Background

OpenTofu is a fork of the main Terraform branch. In August 2023 HashiCorp relicensed Terraform (and other products) from the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL) to the Business Source License 1.1 (BSL). The BSL restricts use in products that compete with HashiCorp’s commercial offerings. In response, the community — backed by Gruntwork, Spacelift, env0, and others — forked Terraform at v1.5.7 (the last MPL release) and created OpenTofu, now stewarded by the Linux Foundation.

Pros

  • More open to feature requests — community-driven roadmap via GitHub RFCs
  • For the first 5 years there is already a commitment to provide 18 FTEs from multiple companies
  • Became part of the Linux Foundation — vendor-neutral governance
  • Compatibility promise from the OpenTofu team — drop-in replacement for Terraform ≤ 1.5
  • MPL 2.0 licensed — safe to use in any context without BSL restrictions
  • State format is compatible — existing .tfstate files work with OpenTofu

Cons

  • Splintering of community — some providers and modules are tested against Terraform first
  • Smaller ecosystem than Terraform (growing, but still newer)
  • Tooling (Terraform Cloud, CDK for Terraform) is HashiCorp-specific and may not work with OpenTofu

Compatibility

OpenTofu is a drop-in replacement for Terraform up to version 1.5. Most .tf configuration files, providers, and modules work without modification. Replace the terraform binary with tofu and the workflow is identical:

# Terraform
terraform init && terraform plan && terraform apply

# OpenTofu (identical workflow)
tofu init && tofu plan && tofu apply

Installing OpenTofu 

# macOS
brew install opentofu

# Ubuntu / Debian
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -fsSL https://get.opentofu.org/install-opentofu.sh | sh

# Windows
winget install OpenTofu.OpenTofu

OpenTofu Docs OpenTofu GitHub OpenTofu Registry

There’s no separate lab for this module — the OpenTofu workflow is deliberately identical to Terraform’s (see module 3), so the only thing that changes is which license governs the binary you run.

📝 Quiz — OpenTofu

Next Up

The azapi provider closes Terraform’s day-0 coverage gap by talking to the ARM API directly.