Spacelift

What do you like best about the product?

Intuitive UI with commenting and ad hoc stack locking for collaboration. Great integration with Gitlab to see change summaries and links to runs.

What do you dislike about the product?

Tough question as the feature requests we’ve raised have been implemented!

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It has enabled broader collaboration on IAC, removing the bottleneck on infrastructure focussed teams by providing an intuitive way of browsing and consuming Terraform modules. Developers are able to make changes confidently on their own due to the clear feedback provided in the UI. Spaces and Policies have also allowed us to implement guardrails to meet security and compliance requirements.

What do you like best about the product?

Spacelift integrates nicely into our existing CI/CD workflows, and it conveniently manages state for our small team. The nested spaces with inheritance are easy to use and make it straightforward to work with collaborators who need different permission sets, with relatively little tofu specification required. It also integrates well with Terragrunt, which both we and our collaborators make use of.

What do you dislike about the product?

The pricing model for small teams feels a bit inconvenient. We’re very grateful there’s a free tier, but limiting it to only two users is restrictive, and the jump to the next tier is too cost-prohibitive for our small research team. It would also be helpful to have an option to toggle the AI assistant off in the interface when we’re not using it.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It underpins the new infrastructure we’re building, and this time we’re using it to do so entirely as infrastructure as code.

What do you like best about the product?

The most impressive thing about Spacelift, to me, is that it simply works. It takes some time to get set up properly, but once it’s in place we can go years without having to fiddle with settings, and everything keeps running smoothly. It’s refreshing to have a product that doesn’t constantly need support. At our costs, Spacelift returns roughly a third of that value in eliminated manual work; 3-4 times return on the subscription cost. That's before counting the incidents it prevents, which makes the value delivered substantially larger than what we're paying for it.

What do you dislike about the product?

Diffs UI: Sometimes, when I’m reviewing diffs, it doesn’t do a great job of clearly showing the actual changes. Certain kinds of edits end up looking like large sections were deleted and then added back, even when there’s only one small difference in the middle. I understand why this happens, but it would be nice to have a smarter diff view that highlights the true changes more accurately in those cases.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Spacelift is our OpenTofu CI/CD layer, replacing ad-hoc tofu apply runs from laptops. The policies we’ve layered on top address a specific set of governance and safety problems: blast-radius control at scale, stale-run hygiene, segregation of duties and change control, preventing irreversible mistakes, and automating around those blocks instead of simply freezing.

The net benefit to the company is that these governance/compliance guardrails and operational safety nets are expressed as versioned, reviewable code (Rego) rather than tribal knowledge, Slack reminders, or a manual runbook. That approach scales across many AWS accounts and environments without requiring a human gatekeeper for every change, while still preventing the two costliest failure modes: an unreviewed production change landing, or infrastructure silently destroying monitoring and alerting.

What do you like best about the product?

Flexibility and deep orchestration power

What do you dislike about the product?

Limited and non-practical documentation for complex setups

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Marrying Ansible and Terraform

What do you like best about the product?

I like how Spacelift makes it easier to manage deployments with its lock feature coming in handy for testing. The ability to auto-publish the module registry on MR merge is helpful, and I appreciate that we can run stacks inside our own network with ease. I find it secure that each stack gets its own cloud identity. I also enjoy that Spacelift watches our folder for file changes and runs tasks, with all changes visible in Git for easy review. It's also great that Spacelift helps run Terraform inside our own machines, ensuring everything operates securely within our network.

What do you dislike about the product?

It's a bit expensive. We understand there are a lot more features Spacelift provides, but there should be an option if a customer is not using every feature they can remain on some kind of basic plan and continue with integrations they already have. Our bill is expected quite significantly due to these new features, but we only use Spacelift for what I already mentioned. For that use case, the new pricing is difficult to come to terms with. Points were deducted only for cost.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Spacelift simplifies managing deployments, runs stacks within our network, assigns unique cloud identities, and tracks changes in Git for easy review. The lock feature aids testing, and it automates module registry publishing on MR merges.

What do you like best about the product?

Ease of use, Slack integrations, generally it's fast and intuitive to pick up how it works. I was connected with an account team that was understanding of my limited use for now and they were still eager to support.

What do you dislike about the product?

The free tier is definitely enough for day to day use but the jump in pricing to get more features is a bit steep. a more guided, curated onboarding would have been nice to narrow all the options for how to potentially implement Spacelift.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Visibility and ease of management for my infrastructure. I like how the UI helps me break down my different stacks and resources.

What do you like best about the product?

I use Spacelift to manage my Terraform IaC, and it makes state management super easy while running Terraform very fast. I think the UI is very clean. I like using the module registry and module tests, as it makes managing our Terraform repos as modules super easy. It streamlines the process of creating and maintaining modules, allowing us to release changes like any other immutable resource, and removes concerns about breaking new module versions. The initial setup of Spacelift was also easy.

What do you dislike about the product?

The UI, while visually stunning, can feel cluttered at times, making it hard to find exactly what I'm looking for without having to click around a ton.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use Spacelift to manage Terraform IaC, making state management super easy and running Terraform fast. Its module registry simplifies releasing changes without breakage, enhancing module management.

What do you like best about the product?

What I like best about Spacelift is its flexible policy engine for controlling Terraform workflows. At Eventbrite, policies can determine which stacks run, when plans are created, and whether changes require approval, giving teams a strong balance of automation, visibility, and safety. Combined with pull-request integration and private workers, Spacelift makes infrastructure delivery more consistent, auditable, and secure.

