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Spacelift runs your Terraform. Massdriver turns it into self-service.

An IaC orchestrator runs the code your platform team writes. A platform orchestrator turns it into self-service for everyone else, and the modules move as they are.

Spacelift is an IaC orchestrator. It runs Terraform, OpenTofu, and Pulumi from Git, adds policy as code with Open Policy Agent, and manages dependencies between stacks. If your platform team manages dozens of Terraform projects across repositories, Spacelift gives that work visibility and governance.

Spacelift is code-first. Its core workflow assumes the person changing infrastructure writes IaC, pushes to Git, and reviews a run, and it adds Blueprints and Templates for creating stacks from a form. For the platform team's own infrastructure the Git workflow is the right model. Massdriver is built for everyone else who needs infrastructure: developers, CI, and agents requesting changes to approved capabilities.

Massdriver is a platform orchestrator for governed infrastructure change. Your platform team publishes the Terraform, OpenTofu, and Helm it already writes to a catalog. Developers, CI, and AI agents request changes from the catalog through a UI, CLI, or API. Policy, permissions, and approvals apply before every apply, and Massdriver runs the IaC with credentials the platform holds. Nobody outside the platform team touches Git to get infrastructure.

Key Differences

• Developer self-service
  Spacelift is built around DevOps teams and infrastructure-savvy developers, with Blueprints and Templates for creating stacks from a form. Massdriver is built around developer self-service from a governed catalog: developers assemble whole environments visually from typed IaC modules, with dependencies between them wired automatically.

• UI and provisioning model
  Spacelift wraps around your Git repos. It runs whatever Terraform or Pulumi code you commit. Massdriver doesn’t require requesters to touch Git. Developers configure inputs through forms and diagrams, and Massdriver provisions the resources from approved modules.

• Policy enforcement
  Spacelift is strong at policy as code with OPA. You can define detailed guardrails, such as blocking untagged resources or requiring approval for production, and plan policies evaluate the Terraform plan. Massdriver adds checks up front: inputs are validated against the bundle schema before provisioning begins, then policy, permissions, and approvals apply to the change.

• Environment lifecycle
  Spacelift manages environments through stacks, and preview environments are typically built from stacks, Git branches, and its API. Massdriver includes native preview environments that spin up full stacks per pull request and clean them up afterward.

Migrating from Spacelift

The modules move as they are. The Terraform and OpenTofu your team runs in Spacelift are published to Massdriver as bundles, and each stack becomes an instance in the catalog with its schema and policy attached. Resource import brings the infrastructure those stacks already created under Massdriver management without a redeploy.

The Massdriver Terraform provider is the connector during the move. A stack still running in Spacelift can read the outputs of Massdriver-managed infrastructure and hand it dependencies, so you migrate one stack at a time instead of all at once. The /massdriver:import command in the Massdriver Claude Code plugin does the module-to-bundle conversion.

Bottom Line

Spacelift makes your existing Terraform pipeline faster and safer for the people already in it. Massdriver removes the pipeline from everyone else's path: developers get governed self-service from the same modules, and the modules come across without a rewrite.