Top 10 Terraform cloud alternatives: the DevOps guide to escaping "State File Nightmares"

Terraform Cloud, a popular tool for Infrastructure as Code (IaC), faces criticism for its pricing models and management complexities, particularly as organizations scale. The tool's traditional reliance on HCL scripting and manual state management has led to governance challenges and unexpected costs, prompting some DevOps teams to explore alternatives that offer more automation and cost efficiency. Platforms like Qovery abstract infrastructure management, allowing developers to provision resources without writing HCL code, thereby enhancing developer autonomy and optimizing costs with features like ephemeral environments. Other alternatives such as Spacelift, env0, and Scalr provide specialized solutions for enterprise governance, while open-source options like OpenTofu and Atlantis offer code-first flexibility. These alternatives aim to streamline infrastructure delivery and management, moving beyond the limitations of Terraform Cloud's traditional model, and are particularly appealing to teams seeking to reduce manual overhead and enhance operational agility in the platform engineering era.