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description: An overview of how OpenTofu compares to alternative software and tools.
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# OpenTofu vs. Alternatives

OpenTofu provides a flexible abstraction of resources and providers. This model
allows for representing everything from physical hardware, virtual machines, and
containers, to email and DNS providers. Because of this flexibility, OpenTofu
can be used to solve many different problems. This means there are a number of
existing tools that overlap with the capabilities of OpenTofu. We compare OpenTofu
to a number of these tools, but it should be noted that OpenTofu is not mutually
exclusive with other systems. It can be used to manage a single application, or the
entire datacenter.

Learn how OpenTofu compares to:

- [Chef, Puppet, etc.](chef-puppet.mdx)
- [CloudFormation, Heat, etc.](cloudformation.mdx)
- [Custom Solutions](custom.mdx)
- [Boto, Fog, etc.](boto.mdx)
- [Terraform](/faq/#opentofu-terraform-differences)
