terraform-plugin-testing vs Test Kitchen

terraform-plugin-testing is a free Go helper module for testing Terraform providers on Linux and macOS. It supports unit tests that exercise plugin code in isolation without network connections, and acceptance tests that run real Terraform plan, apply, refresh, and destroy operations. Acceptance testing includes Lifecycle, Import, Refresh, and Query modes. The plancheck package can inspect empty or non-empty plans, resource and data source values, and actions. The statecheck package checks known values, sensitive values, and comparisons between resource or data source attributes. The framework uses a local Terraform binary with standard Go testing tools, including go test and the testing package, so tests can run in continuous integration environments such as GitHub Actions. Acceptance runs may create and destroy infrastructure, which can consume quotas and incur expenses. Prerequisites include a recent stable Go release, Terraform CLI 0.12.26 or later, provider and resource access, and TF_ACC set to a value. The project uses Mozilla Public License v2.0.

Test Kitchen is a free test harness for running infrastructure code in isolation on one or more platforms. Its workflow uses create, converge, setup, verify, and destroy commands to provision environments and test infrastructure code. Documented drivers cover Amazon EC2, Apache CloudStack, DigitalOcean, Docker through Dokken, Google Cloud Platform, Hetzner Cloud, Vagrant, Azure, Hyper-V, OpenStack, and VMware products. Which drivers are available depends on the driver gems installed in the Ruby environment. Provisioning options include Chef Infra, Cinc Client, Habitat, PowerShell DSC, and shell scripts; listed verification integrations include Cinc Auditor, Chef InSpec, and Serverspec. Community plugins add Ansible, Puppet, and Salt provisioners. Installation is available through RubyGems, system packages, or Cinc Workstation, but Test Kitchen itself does not bundle Cinc or Chef tooling. Requirements include a 64-bit operating system and enabled CPU virtualization. The project uses Apache License 2.0 and points users to Chef Community Slack for community assistance. The documentation notes known issues and no current maintainer for kitchen-docker, recommending kitchen-dokken instead.