CloudStack vs Spacelift comparison

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CloudStack

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

CloudStack and Spacelift are competing products in cloud infrastructure and automation. Spacelift seems to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive features and superior support, appealing to tech buyers looking for feature-rich automation tools.

Features: CloudStack offers scalability, virtualization management, and multiple hypervisor support, emphasizing flexibility. Spacelift delivers advanced CI/CD pipelines, strong integration capabilities, and robust infrastructure as code management, making it attractive for comprehensive system deployment.

Room for Improvement: CloudStack could improve its UI and integration with modern cloud-native tools. It should also enhance multi-cloud capabilities and reduce complexity in network configurations. Spacelift can work on minimizing initial setup complexity, broadening its hypervisor compatibility, and offering more customizable dashboards to cater to different user profiles.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: CloudStack provides straightforward deployment with extensive documentation, while Spacelift offers a flexible approach that integrates well with existing workflows, supported by responsive customer service.

Pricing and ROI: CloudStack is cost-effective with a strong ROI, appealing for budget-conscious businesses. Spacelift, despite higher initial costs, offers significant ROI through its powerful features and automation capabilities, providing greater value over time for those prioritizing advanced features and long-term efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed CloudStack vs. Spacelift Report (Updated: November 2026).

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CloudStack vs. Spacelift

November 2026

Helped 920,769 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

CloudStack

Ranking in Cloud Management

8th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Spacelift

Ranking in Cloud Management

6th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

AI Software Development (17th)

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of CloudStack is 2.2%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spacelift is 1.1%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Spacelift	1.1%
CloudStack	2.2%
Other	96.7%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Tharun Kumar Reddy Thamatam

Senior Infrastructure Consultant at Infosys

Achieving seamless infrastructure management with optimized network and user access controls

I believe enhancements could be made in CloudStack, particularly in the management servers. I had the opportunity to collaborate with one of the Apache CloudStack developers, leading to the installation of additional agents for better information retrieval from hypervisors. We implemented configurations, ensuring consistency across hosts and VMs. We also utilized Ansible or YAML files to automate password upgrades during patching activities and database management, showcasing our customization efforts for improvement. For future releases, it would be beneficial if Apache enhanced CloudStack by integrating alerting systems directly. We've had instances where hypervisors experienced overloads without prior alerts, so proactive alerts within the tool would better prepare us for addressing issues swiftly, preventing disruption in business operations. A portal summarizing system metrics alongside alert capabilities would greatly enhance our operational efficiency.

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G Srivastava

Senior Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Automation of cloud infrastructure has transformed how our team manages Terraform workflows

Spacelift has other features beyond Terraform, including Ansible, Pulumi, Terragrunt, and it also helps with Kubernetes, although we haven't used it for the other tools. We have only used it for Terraform Infrastructure as Code, and it has helped us significantly. One standout feature compared to Terraform Cloud is the ability to apply policies. For example, we want to restrict engineers in our team from building servers with a particular SKU, such as in Azure, where we do not want to run servers with a SKU higher than the standard D4sv5. We can apply those policies in Spacelift, and the RBAC and access policies features are really excellent in Spacelift, which we do not find in any of the other competitor tools. The pricing is also competitive compared to Terraform Cloud. The access policy features allow us to assign specific policies since we have three environments in our company: Dev, QA, and Prod. We assign policies so that anyone can run code from Dev and QA servers, but we assign a policy for specific people, such as managers, to run code in Prod. This is a very good feature from Spacelift that we have implemented for the access policy. Spacelift has positively impacted our organization as a CI/CD tool for application deployment and development. Although we use other CI/CD tools like Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions, there wasn't a specific tool for Terraform Infrastructure as Code until Spacelift came along. It allows us to easily configure our servers and build a number of them on our cloud. While other CI/CD tools have started to include configuration features, Spacelift offers many other benefits that make it an excellent tool to use.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The APIs for automation in CloudStack are excellent; everything is API-driven, and while the API is very rich and hard to learn, you can do everything you would want to do, including everything in the user interface and more."

"The initial implementation process was quite good."

"It works, and pretty much always has, and reliability and support for enterprise features, with a multi-tenant interface, makes CloudStack a very compelling solution."

"The back-end database design is simple and straight forward. The user interface is designed with external users in mind. Billing is relatively straightforward with this product. Not being restricted to just one hypervisor was nice."

"We chose CloudStack because we saw it with a better TCO ratio, balancing innovation, and starting the DevOps culture with a low operational overhead."

"CloudStack is simple to stand up and get off the ground in a hurry."

"It gives us the ability to manage and segregate a guest network with openvSwitch and VLAN IDs."

