OpenTofu becomes the real deal

In open source, forks often struggle to break free from the shadow of their progenitors. But OpenTofu, the community-driven Terraform fork born from HashiCorp’s licensing upheaval, is writing a different story. Since January 2024, OpenTofu has transformed from a hopeful manifesto into a thriving project under the Linux Foundation, backed by an enthusiastic community and big-name sponsors. A little over a year in, OpenTofu shows surprising strength—not just in community enthusiasm but also in concrete measures of success such as code contributions, feature delivery, and corporate backing.

With IBM’s acquisition of HashiCorp finally complete, this could be OpenTofu’s moment.

GitHub metrics tell the story

None of this was obvious from the start. At least, not to me. You may remember that I pilloried OpenTofu early on for a lack of big-name cloud support, then made the questionable (read: incorrect) suggestion that OpenTofu might have been following too fast with its fast-follow approach. I was wrong in both instances. (A gentle reminder here that my views are my own, and do not represent those of my employer, MongoDB.) OpenTofu still has a ways to go to prove its success, but the signs are positive.

For example, consider GitHub stars. Yes, Terraform still leads comfortably (around 45,000 to OpenTofu’s 23,000), but that gap hides the real action: community engagement. Since its stable launch in January 2024, OpenTofu nearly tripled its contributor base to more than 160. Each release draws a vibrant crowd. Version 1.9 saw 49 contributors submit over 200 pull requests (PRs). Terraform, by contrast, entered 2024 with a massive historical contributor base (more than 1,800 total) but far less new blood. After HashiCorp’s shift to the Business Source License (BSL), community contributions to Terraform plummeted: only ~9% of pull requests came from the community in the month of the license change, down from 21% prior. A year later, Terraform’s GitHub activity remains robust in sheer volume (over 34,000 commits total versus OpenTofu’s ~32,500), but those commits are largely from HashiCorp’s own engineers rather than a committed, buzzing community that builds OpenTofu.

OpenTofu’s issue tracker exemplifies open source at its collaborative best. In one four-month period in late 2024, users opened over 150 issues and submitted more than 200 pull requests. Nor have issues lingered—the community has quickly rallied with solutions. Terraform, meanwhile, still sees plenty of issues opened, but the dialogue is muted, largely managed internally by HashiCorp staff (and soon, those same staff inside IBM). The vibrant collaboration that once marked Terraform now thrives within OpenTofu.

Vibrant community engagement

Stars on GitHub indicate popularity, but real community strength shows up in day-to-day interactions. OpenTofu’s Slack workspace and GitHub Discussions have become hubs of enthusiastic dialogue and rapid feedback. It’s reminiscent of classic open source projects: inclusive, lively, and genuinely responsive. Terraform’s forums, in contrast, feel quiet since the fork.

The shift in developer sentiment is unmistakable. Discussions about new OpenTofu features (such as built-in state encryption or the long-awaited -exclude flag) regularly pop up on Reddit and similar platforms where excitement for OpenTofu’s innovations often outweighs nostalgia for Terraform. This may be one reason we’ve seen projects like Alpine Linux ditching Terraform for OpenTofu: It’s partly a licensing issue and partly about community enthusiasm for what OpenTofu is becoming.

Backing from multiple vendors

What about corporate vendors? It’s still the case that the cloud vendors haven’t (to my knowledge) contributed code to OpenTofu, though each of the big three has quietly ensured compatibility with OpenTofu. More overt cloud support may follow, but for now, companies like Harness, Spacelift, env0, Scalr, and Gruntwork have pledged significant resources—18 full-time engineers collectively for five years. Initially, actual contribution lagged the pledges from 163 companies and nearly 800 individuals who put their names behind the initial manifest. This caused some skepticism. Yet by late 2024, vendor-backed contributors ramped up significantly, making good on their commitments, with companies like Cloudflare and Buildkite chipping in with infrastructure support, further enriching OpenTofu’s ecosystem.

HashiCorp’s Terraform remains strong, of course, especially among enterprise users. But the broader open source world has decisively aligned behind OpenTofu, attracted by its multivendor governance model and genuinely open ethos. For many, this makes OpenTofu a compelling upgrade over Terraform, not just a “good enough” replacement due to licensing.

Accelerated innovation

OpenTofu didn’t just replicate Terraform—it leapfrogged it in areas the community prioritized. It swiftly introduced game-changing features Terraform users had requested for years. Native end-to-end state file encryption arrived early, a devsecops dream unmet by Terraform. Provider iteration (for_each), an -exclude flag for selective applies, and dynamic module sourcing addressed pain points Terraform had left unresolved.

HashiCorp’s own updates haven’t stalled, but their innovation often seems incremental compared to OpenTofu’s aggressive feature rollout. Terraform’s enhancements, such as provider-defined functions and stricter variable validation, are welcome but safe bets. OpenTofu is taking bigger swings, breaking slight compatibility in strategic ways (like introducing the.tofu file extension) to push innovation further.

Additionally, OpenTofu’s new open-source registry (with Git-backed decentralization) signals its intent to build a robust, open ecosystem distinct from HashiCorp’s proprietary registry approach.

Is OpenTofu truly successful?

So, has OpenTofu succeeded as a fork? It depends on how you measure success.

In terms of building a thriving community, absolutely. OpenTofu has rekindled the community-driven spirit Terraform lost after licensing changes. It has active, engaged contributors not beholden to a single vendor. Featurewise, OpenTofu is not just on par—it’s begun pushing past Terraform in meaningful ways.

Real-world adoption, however, is harder to quantify. Terraform still commands massive enterprise mindshare. But OpenTofu’s registry traffic (millions of daily requests) and substantial CLI downloads indicate real traction. Tool vendors like Scalr report sharply increased OpenTofu usage (more than 300% year-over-year growth in registry usage), signaling a meaningful shift beyond mere curiosity.

A complicated but promising path forward

OpenTofu isn’t without challenges. It must sustain momentum, prove itself at enterprise scale, and keep the community growing to avoid dependency on key individuals. But these hurdles reflect genuine progress. OpenTofu has moved well beyond the typical fork fate of stagnation or irrelevance.

Historically, forks struggle when ideology outweighs pragmatism, or licensing debates overshadow real benefits. OpenTofu succeeded precisely because it didn’t fixate on the open source advantage it had over Terraform; instead, it focused on delivering real, community-requested features that users genuinely value. As Redis CEO Rowan Trollope recently argued, “If you’re the average developer, what you really care about is capability: Does this thing offer something unique and differentiated … that I need in my application?” OpenTofu hasn’t rested on its open source laurels, preferring instead to focus on delivering a great product.

None of this implies Terraform is “dead” or even declining in absolute terms. HashiCorp still has a huge customer base and is likely monetizing Terraform more than ever via Terraform Cloud. But in the open source arena, Terraform has undeniably lost its crown to OpenTofu. The community energy around Terraform now largely flows into OpenTofu, and that is the ultimate sign of a successful fork. HashiCorp bet that their ecosystem had no viable alternative; the community answered by creating one. It’s a remarkable feat, one that just might turn into hefty enterprise adoption.