IBM completed its $6.4 billion acquisition of HashiCorp on February 27, 2025. The HCP Terraform free tier ended March 31, 2026. And Terraform's CDKTF framework was quietly deprecated in December 2025. None of these events broke your Terraform infrastructure. But together they raised a question that's harder to dismiss: what are you actually paying for, and what happens if the roadmap shifts again?

Platform teams running this evaluation now are mostly asking three things: is the pricing model sustainable as infrastructure grows, is the platform flexible enough to support frameworks beyond Terraform, and how painful is it to migrate from Terraform Cloud to something new? This post answers all three, with env zero as the specific alternative we know best.

At a glance HCP Terraform (formerly Terraform Cloud) is HashiCorp's managed IaC execution platform, now owned by IBM. Free tier ended March 31, 2026. Current paid tiers: Essentials ($0.10/resource/month), Standard ($0.47/resource/month), Premium ($0.99/resource/month). Supported IaC frameworks: Terraform and OpenTofu only. env zero is a cloud governance platform rated 4.7/5 on G2 across 150+ reviews that runs Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Pulumi, Helm, Kubernetes, and CloudFormation from one control plane, with unlimited concurrent runs across all plans.

What changed in 2025-2026, and why teams are re-evaluating now

Three events compounded quickly.

IBM acquired HashiCorp. The deal closed February 27, 2025, for $6.4 billion. IBM's stated rationale was integrating HashiCorp's tooling with its Red Hat and hybrid cloud portfolio. Practically, the product roadmap has continued without significant changes to direction. The Business Source License (BSL) that HashiCorp introduced in August 2023 remains in place. But for enterprise teams doing vendor reviews, "acquired by IBM" now appears in your risk assessment, and that changes procurement conversations in ways that don't show up in the product changelog.

The free tier ended. The legacy HCP Terraform free plan offered unlimited managed resources. It ended March 31, 2026. Organizations still on that plan were migrated to an enhanced Free tier capped at 500 Resources Under Management (RUM). RUM counts every resource declared in your Terraform state files, calculated hourly at your peak count.

Five hundred resources sounds reasonable until you count carefully. A single EKS cluster with its VPC, subnets, security groups, IAM roles, and node groups can consume 50-80 resources. A moderately sized AWS environment across two regions hits 500 faster than most teams expect. Before assuming you're safe on the free tier:

# Run from each workspace's root directory; requires terraform init first
terraform state list | wc -l

Run that across every workspace and total the results. The real number is often two to three times the estimate. Some teams coming from the legacy free tier found their cost going from $0 to over $15,000/year on the Standard tier, which is the primary driver behind migration activity right now.

CDKTF was deprecated. In December 2025, HashiCorp deprecated the Cloud Development Kit for Terraform (CDKTF), which let teams write Terraform configurations in TypeScript, Python, Go, Java, or C# instead of HCL. Its removal signals the direction: HCP Terraform is doubling down on HCL-native Terraform. For teams that had started building CDKTF pipelines or were evaluating it as an on-ramp to infrastructure-as-code (IaC), that option is now off the table.

Related reading: OpenTofu vs. Terraform: A Practical Guide for Enterprise Infrastructure Teams covers the license split, ecosystem divergence, and what the CDKTF sunset means for teams choosing between Terraform and its fork.

What to look for in an HCP Terraform alternative

The criteria matter more than the vendor list. These are the questions that separate platforms that fix the HCP Terraform problem from ones that trade it for a different set of constraints.

The first is pricing model transparency. HCP Terraform charges per resource. As your infrastructure grows, so does your bill. Growth is the goal of good platform engineering. An alternative that charges per run, per environment, or a flat monthly rate decouples your cost from your scale. You want a cost model that makes sense to explain to a finance team at the end of the quarter, not one that requires a spreadsheet to predict.

