terraform/website/source/intro/vs/index.html.markdown

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layout: "intro"
page_title: "Terraform vs. Other Software"
sidebar_current: "vs-other"
description: |-
  Terraform provides a flexible abstraction of resources and providers. This model allows for representing everything from physical hardware, virtual machines, and containers, to email and DNS providers. Because of this flexibility, Terraform can be used to solve many different problems. This means there are a number of existing tools that overlap with the capabilities of Terraform. We compare Terraform to a number of these tools, but it should be noted that Terraform is not mutually exclusive with other systems. It can be used to manage a single application, or the entire datacenter.
---

# Terraform vs. Other Software

Terraform provides a flexible abstraction of resources and providers. This model
allows for representing everything from physical hardware, virtual machines, and
containers, to email and DNS providers. Because of this flexibility, Terraform
can be used to solve many different problems. This means there are a number of
existing tools that overlap with the capabilities of Terraform. We compare Terraform
to a number of these tools, but it should be noted that Terraform is not mutually
exclusive with other systems. It can be used to manage a single application, or the
entire datacenter.

Use the navigation on the left to read comparisons of Terraform versus other
specific systems.