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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Build Automation
  4. Cloud IDE
  5. Koding vs Terraform

Koding vs Terraform

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Koding
Koding
Stacks77
Followers147
Votes200
Terraform
Terraform
Stacks22.9K
Followers14.7K
Votes344
GitHub Stars47.0K
Forks10.1K

Koding vs Terraform: What are the differences?

What is Koding? A new way for developers to work. Koding is a feature rich cloud-based development environment complete with free VMs, an attractive IDE & sudo level terminal access!.

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.

Koding belongs to "Cloud IDE" category of the tech stack, while Terraform can be primarily classified under "Infrastructure Build Tools".

Some of the features offered by Koding are:

  • Free virtual machine (VM) with Ubuntu, root access, apt-get, and many commonly used tools
  • Built-in Terminal with 256-color support
  • All languages, databases, and command-line tools are supported

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.

"Free" is the top reason why over 35 developers like Koding, while over 80 developers mention "Infrastructure as code" as the leading cause for choosing Terraform.

Terraform is an open source tool with 17.4K GitHub stars and 4.77K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Terraform's open source repository on GitHub.

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Advice on Koding, Terraform

Sung Won
Sung Won

Nov 4, 2019

DecidedonGoogle Cloud IoT CoreGoogle Cloud IoT CoreTerraformTerraformPythonPython

Context: I wanted to create an end to end IoT data pipeline simulation in Google Cloud IoT Core and other GCP services. I never touched Terraform meaningfully until working on this project, and it's one of the best explorations in my development career. The documentation and syntax is incredibly human-readable and friendly. I'm used to building infrastructure through the google apis via Python , but I'm so glad past Sung did not make that decision. I was tempted to use Google Cloud Deployment Manager, but the templates were a bit convoluted by first impression. I'm glad past Sung did not make this decision either.

Solution: Leveraging Google Cloud Build Google Cloud Run Google Cloud Bigtable Google BigQuery Google Cloud Storage Google Compute Engine along with some other fun tools, I can deploy over 40 GCP resources using Terraform!

Check Out My Architecture: CLICK ME

Check out the GitHub repo attached

2.25M views2.25M
Comments
Timothy
Timothy

SRE

Mar 20, 2020

Decided

I personally am not a huge fan of vendor lock in for multiple reasons:

  • I've seen cost saving moves to the cloud end up costing a fortune and trapping companies due to over utilization of cloud specific features.
  • I've seen S3 failures nearly take down half the internet.
  • I've seen companies get stuck in the cloud because they aren't built cloud agnostic.

I choose to use terraform for my cloud provisioning for these reasons:

  • It's cloud agnostic so I can use it no matter where I am.
  • It isn't difficult to use and uses a relatively easy to read language.
  • It tests infrastructure before running it, and enables me to see and keep changes up to date.
  • It runs from the same CLI I do most of my CM work from.
385k views385k
Comments
Tan
Tan

Apr 24, 2020

Needs adviceonPythonPythonAnacondaAnacondaJavaJava

I am going to learn machine learning and self host an online IDE, the tool that i may use is Python, Anaconda, various python library and etc. which tools should i go for? this may include Java development, web development. Now i have 1 more candidate which are visual studio code online (code server). i will host on google cloud

297k views297k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Koding
Koding
Terraform
Terraform

Koding is a feature rich cloud-based development environment complete with free VMs, an attractive IDE & sudo level terminal access!

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.

Free virtual machine (VM) with Ubuntu, root access, apt-get, and many commonly used tools; Built-in Terminal with 256-color support; All languages, databases, and command-line tools are supported; Various file upload options such as Drag & Drop, Dropbox, Clone from Github, FTP and the ability to access them using SSH; Real-time code and terminal collaboration with integrated chat abilities; Subdomains serve PHP, Perl, Python via Apache, and additional ports are available for other web apps; Additional VMs can be purchased and shared with group members; Unlimited user-defined domains and subdomains for private or shared VMs;Ability to signup with Github, and link account to oDesk and Facebook
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.;Change Automation: Complex changesets can be applied to your infrastructure with minimal human interaction. With the previously mentioned execution plan and resource graph, you know exactly what Terraform will change and in what order, avoiding many possible human errors
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
47.0K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
10.1K
Stacks
77
Stacks
22.9K
Followers
147
Followers
14.7K
Votes
200
Votes
344
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 36
    Free
  • 31
    Built in terminal for vm
  • 30
    Free vm with ssh access
  • 15
    Apps
  • 14
    Real time code collaboration with infinite # of people
Pros
  • 121
    Infrastructure as code
  • 73
    Declarative syntax
  • 45
    Planning
  • 28
    Simple
  • 24
    Parallelism
Cons
  • 1
    Doesn't have full support to GKE
Integrations
No integrations available
Heroku
Heroku
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
CloudFlare
CloudFlare
DNSimple
DNSimple
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Consul
Consul
Equinix Metal
Equinix Metal
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
OpenStack
OpenStack
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine

What are some alternatives to Koding, Terraform?

Ansible

Ansible

Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.

Red Hat Codeready Workspaces

Red Hat Codeready Workspaces

Built on the open Eclipse Che project, Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces provides developer workspaces, which include all the tools and the dependencies that are needed to code, build, test, run, and debug applications.

AWS Cloud9

AWS Cloud9

Cloud9 provides a development environment in the cloud. Cloud9 enables developers to get started with coding immediately with pre-setup environments called workspaces, collaborate with their peers with collaborative coding features, and build web apps with features like live preview and browser compatibility testing. It supports more than 40 languages, with class A support for PHP, Ruby, Python, JavaScript/Node.js, and Go.

Chef

Chef

Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.

Capistrano

Capistrano

Capistrano is a remote server automation tool. It supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks, and includes a set of sane-default deployment workflows.

Puppet Labs

Puppet Labs

Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.

Salt

Salt

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.

Nitrous.IO

Nitrous.IO

Get setup lightning fast in the cloud & code from anywhere, on any machine.

Codeanywhere

Codeanywhere

A development platform that enables you to not only edit your files from underlying services like FTP, GitHub, Dropbox and the like, but on top of that gives you the ability to collaborate, embed and share through Codeanywhere on any device.

Fabric

Fabric

Fabric is a Python (2.5-2.7) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting execution.

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