Framework flexibility is the second. HCP Terraform runs Terraform and OpenTofu. If your organization also uses Terragrunt for module orchestration, or if any teams run Pulumi, Kubernetes manifests, or Helm charts, you're managing multiple separate automation platforms. An alternative worth switching to consolidates those into one control plane with consistent access controls, policy enforcement, and audit logging across every framework.

State portability matters more than most teams realize until they need it. Terraform state is yours. Any platform managing your state should give you full version history, rollback to any previous state version, state locking, and an export path that doesn't require calling support. Check whether state backups are standard or gated behind an enterprise tier. If you ever need to leave the platform, extracting state files should be trivial.

Governance depth separates execution wrappers from actual governance platforms. A platform that only runs plans and applies is a continuous integration wrapper with a nicer UI. A governance platform enforces standards before, during, and after deployment, detects when infrastructure drifts from its defined state, and gives you an audit trail that holds up in a compliance review. For platform teams responsible for security posture and regulatory readiness, this distinction is where vendor evaluation really starts.

Finally, migration tooling. Any platform worth switching to has invested in making the switch non-painful. Look for a documented migration path, ideally an automated tool that maps workspaces, transfers state files, and connects your version control system without manual YAML transcription. The harder the migration, the longer the evaluation drags and the higher the switching cost if you need to move again later.

env zero was designed with all five of these criteria in mind. The sections below go through each one specifically.

Related reading: Terraform Tools to Know in 2026 maps the broader IaC ecosystem: where HCP Terraform, env zero, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, and Atlantis each fit for different team sizes and requirements.

env zero as a Terraform Cloud alternative

env zero is a cloud governance platform: it runs your IaC workflows, enforces policy, detects and remediates drift, and gives platform teams the visibility and control layer that HCP Terraform never prioritized. IaC execution is one component; governance across the infrastructure lifecycle is the product.

env zero is also a founding member of OpenTofu's Technology Steering Committee, one of the original companies that helped establish open governance for the Terraform fork. That means its roadmap is directly tied to OpenTofu's release cycle, and teams moving away from Terraform's BSL license have a clear supported path rather than a speculative bet.

Pricing that doesn't penalize scale

HCP Terraform's RUM model charges per resource per month. A 5,000-resource environment on the Standard tier runs roughly $2,350/month. As infrastructure grows, the bill compounds. The teams doing the most automation pay the most.

env zero charges per apply or per environment depending on the plan, with unlimited concurrent runs, unlimited users, and unlimited monthly deployments across all tiers. A team running 10,000 resources and triggering hundreds of applies a day pays the same as one running 500. The unit economics align with scale rather than work against it.

Cloud Compass, env zero's entry tier, starts at $1,500/month flat. That's higher than some entry-tier alternatives. Before dismissing the entry price, run the math against your current HCP Terraform Standard tier cost at your actual and projected resource count:

The break-even sits at roughly 3,200 managed resources. Above that, env zero's flat model costs less than HCP Terraform's Standard tier (before accounting for the unlimited concurrency, unlimited users, and multi-framework coverage included in every env zero plan). Cloud Navigator and Cloud Pilot (custom pricing) add full governance automation, self-service infrastructure, and enterprise integrations for teams that have grown past Cloud Compass.

Pismo, one of the leading global fintech platforms, moved infrastructure delivery from a two-month cycle to two days after adopting env zero. That change came from governed self-service and predictable workflows, not a change in cloud spend.

Multi-framework support as a strategic hedge

env zero runs Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Pulumi, Helm, Kubernetes, and CloudFormation from a single platform, with consistent Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), policy enforcement, audit logging, and cost tracking across every framework.

The argument for this isn't just operational. With CDKTF gone and OpenTofu growing to 9.8 million downloads with 300% annual growth, standardizing on a Terraform-only platform is a vendor concentration bet. The teams best positioned over the next few years are the ones that can run multiple frameworks without rebuilding their governance layer each time one gains or loses momentum.

Related reading: Terragrunt Tutorial: Examples and Use Cases explains why many platform teams adopt Terragrunt alongside Terraform for DRY module orchestration, and why the two need to be managed from the same control plane to avoid policy gaps.

