Spacelift

Once an organisation has more than a handful of infrastructure stacks, running plans from laptops stops being viable and the question becomes who runs your automation and what credentials they hold. Spacelift answers it with an orchestration platform that supports several IaC tools at once and can run the actual work inside your own network.

The company's engineering and operations are in Warsaw, which makes it the European alternative to Terraform Cloud for teams that do not want a US vendor holding cloud credentials.

Policy as Code

Spacelift uses Open Policy Agent for rules that run at defined points in the workflow: which plans require approval, which resources may never be created, who can trigger what, and what a pull request must satisfy before it can be applied.

That turns governance from a wiki page into something enforced by the system. For regulated organisations, having the control demonstrable in code is usually the difference between passing and failing an audit of change management.

Self-Hosted Workers

The control plane runs as a service, but the workers that actually execute plans can run in your own VPC. Cloud credentials never leave your network, which addresses the core objection to a hosted IaC platform. A fully self-hosted edition is available for organisations that need the control plane inside their perimeter too.

Multi-Tool and Dependencies

Real estates are rarely one tool. Spacelift orchestrates OpenTofu, Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Ansible and Kubernetes from one place, and models dependencies between stacks so that outputs from one feed inputs to another and changes propagate in the right order.

Drift detection runs on a schedule and reports where reality has diverged from code — routinely the source of the most unpleasant surprises in infrastructure work.

Limitations to Consider

Spacelift is priced for organisations rather than individuals, and the jump from the free tier to a paid plan is substantial — for a small team, Digger running in existing CI is far cheaper. The platform has a real learning curve, particularly around policies and stack dependencies. And while engineering sits in Poland, the corporate entity is US-registered, which strict procurement processes will notice.

Who Should Use Spacelift

Platform and infrastructure teams managing dozens or hundreds of stacks who need enforced policy, audit trails, drift detection and multi-tool orchestration, and who want workers running inside their own network.