Spacelift vs. Firefly

Considering a Spacelift alternative?

Here’s a walkthrough for DevOps pros who just want to know what their options are.

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Firefly is a Cloud Infrastructure Automation platform—and alternative to Spacelift—that lets you:

Provision IaC pipelines & adopt GitOps automations (with easy setup)

Inventory, sort, and filter through all your cloud assets

Understand your IaC coverage and status

Detect and remediate configuration drift in real time

Codify your cloud easily and automatically

Lean on comprehensive asset history for disaster recovery and rollback

Continuously scan your entire cloud footprint, across multi-cloud environments, IaC frameworks, Kubernetes clusters, and SaaS applications

See how Firefly stacks up against Spacelift

Firefly

Spacelift

IaC orchestration

Firefly

Seamless setup and integration. Provision and orchestrate IaC seamlessly within your existing CI/CD, for any IaC

Not blocked in case of downtime

Spacelift

Cumbersome migration and slow onboarding.

Vendor lock - doesn’t integrate with existing CI/CD

Cloud scanning & inventory

Firefly

Discover and inventory all cloud metadata and configurations; maps any IaC AND detects unmanaged resources

Spacelift

No visibility into cloud resources. Relies solely on IaC for visibility - can only show you what they deployed

Can’t detect unmanaged assets (ClickOps)

Asset history

Firefly

Complete change log, with ability to revert to previous versions

Spacelift

No asset history

Codification

Firefly

Generates IaC code in any language, creates modules, uses module call, and nested modules

Spacelift

Does not offer codification of cloud resources

Drift detection

Firefly

Near real-time detection at scale, does not require plan/apply to engage

Maps cloud events against cloud resources against ideal state configurations for full fidelity context of who, what, when + configuration history

Spacelift

Detects drift by running periodic Terraform plans against the cloud.

Requires manual configuration and setup.

Doesn't work at scale, might exhaust your quota for API limits. Won’t be able to provide user data

Drift fix (remediation)

Firefly

Firefly uniquely calls modules/repos, allowing non-expert IaC engineers to automate fix IaC by opening PR

Spacelift

Offers reconciliation remediation, can only revert to desired state.

Governance-as-Code

Firefly

Unified governance engine across code, CI/CD, and cloud deployed resources, including unmanaged resources

Built-in FinOps cost estimation

Firefly has a natural language translator into Open Policy Agent (OPA) so more engineers can use it without the need for OPA training/expertise

AI-remediation for policy violations

Spacelift

Only supported at plan/apply for new infrastructure.

It won’t apply on manual changes and unmanaged resources.

InfraCost - need additional license

Requires knowledge of OPA, no policy packs

Disaster recovery & business resilience

Firefly

Rollback to previous stored configurations

Independent backup for all cloud configurations + IaC code

Spacelift

Backup and recovery not supported

6 reasons you shouldn’t use Firefly as a Spacelift alternative

If Firefly isn’t the right Cloud Infrastructure Automation solution for you, we won’t waste your time. But how do you know if Firefly is not a good fit for your business? (Hint: for you, automated cloud codification is decidedly not on your cloud management wishlist, and Terraform orchestration is your primary priority).

If you’re the kind of DevOps pro who *prefers* to keep things highly manual, strategically inefficient, and full of surprises, you’re all set to embrace the chaos with Spacelift. (You should leave this page now. But we’ll be here if you change your mind).

If you are confident that you have full visibility of your assets, even across multi-cloud environments

Your cloud is constantly scanned for issues, and you already know what percentage of your cloud is codified in IaC and unmanaged, plus what has drifted (in any IaC language). IaC is your cloud blueprint, and everything is well-documented and repeatable.

If you love adding yet another tool to your existing tech stack, or relying on an additional CI/CD platform that doesn't integrate into your current workflow

For you, practicing extreme patience in the face of slow onboarding and difficult setup processes is just good character building.

If manual codification sounds like a great lesson in doing things the hard way, and you’re up for the challenge

Note: you also may need to be a fan of doing unnecessary manual work instead of using templates (or modules), not mind using crappy code that doesn't follow best practices, or love the company of constant toil as your workplace companion.

If not having any asset history or change log capabilities makes you feel like a daredevil, and you enjoy the challenge of solving problems without the ability to see what changes were made, or who made them

Your team doesn’t care to be able to roll back to previous versions, and already feels confident they can pass auditing and do troubleshooting as is.

If, for your team, ensuring that deployments and configurations are within policy is more effective when handled manually

In this scenario, your DevOps engineers are uncharacteristically impervious to human error and possess superhuman powers of efficiency.

If, in the event of an incident, your engineers would rather re-create your configurations than keep them centrally documented

Chaos is the spice of life, and you believe that redoing work is the cornerstone of positive morale.

Weighing your options?
Book a demo to see Firefly at work

Without Firefly, you're left with Spacelift's limited visibility, delayed drift detection, single-language support, and potential vendor lock-in. But hey, some people enjoy living on the edge — and if that sounds familiar, we applaud your courage.

Why Firefly?

Comprehensive asset visibility & inventory

Simplified IaC provisioning

Use your preferred CI/CD

Real-time drift detection & remediation

Multi-language IaC support & codification

Unified governance across cloud resources

Self-hosted options for true control