State management with full version history

env zero stores Terraform state with full version history. Every deployment correlates to a state version. You can view the complete version list, download any previous version, and roll back to it if a deployment introduces a regression. State locking prevents concurrent writes. Access control at the environment level limits which other environments can read your state via cross-environment references.

For organizations with data residency requirements, env zero supports self-hosted state storage using your own S3 bucket rather than env zero's hosted backend.

A claim that circulates in some competitor comparisons: that env zero lacks state backups. That's inaccurate. Full version history and rollback have been part of the platform since its early production releases.

Related reading: Terraform Best Practices: State Management, Reusability, Security covers state design and backup patterns that apply whether you're running on env zero or a self-managed backend.

Cost management beyond pre-run estimation

HCP Terraform's cost management stops at pre-deployment estimation via an Infracost integration: it tells you what a change will cost before it applies. That's genuinely useful. env zero goes further. After deployment, real-time cost data flows in from your cloud provider's billing API and aggregates at the environment, project, and organization level. You can see where spend is concentrated, filter by project, and track cost trends over time. Budget-based policies can block deployments when a threshold is exceeded. Time to Live (TTL) scheduling auto-destroys idle development environments before they silently accumulate cost month over month.

The distinction is estimation versus ongoing enforcement. A resource that costs $50 to provision might cost $800/month to run. Without post-deployment tracking, you find out about the second number in your cloud bill, not in your IaC platform.

One important clarification: env zero provides cost monitoring and governance, but it is not a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tool. It tracks costs and IaC-defined resource state; it does not do vulnerability scanning or threat detection across arbitrary cloud resources.

Developer self-service without tickets

env zero's Service Catalog and template system lets platform teams define approved infrastructure templates once. Developers deploy from those templates without filing tickets or waiting for manual review. The guardrails are in the template (approved IaC, scoped variables, RBAC constraints), not in a Slack thread.

Adaptavist, a five-person platform team managing 700+ environments, migrated entirely to env zero in five months with zero developer retraining. The self-service model meant developers kept the same deployment experience; the governance layer underneath changed.

"It is allowing us to create projects and modules for teams to select the infrastructure they want and deploy it themselves into the cloud. It is taking work off the team." (Reviewed on G2)

Governance with Open Policy Agent that travels with you

env zero uses Open Policy Agent (OPA) for policy enforcement. OPA is industry-standard: the same policies work in Kubernetes admission controllers, CI pipelines, and any other OPA-compatible tool. Policies you write in env zero today are portable. If your organization ever consolidates tooling again, those policies move with you.

A real-world example: this OPA policy blocks any resource from being created without a required set of tags, and produces a clear denial message pointing at the offending resource.

package terraform.analysis

# Deny resources created without required tags
deny[msg] {
  resource := input.resource_changes[_]
  resource.change.actions[_] == "create"
  required := {"team", "environment", "cost-center"}
  provided := {tag | resource.change.after.tags[tag]}
  missing := required - provided
  count(missing) > 0
  msg := sprintf(
    "%s is missing required tags: %v",
    [resource.address, missing]
  )
}

This policy runs in env zero before any apply and produces a blocking denial if tags are absent. It also runs without modification in a Kubernetes admission controller or any other OPA-compatible system: the same file, the same logic, no translation required.

HCP Terraform supports OPA and Sentinel, HashiCorp's proprietary policy language. Sentinel's Terraform-native syntax is faster to write for simple infrastructure rules, but any investment in Sentinel policies stays inside HCP Terraform. The tradeoff is ergonomics now versus flexibility later.

Related reading: How Policy-as-Code Enhances Infrastructure Governance with OPA covers writing and deploying OPA policies for Terraform, including cost, security, and compliance rule patterns.