"The API with CloudStack made integration into various external facing web applications simple enough."

More CloudStack pros

"I appreciate that I just have to connect to my AWS account with my credentials, and Spacelift handles the rest."

"Spacelift has positively impacted my organization by reducing manpower, as it reduced the efforts of resources in the team, where previously a job done by two or three engineers can now be easily managed by one engineer using Spacelift."

"One key feature is the Spacelift policies, which we can attach to deployments to ensure compliance with our standards."

"If you're looking to automate your Infrastructure as Code, then Spacelift is the best choice."

"Spacelift has positively impacted my organization because it works well; it allows everybody to collaborate in the same Terraform repo without stepping on each other's toes."

"Spacelift has positively impacted our organization by speeding up our deployments and easing a lot of pain with infrastructure deployments, especially because a lot of teams are working simultaneously on the same code base using the same configs."

"SpaceLift impacts my organization positively by giving more agility to the teams when they are deploying, allowing us to manage the AWS resources using Spacelift, so our cloud organization improves after this implementation."

"Spacelift has positively impacted my organization in significant ways in terms of building infrastructure as code."

More Spacelift pros

Cons

"The product could improve by embracing newer technologies like GPU virtualization."

"The web UI can be improved. It is too complex, and not trivial for the average user."

"A technology upgrade is one item which could be improved upon a lot."

"CS has very descriptive logging, and every time I faced issues and asked for help, I didn’t get any reply from the community. Reason? Its quite obvious. CS runs on specific environments, unique to each case. So, unless it is a functional issue of CS, nobody can help you. All issues were resolved by myself going through logs. This is another reason why you need smart enough people to manage it. Engineers must have knowledge of hypervisors and understand how CS interacts with them."

"I think that container technology in CloudStack is an area that needs to be improved."

"It is not widely used so Google does not help very much when you are troubleshooting, and the CloudStack forum is not very active."

"I would like to see support for native VLAN, and fault-tolerance."

"The absence of the feature, deploy an instance from a snapshot, is the weak point of the platform. It is a feature that everyone needs nowadays."

More CloudStack cons

"I think an improvement for Spacelift would be a feature to run multiple stacks."

"Synchronization can be difficult when using older and newer versions with Kubernetes and HashiCorp."

"In the free version, there's no straightforward way to be notified once a deployment is finished."

"Spacelift could be improved by implementing some of the many AI-based tools available that support a variety of tools like Pulumi, CloudFormation, OpenTofu, and Terraform."

"The self-hosted version does not have a lot of features compared to the SaaS version, such as cloud integrations for Azure and GCP."

"Perhaps the learning curve could be a bit steep if someone is completely new to Spacelift and only has experience with plain Terraform."

"Spacelift is good overall, but there are little explanatory aspects, such as navigating particular stacks, that are somewhat difficult to understand for newcomers, especially regarding the process, stack setup, and variable setup for deployments."

"I chose a rating of six out of ten because I think multiple other tools similar to Spacelift exist, for example, many automation tools such as Jenkins or other cloud-native tools that perform efficiently compared to Spacelift."

More Spacelift cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is no license, so the product is free unless you are buying professional technical support services."

"It is a 100% open-source solution needing just an Apache license. Also, there are no hidden fees to be paid."

"As far as I know, CS is still free of charge. If you want to pay some money, Citrix Cloud Platform is based on CS, I think. As for hypervisors – everything as usual, you need to pay for VMware and vCenter. As for XenServer, recently they changed the free feature list, so you may need to pay some money to get useful features like XenMotion."

"CloudStack is an open source solution, so you don't need to pay anything for it. When our company develops something specially for CloudStack, it is donated to the Apache Software Foundation and provided to anyone that wants to use it."

"The Apache CloudStack is open source, so you do not have licenses to purchase."

"Give an effort to planning. If possible, contract a specialized consultant company for the initial setup and knowledge transfer."

"The solution is open-source and free."

"CloudStack is an open-source product."

"It is a bit expensive product."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Outsourcing Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Outsourcing Company

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	13
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	12

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	8

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CloudStack?

CloudStack is open-source, so there is no cost apart from learning. Billing solutions, if outsourced, come at a moderate cost.

What needs improvement with CloudStack?

Enhancements for CloudStack can focus on integrating more hypervisors, as mentioned regarding current features. We're working on a new feature that will allow for certain limited functions, but ove...

What is your primary use case for CloudStack?

My usual use cases for CloudStack involve an AWS style private cloud or public cloud. I can deploy an AWS style cloud using the open source tool that is CloudStack. The use case depends on the cust...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Spacelift?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was that licensing was somewhat unclear when HashiCorp changed their own licensing.

