GitHub Enterprise vs Terraform: What are the differences?
What is GitHub Enterprise? The on-premises version of GitHub, which you can deploy and manage in your own, secure environment. GitHub Enterprise lets developers use the tools they love across the development process with support for popular IDEs, continuous integration tools, and hundreds of third party apps and services.
What is Terraform? Describe your complete infrastructure as code and build resources across providers. With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.
GitHub Enterprise can be classified as a tool in the "Code Collaboration & Version Control" category, while Terraform is grouped under "Infrastructure Build Tools".
Some of the features offered by GitHub Enterprise are:
- Compliance and auditing
- Hundreds of integrations
- Flexible deployment
On the other hand, Terraform provides the following key features:
- Infrastructure as Code: Infrastructure is described using a high-level configuration syntax. This allows a blueprint of your datacenter to be versioned and treated as you would any other code. Additionally, infrastructure can be shared and re-used.
- Execution Plans: Terraform has a "planning" step where it generates an execution plan. The execution plan shows what Terraform will do when you call apply. This lets you avoid any surprises when Terraform manipulates infrastructure.
- Resource Graph: Terraform builds a graph of all your resources, and parallelizes the creation and modification of any non-dependent resources. Because of this, Terraform builds infrastructure as efficiently as possible, and operators get insight into dependencies in their infrastructure.
Terraform is an open source tool with 17.7K GitHub stars and 4.83K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Terraform's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Terraform has a broader approval, being mentioned in 510 company stacks & 312 developers stacks; compared to GitHub Enterprise, which is listed in 39 company stacks and 48 developer stacks.