Drift detection with auto-remediation

Drift is the governance problem that doesn't announce itself. An engineer patches a security group rule during an incident. The fix works, the ticket closes, and three weeks later the group no longer matches your Terraform state. env zero detects the divergence on schedule (hourly on enterprise plans, daily minimum on standard plans), surfaces it with full change detail, and can apply a remediation run automatically to restore the defined state.

Notifications route to Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, or webhooks, so drift doesn't require anyone to remember to check a dashboard.

For platform teams responsible for uptime and incident MTTR, Automation Anywhere saw its multi-region deployment time go from a full day to minutes after adopting env zero. When drift shows up as an incident before it shows up in a dashboard, MTTR suffers. That's the problem drift auto-remediation closes.

Related reading: The Ultimate Guide to Terraform Drift Detection covers detection schedules, alert routing, and remediation thresholds across large environment counts.

env zero vs. HCP Terraform [2026]

Is env zero the right alternative for you?

env zero is built for platform teams managing infrastructure at scale across multiple teams, environments, and IaC frameworks. If that describes your situation, the governance depth and multi-framework support are hard to find elsewhere at the same level.

If your situation is different, be honest about the fit. A solo developer or a small startup that was on HCP Terraform's free tier and needs to stay under $100/month should look at open-source options: Atlantis for GitOps-driven Terraform, or OpenTofu with a self-managed CI pipeline. These won't give you governance, policy enforcement, or drift detection, but they'll run your IaC without a platform bill.

If automated code generation and cloud account scanning outside your IaC are primary requirements, env zero doesn't do those. It tracks costs and IaC-defined resource state. Tools like Wiz, Prisma Cloud, or ControlMonkey's scanning layer address the CSPM use case. If you're still comparing multiple platforms side by side, the Terraform Cloud Alternatives guide covers Spacelift, Scalr, Atlantis, and others in detail.

The teams that get the most from env zero are the ones where the platform engineer is drowning in ticket-driven infrastructure requests, where cost visibility is a quarterly fire drill rather than an ongoing practice, and where drift shows up as an incident before it shows up in a dashboard. Virgin Media O2, for example, went from up to half a day to stand up a single proof-of-concept environment to under 10 minutes with five variables. That kind of reduction comes from self-service templates with built-in governance, not from a faster CI runner.

Migrating from HCP Terraform to env zero

The state migration step is where most teams stall in their evaluation. In practice, it's less complex than expected because Terraform state is portable by design: it's a JSON file describing your infrastructure that doesn't need reformatting to move between platforms.

env zero provides three migration paths depending on how much automation your team wants.

The in-app migration wizard is the fastest. It connects to your HCP Terraform organization, maps workspaces to env zero environments, and transfers state files with guided configuration. For teams with under 100 workspaces, this is the right starting point. No scripting required.

The open-source CLI tool handles larger migrations and lets you script the workspace-to-environment mapping for repeatability. It requires Node.js 20 or higher and Terraform 1.0 or higher. The tool migrates state files, workspace configurations, and other HCP Terraform account settings, and is particularly useful for teams with 100+ workspaces or those running migrations across multiple accounts.

Manual migration is the fallback for complex setups where the wizard or CLI doesn't match your workspace structure. The sequence for each workspace:

# 1. Export state from the HCP Terraform remote backend
terraform state pull > terraform.tfstate.backup

# 2. Update the backend block in main.tf to point at env0
#    (env0 provides the exact backend config in its UI)

# 3. Re-initialize with the new backend
terraform init -reconfigure

# 4. Push the exported state to env0
terraform state push terraform.tfstate.backup

# 5. Verify state landed correctly before running any plans
terraform state list

Keep the .backup file until the first plan and apply complete cleanly. The env zero Migration Strategy Guide covers the backend configuration syntax and workspace variable mapping for each step.

For most teams, the full migration takes under a week. Adaptavist's migration of 700 environments over five months was unusually large. A team moving 30-50 workspaces from HCP Terraform can reasonably complete it in a single sprint.

