Ansible vs Terraform

Compare Ansible vs Terraform for infrastructure automation. Learn the key differences, strengths, and when to use each tool.

Ansible and Terraform are both popular infrastructure automation tools, but they serve different primary purposes. Ansible excels at configuration management and application deployment using a procedural, agentless approach with SSH. It connects to remote machines, executes tasks in order, and disconnects. Terraform specializes in infrastructure provisioning using a declarative approach with state management, tracking what resources exist and calculating changes needed. Many organizations use both tools together, with Terraform handling infrastructure provisioning (creating VMs, networks, databases) and Ansible handling configuration and application deployment on top of that infrastructure. Key differences include: Terraform uses HCL language while Ansible uses YAML playbooks; Terraform maintains a state file while Ansible is stateless; Terraform excels at cloud resource lifecycle management while Ansible excels at server configuration. For greenfield cloud infrastructure, start with Terraform. For configuring servers and deploying applications, choose Ansible. For complete automation, use both.