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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 a code-first tool. It assumes the person who wants infrastructure writes IaC, pushes to Git, and waits for a run. For the platform team's own infrastructure that is the right model. For the developers who file tickets asking for a database, it is the bottleneck.

Massdriver is a platform orchestrator. Your platform team publishes the Terraform, OpenTofu, and Helm it already writes to a catalog. Developers and AI agents provision from the catalog through a UI, CLI, or API, policy runs before every apply, and Massdriver generates the pipeline per deploy. Nobody outside the platform team touches Git to get infrastructure.

Key Differences

• Developer self-service
  Spacelift is best suited for DevOps teams or infra-savvy developers. It doesn't provide a simplified UI for provisioning — just a dashboard to manage plans and approvals. Massdriver was built for real developer self-service: developers assemble infrastructure visually, submit forms tied to real IaC modules, and deploy cloud-native environments themselves.

• UI and provisioning model
  Spacelift wraps around your Git repos — it runs whatever Terraform or Pulumi code you commit. Massdriver doesn’t require users to touch Git. The UI is the interface — developers configure inputs through forms and diagrams, and Massdriver provisions the resources using pre-defined modules and pipelines.

• Policy enforcement
  Spacelift shines at policy enforcement via OPA. You can define detailed guardrails (e.g., block untagged resources, enforce approvals for prod), but they act after the Terraform plan is written. Massdriver enforces policies up front. Inputs are validated before provisioning even begins, so invalid or non-compliant infrastructure simply can’t be requested.

• Environment lifecycle
  Spacelift supports managing environments through stacks and Git branches. But for ephemeral or preview environments, you’ll need custom scripting and API integration. Massdriver includes native preview environments, automatically spinning up full stacks per pull request and cleaning them up afterward — no extra work required.

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.