One common mistake in any state migration: apply against your new state before verifying it is correct. The right order is migrate, verify in env zero's state UI, then trigger your first plan. Keep a local backup of the exported state file until the first apply completes cleanly.

Try it with env zero

The math above shows the break-even at roughly 3,200 managed resources. But the pricing model is only part of the decision. The teams that see the fastest return are the ones solving for governance and self-service, not just cost. Pismo cut infrastructure delivery from two months to two days. Western Union moved deployments from weeks to hours across 200+ apps.

env zero's free trial connects to your existing version control system, maps a few workspaces, and runs real cost tracking and unlimited concurrency against your actual infrastructure. No commitment required.

Start a free trial or book a demo.

References

• IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp: IBM Newsroom, February 27, 2025
• HCP Terraform pricing: current RUM tier breakdown and cost estimator
• HCP Terraform plans and features: official HashiCorp documentation
• HCP Terraform free tier discontinuation: migration context and timeline
• env0 migration tool: open-source CLI for migrating from HCP Terraform
• env0 Migration Strategy Guide: official step-by-step documentation
• env0 drift detection documentation: schedule configuration, auto-remediation guide
• env0 state management documentation: state versioning, access control, self-hosted backend options
• env zero on G2: 4.7/5, 150+ reviews
• OpenTofu official documentation: the open-source Terraform fork under CNCF

FAQ

What is HCP Terraform?

HCP Terraform (formerly Terraform Cloud) is HashiCorp's SaaS platform for running Terraform at scale. It provides remote execution, shared state management, team access controls, policy enforcement via Sentinel and Open Policy Agent (OPA), and a private module registry. HashiCorp was acquired by IBM in February 2025 for $6.4 billion and rebranded Terraform Cloud to HCP Terraform in April 2024.

Did HCP Terraform end its free tier?

Yes. The legacy HCP Terraform free plan, which offered unlimited managed resources, ended March 31, 2026. It was replaced by an enhanced Free tier capped at 500 Resources Under Management (RUM). Organizations on the legacy plan were automatically migrated. If your total resource count across all workspaces exceeds 500, a paid tier is required.

Does env zero support OpenTofu and Terragrunt?

Yes. env zero runs OpenTofu and Terragrunt natively alongside Terraform, Pulumi, Helm, Kubernetes, and CloudFormation from the same control plane. env zero is also a founding member of OpenTofu's Technology Steering Committee. HCP Terraform supports Terraform and OpenTofu but not Terragrunt, Pulumi, or Kubernetes.

How does env zero pricing compare to HCP Terraform RUM pricing?

HCP Terraform charges per resource per month: $0.10 at Essentials, $0.47 at Standard, $0.99 at Premium. As infrastructure grows, so does the bill. env zero charges per apply or per environment depending on the plan, with unlimited concurrent runs and unlimited users included. Cloud Compass, the entry tier, starts at $1,500/month flat. For teams above 3,000-4,000 managed resources, env zero's model typically costs less than HCP Terraform's Standard tier; the break-even point depends on your resource count and run frequency.

Does env zero back up Terraform state?

Yes. env zero provides full state version history, with the ability to view and download any previous state version and roll back to it. State locking prevents concurrent writes. For organizations with data residency requirements, env zero supports self-hosted state storage using your own S3 bucket rather than env zero's hosted backend.

How long does migration from HCP Terraform to env zero take?

It depends on the number of workspaces and their complexity. Teams migrating 30-50 workspaces typically complete it in under a week using the in-app migration wizard. Larger migrations with 100+ workspaces may use the open-source CLI tool from github.com/env0/env0-migration-tool and take 2-4 weeks with testing and validation. State files are portable; no reformatting is required.

Can I use my existing OPA policies in env zero?

Yes. env zero uses OPA as its policy engine. Policies written in OPA for HCP Terraform can move directly into env zero without modification. OPA policies are portable by design. Sentinel policies, which are proprietary to HCP Terraform, do not translate to other platforms and would need to be rewritten in OPA if you migrate.