head to head · open source
Pulumi vs terragrunt
Pulumi has 25,695 GitHub stars, 1,431 forks, 2,419 open issues and last shipped today. terragrunt has 9,837 stars, 1,227 forks, 235 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Pulumi leads on adoption by 161% (25,695 vs 9,837 stars). Pulumi is written in Go under Apache-2.0; terragrunt is written in Go under MIT. Pulumi has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, terragrunt 12%. Pulumi was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (aws), 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 | terragrunt | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 9.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| 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 terragrunt if
- You want the terragrunt feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and terragrunt 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 terragrunt
Terragrunt is an MIT licensed, Go based orchestration tool that lets Infrastructure as Code written in OpenTofu or Terraform scale, and it is built for DevOps and cloud infrastructure teams that already run that tooling.
read the full terragrunt overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Pulumi or terragrunt more popular?
Pulumi has 25,695 GitHub stars and terragrunt has 9,837. Pulumi has the larger community by that measure.
Are Pulumi and terragrunt free?
Both are open source. Pulumi is licensed under Apache-2.0 and terragrunt under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Pulumi and terragrunt?
Pulumi is written in Go and terragrunt 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 terragrunt?
Choose Pulumi if you want the larger community (25,695 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose terragrunt if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.