head to head · open source
OpenTofu vs infracost
OpenTofu has 30,703 GitHub stars, 1,414 forks, 320 open issues and last shipped yesterday. infracost has 12,605 stars, 701 forks, 22 open issues and last shipped yesterday. OpenTofu leads on adoption by 144% (30,703 vs 12,605 stars). OpenTofu is written in Go under MPL-2.0; infracost is written in Go under Apache-2.0. OpenTofu has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, infracost 6%. infracost was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| OpenTofu | infracost | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 31K | ★ 13K |
| License | MPL-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 701 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick OpenTofu if
- You weight community size — 31K stars and counting
- You want the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick infracost if
- You want the infracost feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and infracost fits your workflow better
About OpenTofu
Homepage Slack Get Started OpenTofu is an OSS tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. OpenTofu can manage existing and popular service providers as well as custom in house solutions. Getting help and contributing Have a question? Post it in GitHub Discussions Open a GitHub issue Join us in the opentofu channel on the CNCF Slack! Want to contribute? Please read the Contribution Guide. Recurring Events Community Meetings on Wednesdays at 12:30 UTC (calendar) Technical Steering Committee Meetings every other Tuesday at 4pm UTC (calendar) [!TIP] For more OpenTofu events…
read the full OpenTofu overview →
About infracost
Cloud cost intelligence for engineers, AI coding agents, and CI/CD. Infracost shows cloud cost estimates and FinOps best practices for Terraform, Terragrunt, CloudFormation, and AWS CDK — before changes are deployed . See costs in your terminal, your editor, your AI coding agent, or right in pull requests. The Infracost Dev toolkit Infracost meets engineers wherever they work with infrastructure code — the terminal, their editor, their AI coding agent, and their CI pipeline. Every entry point talks to the same engine, the same pricing data, and the same FinOps policies, so a check you set up once shows up…
read the full infracost overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is OpenTofu or infracost more popular?
OpenTofu has 30,703 GitHub stars and infracost has 12,605. OpenTofu has the larger community by that measure.
Are OpenTofu and infracost free?
Both are open source. OpenTofu is licensed under MPL-2.0 and infracost under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between OpenTofu and infracost?
OpenTofu is written in Go and infracost in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, OpenTofu or infracost?
Choose OpenTofu if you want the larger community (30,703 stars) or its MPL-2.0 licence terms. Choose infracost if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.