OpenStack Heat vs Terramate

OpenStack Heat is a free, open-source orchestration service for composite applications in OpenStack. Declarative templates describe infrastructure and relationships in human-readable files that can be version-controlled. Heat can create instances, floating IPs, volumes, security groups, and users, while supporting instance high availability, autoscaling, and nested stacks. It runs HOT templates written in YAML and also accepts AWS CloudFormation templates. Templates can integrate with Puppet and Ansible, and operators can extend capabilities with plugins. The service exposes an OpenStack-native REST API and a CloudFormation-compatible Query API. Access is available through a command-line interface, RESTful queries, and the OpenStack dashboard. Heat runs on Linux as a self-hosted service and is provided under the Apache 2.0 license. Installation assumes an existing OpenStack environment with Compute, Image Service, and Identity, with guidance covering Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Ubuntu, and Debian.

Terramate is an Infrastructure as Code orchestration and observability platform for platform teams. It helps teams package reusable infrastructure patterns so developers and AI agents can self-serve across environments. Terramate Cloud lists Terraform, OpenTofu, and Terragrunt as supported tools. Its capabilities include stacks, orchestration, custom workflows, rendered pull request plan previews, GitOps, drift detection, and drift reconciliation. Integrations include GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, Bitbucket Pipelines, and Azure DevOps, and pull request integration is documented for GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and other VCS platforms. Terramate says it does not need access to customer cloud accounts, state files, or source code; the CLI removes sensitive values from plan data before syncing it to the cloud. It lists AES-256 encryption at rest and HTTPS with TLS 1.2 for communications. Supported clouds are AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. State management is self-hosted. Community is free for up to 2 users and 1,000 resources; Teams costs $449 a month and supports unlimited users and up to 5,000 resources. Enterprise pricing is custom.