head to head · open source
Pulumi vs infracost
Pulumi has 25,694 GitHub stars, 1,431 forks, 2,419 open issues and last shipped yesterday. infracost has 12,521 stars, 688 forks, 22 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. Pulumi leads on adoption by 105% (25,694 vs 12,521 stars). Pulumi is written in Go under Apache-2.0; infracost is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Pulumi has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, infracost 5%. Pulumi was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (aws, azure, cloud, gcp), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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
| Pulumi | infracost | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 13K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 688 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Pulumi if
- You weight community size — 26K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-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 Pulumi
Pulumi is an open source infrastructure as code tool that lets teams define and deploy cloud infrastructure using general purpose programming languages instead of YAML, aimed at developers, platform engineers, and agents working across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Kubernetes.
read the full Pulumi overview →
About infracost
Infracost is an open source cloud cost intelligence tool, written in Go and licensed Apache 2.0, that estimates cloud spend and enforces FinOps policies for Terraform, Terragrunt, CloudFormation and AWS CDK before changes are deployed — built for engineers, platform and DevOps teams, FinOps practitioners, and AI coding agents.
read the full infracost overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Pulumi or infracost more popular?
Pulumi has 25,694 GitHub stars and infracost has 12,521. Pulumi has the larger community by that measure.
Are Pulumi and infracost free?
Both are open source. Pulumi is licensed under Apache-2.0 and infracost under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Pulumi and infracost?
Pulumi 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, Pulumi or infracost?
Choose Pulumi if you want the larger community (25,694 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose infracost if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.