Editorial take
Why it stands out
Pulumi is easiest to recommend when the team wants infrastructure to live closer to normal software engineering habits rather than in a separate configuration-only world.
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Tool profile
Infrastructure-as-code platform and OSS toolchain that lets teams manage cloud infrastructure with familiar programming languages.
Infrastructure as code using familiar software languages
Pulumi is one of the most important modern IaC tools because it changes the authoring model. Instead of writing infrastructure in a domain-specific configuration language only, teams can define infrastructure with general-purpose languages like TypeScript, Python, Go, C#, and Java. That makes Pulumi especially attractive to software-heavy teams that want infrastructure to fit more naturally into their existing engineering practices.
Its commercial pricing is also unusually transparent. Pulumi Cloud is free forever for individuals, Team starts at $40 per month with 500 resources included, Enterprise starts at $400 per month with 2,000 resources included, and Business Critical is custom. The OSS CLI and SDK remain free to use even without Pulumi Cloud, which means the buying decision is really about how much managed state, governance, insights, and collaboration the team wants on top.
Quick fit
Editorial take
Pulumi is easiest to recommend when the team wants infrastructure to live closer to normal software engineering habits rather than in a separate configuration-only world.
What it does well
Primary use cases
Fit notes
Compare with
Pressure-test this pick against nearby alternatives.
Apache Kafka
Free planEvent streaming and event-driven architectures
Open-source distributed event streaming platform for high-throughput pipelines, pub/sub, and stream-processing ecosystems.
Choose Kafka when replayable event streams and ecosystem breadth matter more than the lightest possible operational footprint.
Pricing snapshot
Pulumi Cloud offers an Individual plan that is free forever, Team at $40/month with 500 resources included, Enterprise at $400/month with 2,000 resources included, and Business Critical with custom pricing. Additional Team resources are billed at about $0.1825 per resource per month, and the open-source Pulumi CLI and SDK remain free to use without Pulumi Cloud.
Arcjet
Free planApplication runtime security
Runtime security toolkit for modern applications and AI systems that helps teams enforce quotas, block bots, prevent prompt abuse, and ship app-level protections in code.
Closer to application-runtime security and abuse-prevention tooling than to classic perimeter appliances.
