# OpenTofu

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/iac/opentofu/

Community-driven fork of Terraform under Linux Foundation stewardship, free to use with no managed tier and no vendor.

## Who it suits

Not having a vendor. OpenTofu is a drop-in replacement for Terraform held by the Linux Foundation specifically so a licence change cannot happen to it again — free, self-hosted, with providers and modules from its own registry.

Consider something else if Somebody has to answer for who changed what. There is no account, so there is no audit trail and no SSO — access control is whatever your CI and state backend enforce, which is exactly the gap the other three sell into.

## iScore

77 / 100 (80% interval 70–83), rank 4 of 4 in iac.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every iac peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/iac/opentofu/alternatives/

- Price: 100 (94–100), weight 36%, 1 of 1 criteria scored
- Capabilities: 86 (69–100), weight 29%, 1 of 1 criteria scored
- Trust and compliance: 11 (0–42), weight 21%, 1 of 2 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: audit_logs
- Evidence: 98 (98–98), weight 14%, 4 of 4 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Free tier: Yes ([source](https://opentofu.org/), read 2026-09-15)
- What the free plan includes: Everything, with no account. Providers and modules come from the OpenTofu Registry, and the project states an aim of feature parity with Terraform for future releases. ([source](https://opentofu.org/), read 2026-09-15)
- Entry paid plan: None. OpenTofu is the tool rather than a platform: there is nothing to buy, no hosted state and no vendor to bill you — which is the reason the other three in this category exist. ([source](https://opentofu.org/), read 2026-09-15)
- Pricing model: Nothing is metered because nothing is sold. Governance rather than price is the pitch: the project is held by the Linux Foundation specifically so a licence change cannot happen to it again. ([source](https://opentofu.org/), read 2026-09-15)

### Observability

- Self-hostable: Supported ([source](https://opentofu.org/), read 2026-09-15)

### Auth

- SAML single sign-on: Not supported — No account and no directory to federate with; access control is your own CI and state backend ([source](https://opentofu.org/), read 2026-09-15)
- Audit logs: None, and there cannot be: OpenTofu is a binary you run, with no account, no hosted state and no service to keep a trail of. What a platform sells is partly this. ([source](https://opentofu.org/), read 2026-09-15)

## Compared with

- [OpenTofu vs Pulumi](https://inetgeek.com/compare/pulumi-vs-opentofu/)