and on-premises resources through human-readable configuration files. Its core process is to write a configuration, review an execution plan, then apply approved changes. Providers connect Terraform to services through APIs, and the Terraform Registry lists providers for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, GitHub, and Splunk. Modules package reusable infrastructure configurations that users can find or publish in the Registry. The free Community Edition is a downloadable command-line tool. HCP Terraform adds remote execution, repository connections to GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket that can trigger plans after changes, and an API. It stores state remotely with encryption at rest and offers workspaces, single sign-on, and role-based access controls. HCP Terraform and Terraform Enterprise support Sentinel policies. HashiCorp cautions that policy-as-code is a guardrail, not a security boundary, and trusted providers and modules matter because they can access workspace variables and state. Downloads are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.