What do you dislike about the product?

What I dislike most about Spacelift is that the operational model can sometimes feel complex. Access permissions, approval ownership, worker-pool capacity, and policy or notification configuration can create bottlenecks and require SRE support, especially when teams need to test changes quickly. The platform is powerful, but getting the setup and guardrails right takes time and clear documentation.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Spacelift replaces fragmented, manual Terraform execution with a shared workflow for planning, approving, and applying infrastructure changes. At Eventbrite, it provides pull-request visibility, policy-driven controls, centralised state and run history, and secure private worker pools for internal services. This reduces deployment risk and makes infrastructure changes easier to review, repeat, and audit, while allowing SRE to provide guardrails without manually running every deployment.

What do you like best about the product?

I like how easy it was to set up and integrate Spacelift with all our existing tooling. It helped us streamline how we deploy and manage infrastructure, reducing a clutter of CI/CD pipelines into a one-stop solution for our infra. The integration was seamless, allowing us to onboard without any issues. Spacelift has also improved our collaboration and developer velocity by making it easier to manage infrastructure and GitOps pipelines than doing it manually.

What do you dislike about the product?

We have many workflows including lambda functions and CDK. That only required a bit of time to set up because there's no full support for the CDK deploy workflow, which bundles and uploads assets. We had to split the steps to package and then deploy. Otherwise, all good.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Spacelift helps us manage infrastructure at scale, streamlines collaboration, and boosts developer velocity. It's easier for managing infrastructure and GitOps pipelines compared to manual methods, providing a unified platform for our CI/CD needs.

My main use case for Spacelift is to manage the infrastructure and accounts stacks for AWS and Azure. I use Spacelift to manage my AWS and Azure stacks by using Terraform integration with the Spacelift YML file, where I provision the spaces and manage the different stacks under the different spaces. For the state augmentation and state management, I use Spacelift since it is an independent solution, which proves useful for end-user developers to deploy their resources to the cloud directly.

Spacelift offers the best features that allow me to manage the stacks for different AWS and Azure accounts with different cloud providers while supporting additional services including OpenTofu, Terraform, Azure ARM templates, and CloudFormation.

The best feature I appreciate about Spacelift is that I can immediately back out the resources that are provided with Terraform in Spacelift. When I want to provision a new resource, I simply need to publish code and push it to the repository. The CI/CD automatically triggers the stack, and the stack allows me confirmation before deploying the resource and providing me with complete details of the resources that are deployed through the stacks. Regarding AWS and Azure specifically, they provide clear visibility for the resources that are deployed. With the templates and the secret variable management, I can keep everything secured.

Spacelift has positively impacted my organization by automating deployed nodes for Linux virtual machines, which provide high availability for stack deployment. The runs that have been triggered are quite fast, with no need for dependency on other teams to get them deployed or approved. The overall support for particular stack failures has been fabulous and has really impacted the company as it moves forward.

Regarding Spacelift specifically, if I have ten runs scheduled at a time, based on the particular Linux virtual machines that Spacelift uses, and if I have provisioned multiple nodes or Docker containers, all ten runs that are scheduled are executed quickly and saves a considerable amount of time rather than entering a pending state until the first run is completed. Therefore, efficiency has improved significantly.

Spacelift is good overall, but there are little explanatory aspects, such as navigating particular stacks, that are somewhat difficult to understand for newcomers, especially regarding the process, stack setup, and variable setup for deployments. If the documentation were more narrative, it would be much better.

The authentication for end-users requires access, and if there could be a read-only space where non-authorized users can see a non-authorized page, that would be helpful. A non-authorized user who wants to see some progress with read-only access could do so.

I have not yet interacted with the AI capabilities of Spacelift, but if they are improved, I think the Git-based tools will provide the same type of stability, and governance will be managed specifically as Spacelift is already taking care of governance for other applications and tools with respect to company policies.

I have been using Spacelift for the last two years.

Spacelift is stable.

Spacelift's scalability is quite good. Based on the requests and the Linux Docker machines I provision, it becomes more stable, and the runs happen very quickly.

Customer support has been good overall, but I have not engaged it much as I can fix things internally with the documents and different blogs available on the internet.

I previously used Terraform Cloud. I switched from Terraform Cloud to Spacelift based on pricing and the processing model, along with some additional features that Spacelift provides.

It was reasonably easy for my team to adopt and start using Spacelift, coming from a cloud background. If it were made more narrative, it would be easier for non-technical people to become accustomed to Spacelift. I describe the learning curve for Spacelift as straightforward but requiring some support at the initial stage.

I incorporated Spacelift directly with the Spacelift support and sales team rather than purchasing through the AWS Marketplace.

I have seen a return on investment. The metrics show that fewer employees are needed, money is saved based on past experiences with different cloud management or Infrastructure as Code management tools, and efficiency has improved significantly in terms of Infrastructure as Code deployment.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been based on the stacks, states, and resources provisioned or processed by Spacelift, which incurred different costs. The spaces have been a major aspect of managing things, and the contacts for the resources I provide internally in Spacelift are quite affordable, effective, and useful.

Only Spacelift was evaluated after Terraform Cloud.

I would advise others looking into using Spacelift to give it a try first, as you will love it. I suggest everyone look at Spacelift and dip their toes into it first, as you will definitely love it and will want to use it in the future.

Hybrid Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)