KICS vs Terratest

KICS is a free, open-source static analysis solution powered by Checkmarx. It scans Infrastructure as Code for security vulnerabilities, compliance issues, and configuration mistakes across Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS CloudFormation, Ansible, Helm, Google Deployment Manager, AWS SAM, Microsoft ARM, Azure Blueprints, OpenAPI, Pulumi, Crossplane, Knative, and Serverless Framework files. Its security queries can be edited, extended, or supplemented with new queries, using OPA Rego policy language. Documented CI and delivery integrations include GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Azure Pipelines, CircleCI, Bitbucket Pipelines, Terraform Cloud, AWS CodeBuild, pre-commit hooks, and others. A Visual Studio Code extension can scan automatically. KICS runs as a Docker image, from source, or through downloadable Linux, Windows, and macOS releases. Reports can be exported as JSON, SARIF, GitLab SAST, JUnit, HTML, PDF, CycloneDX, ASFF, or CSV. Terraform functions and environment variables are unsupported, and unofficial or custom Terraform modules are not supported.

Terratest is an open-source Go library for writing automated tests for infrastructure code. Its helpers cover Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Packer, Helm, Docker, and Kubernetes, as well as AWS, Azure, and GCP APIs. Tests can run infrastructure tools, deploy real resources, validate the resulting environment, and remove resources afterward. Validation can use HTTP requests, API calls, SSH connections, and shell commands. The documentation covers unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, along with parallelism, retries, error handling, and static analysis. Terratest runs locally and supports configuration-compliance checks, provisioning tests, deployed checks, and policy as code. The project is free under the Apache 2.0 License. The quick start requires Go 1.26 or later and OpenTofu or Terraform for its examples. The documentation recommends cleaning up after tests because they may create resources in real environments. General questions and issue reports go through GitHub Discussions and Issues; Gruntwork offers commercial support to companies using Terratest in production. The v1 line receives security fixes only while v2 is in development.