What needs improvement with Spacelift?

It would be nice to have out-of-the-box A/B testing with Spacelift because we still use some custom features for that. Out-of-the-box A/B testing is the main thing I would like to add about the nee...

What is your primary use case for Spacelift?

We manage a lot of AWS deployments with Spacelift configs, so we have a main use case for it. We also use it for versioning and spinning up new environments. Recently we used Spacelift for deployin...

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Product Reports

Download CloudStack product report

CloudStack

October 2026

Download Spacelift product report

October 2026

Also Known As

Vmops, Cloud.com

No data available

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Apache

Overview

CloudStack offers an easy-to-manage platform compatible with multiple hypervisors, enabling seamless networking and efficient workload scaling. Its advanced APIs and open-source nature facilitate automation and customization, making it ideal for extensive cloud environments.

CloudStack is recognized for ease of setup, robust networking, and hypervisor compatibility. Supporting a range of workloads, it scales efficiently, offering flexible features like VM migration, private networking, and multi-zone support. Its user-friendly open-source design aids troubleshooting and customization, making it ideal for managing broad cloud deployments. Despite needing upgrades in interface and integration with third-party vendors and container technology, CloudStack remains a strong choice for businesses seeking effective virtualization solutions. Improvements in documentation, regional management, and emerging tech support would enhance usability and performance.

What are CloudStack's notable features?

Hypervisor compatibility: Supports diverse virtualization technologies for flexible deployment.
Robust networking: Ensures reliable and scalable network infrastructure management across zones.
Advanced APIs: Facilitates automation and integration to streamline cloud operations.
VM migration: Enhances operational flexibility with seamless virtual machine relocations.
Private networking: Provides secure and isolated network environments for critical tasks.
Multi-zone support: Offers scalable solutions for distributed cloud management.

What benefits and ROI should users consider?

Open-source model: Allows extensive customization without licensing costs, enhancing ROI.
Ease of management: Simplifies operations, reducing time and resources spent on maintenance.
Scalability: Enables growth and adaptability, fostering agility in expanding businesses.
Flexibility: Supports various workloads and environments, meeting diverse operational needs.

CloudStack is implemented across industries, used in managing virtual environments, offering IaaS in public, private, and hybrid cloud models. Companies use it for internal virtualization and customer service, integrating with hypervisors across data centers to orchestrate virtual machines and support development and testing globally.

Apache

The Spacelift orchestration platform combines infrastructure provisioning, configuration, and governance to increase platform team efficiency, accelerate developer velocity, and control costs. It connects to and orchestrates infrastructure as code, version control systems (VCSs), observability tools, control and governance solutions, and cloud providers to help deliver secure infrastructure faster. With Spacelift Intelligence, teams can also understand, design, deploy, and govern infrastructure using natural language, giving developers a fast, governed path to infrastructure without adding to the platform team's backlog.

Infrastructure provisioning: Stacks ensure faster, more secure provisioning by automatically combining source code, current infrastructure state, and configuration. The platform works with any major IaC tool or cloud platform and the VCS provider where your teams store infrastructure code.

Configuration automation: Expand your capabilities beyond Terraform and OpenTofu with a workflow that also manages Ansible playbooks.

Governance to balance speed and control: Reinforce security and compliance with controls over developer/DevOps activity. Provide Golden Paths and define custom policies for third-party security vulnerability scanning tools, while accelerating policy creation with best-practice templates. Detect drift automatically, and restore resources to their expected state with drift remediation.

Integrated workflow: Easily create workflows that combine IaC for provisioning, Ansible for configuration management, Kubernetes for container orchestration, and policies for governance. Blueprint templates allow you to open your infrastructure pipelines to developers without losing control.

Infra Assistant: Your AI infrastructure assistant that can understand, design, deploy, and govern infrastructure in plain language. Ask questions about your infrastructure state that dashboards and reports can't answer. Get expert design guidance before you deploy, create and apply policies with AI assistance and diagnose failures faster with AI-generated context across your stacks, dependencies, and history.

Intent: A no-code, AI-based deployment model for maximum speed. Developers request infrastructure through their LLM via Spacelift MCP. Intent translates those requests into governed infrastructure actions with the same policies, credentials, and visibility as IaC, without requiring Terraform expertise.

Sample Customers

GreenQloud, Exoscale, TomTom, ASG, PC Extreme, ISWest, Grid'5000

Visit spacelift.io/customers to see how Duolingo, Figma, Moody's, Checkout.com, 1Password, Redfin and others manage infrastructure for the AI-accelerated software era with Spacelift.