Spacelift Overages

What do you like best about the product?

Intuitive UI with commenting and ad hoc stack locking for collaboration. Great integration with Gitlab to see change summaries and links to runs.

What do you dislike about the product?

Tough question as the feature requests we’ve raised have been implemented!

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It has enabled broader collaboration on IAC, removing the bottleneck on infrastructure focussed teams by providing an intuitive way of browsing and consuming Terraform modules. Developers are able to make changes confidently on their own due to the clear feedback provided in the UI. Spaces and Policies have also allowed us to implement guardrails to meet security and compliance requirements.

What do you like best about the product?

Spacelift integrates nicely into our existing CI/CD workflows, and it conveniently manages state for our small team. The nested spaces with inheritance are easy to use and make it straightforward to work with collaborators who need different permission sets, with relatively little tofu specification required. It also integrates well with Terragrunt, which both we and our collaborators make use of.

What do you dislike about the product?

The pricing model for small teams feels a bit inconvenient. We’re very grateful there’s a free tier, but limiting it to only two users is restrictive, and the jump to the next tier is too cost-prohibitive for our small research team. It would also be helpful to have an option to toggle the AI assistant off in the interface when we’re not using it.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It underpins the new infrastructure we’re building, and this time we’re using it to do so entirely as infrastructure as code.

What do you like best about the product?

The most impressive thing about Spacelift, to me, is that it simply works. It takes some time to get set up properly, but once it’s in place we can go years without having to fiddle with settings, and everything keeps running smoothly. It’s refreshing to have a product that doesn’t constantly need support. At our costs, Spacelift returns roughly a third of that value in eliminated manual work; 3-4 times return on the subscription cost. That's before counting the incidents it prevents, which makes the value delivered substantially larger than what we're paying for it.

What do you dislike about the product?

Diffs UI: Sometimes, when I’m reviewing diffs, it doesn’t do a great job of clearly showing the actual changes. Certain kinds of edits end up looking like large sections were deleted and then added back, even when there’s only one small difference in the middle. I understand why this happens, but it would be nice to have a smarter diff view that highlights the true changes more accurately in those cases.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Spacelift is our OpenTofu CI/CD layer, replacing ad-hoc tofu apply runs from laptops. The policies we’ve layered on top address a specific set of governance and safety problems: blast-radius control at scale, stale-run hygiene, segregation of duties and change control, preventing irreversible mistakes, and automating around those blocks instead of simply freezing.

The net benefit to the company is that these governance/compliance guardrails and operational safety nets are expressed as versioned, reviewable code (Rego) rather than tribal knowledge, Slack reminders, or a manual runbook. That approach scales across many AWS accounts and environments without requiring a human gatekeeper for every change, while still preventing the two costliest failure modes: an unreviewed production change landing, or infrastructure silently destroying monitoring and alerting.

What do you like best about the product?

Flexibility and deep orchestration power

What do you dislike about the product?

Limited and non-practical documentation for complex setups

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Marrying Ansible and Terraform

What do you like best about the product?

I like how Spacelift makes it easier to manage deployments with its lock feature coming in handy for testing. The ability to auto-publish the module registry on MR merge is helpful, and I appreciate that we can run stacks inside our own network with ease. I find it secure that each stack gets its own cloud identity. I also enjoy that Spacelift watches our folder for file changes and runs tasks, with all changes visible in Git for easy review. It's also great that Spacelift helps run Terraform inside our own machines, ensuring everything operates securely within our network.

What do you dislike about the product?

It's a bit expensive. We understand there are a lot more features Spacelift provides, but there should be an option if a customer is not using every feature they can remain on some kind of basic plan and continue with integrations they already have. Our bill is expected quite significantly due to these new features, but we only use Spacelift for what I already mentioned. For that use case, the new pricing is difficult to come to terms with. Points were deducted only for cost.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Spacelift simplifies managing deployments, runs stacks within our network, assigns unique cloud identities, and tracks changes in Git for easy review. The lock feature aids testing, and it automates module registry publishing on MR merges.