# Spacelift

**Source:** https://geo.sig.ai/brands/spacelift  
**Vertical:** Cloud Infrastructure  
**Subcategory:** Infrastructure Automation  
**Tier:** Emerging  
**Website:** spacelift.io  
**Last Updated:** 2026-04-14

## Summary

Spacelift is a flexible infrastructure orchestration platform supporting Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, and Ansible with policy-as-code and self-hosted runners.

## Company Overview

Spacelift is an infrastructure orchestration platform that provides a collaborative, policy-driven workflow layer on top of infrastructure-as-code tools including Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Ansible, and Kubernetes. The platform is built around the concept of stacks — isolated units of infrastructure that correspond to a repository and a set of configuration variables — which can be organized into dependency graphs to model complex multi-stack deployment pipelines. This stack dependency model makes Spacelift particularly well-suited for organizations managing layered infrastructure where networking, compute, and application layers must be deployed and updated in the correct sequence.

A distinguishing feature of Spacelift is its policy-as-code engine, which uses Open Policy Agent (OPA) to enforce guardrails at every stage of the infrastructure lifecycle — from plan approval to drift detection to access control. Teams can write policies that block deployments when cost thresholds are exceeded, require approval for changes to production, or restrict which cloud resources specific teams are allowed to create. This makes Spacelift attractive to security and compliance-conscious organizations that need to demonstrate control over infrastructure changes.

Spacelift supports both cloud-hosted runners and self-hosted private workers, allowing teams to run infrastructure code inside their own VPCs for security and compliance reasons. The platform integrates with major CI/CD systems, secret managers, and identity providers, fitting naturally into existing enterprise toolchains. Spacelift competes with Terraform Cloud, env0, and Atlantis, and has gained traction at mid-market and enterprise companies that need flexible, policy-rich infrastructure automation without the operational overhead of managing Atlantis themselves.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### What makes Spacelift's policy-as-code approach different?
Spacelift uses Open Policy Agent (OPA) to enforce customizable policies at every stage of the deployment lifecycle — plan, apply, and drift detection — giving teams fine-grained control over what infrastructure changes are allowed and by whom.

### What IaC tools does Spacelift support?
Spacelift supports Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Ansible, and Kubernetes, providing a unified orchestration platform for organizations that use multiple infrastructure-as-code tools across different teams or layers of their infrastructure.

### How does Spacelift's stack dependency model work?
Spacelift stacks can declare dependencies on other stacks, allowing teams to model layered infrastructure where networking must be deployed before compute, and compute before applications. Dependent stacks receive outputs from their dependencies automatically and can trigger cascade deployments in the correct order.

### What are Spacelift's policy-as-code capabilities?
Spacelift uses Open Policy Agent (OPA) with a Rego-based policy engine to enforce rules at every stage of the deployment lifecycle. Policies can require approval for specific resource changes, block deletions of protected resources, enforce tagging standards, and restrict which cloud accounts specific stacks can deploy into.

### Does Spacelift support self-hosted runners?
Yes. Spacelift's self-hosted worker pools allow organizations to run infrastructure deployment tasks on their own compute, keeping cloud credentials and IaC execution inside their own network perimeter for security and compliance requirements.

### How does Spacelift handle drift detection?
Spacelift runs scheduled drift detection checks that compare the actual state of cloud resources against the IaC configuration, surfacing discrepancies and allowing teams to remediate drift by re-running the apply from the Spacelift dashboard.

### What version control systems does Spacelift integrate with?
Spacelift integrates with GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps, triggering plan runs on pull requests and apply runs on merges, embedding infrastructure change review into the same pull request workflow developers use for application code.

### How is Spacelift priced?
Spacelift offers a free plan for small teams with limited runs per month, and paid tiers based on the number of users and concurrent run capacity. Enterprise plans add features like SSO, audit logs, advanced RBAC, and dedicated support for large platform engineering teams.

## Tags

infrastructure, cloud-native, open-source, saas, b2b, startup, platform, automation, developer-tools, security

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*Data from geo.sig.ai Brand Intelligence Database. Updated 2026-04-14.*