Terraform Cloud (HCP) Projects vs Spacelift Spaces

HCP Terraform (formerly Terraform Cloud) and Spacelift both offer organizational grouping features for infrastructure teams, but with fundamentally different designs. HCP Terraform Projects use a flat structure to group workspaces, manage team permissions, and scope variable and policy sets. Spacelift Spaces use a hierarchical tree model that organizes stacks, policies, contexts, cloud integrations, worker pools, and modules, with built-in resource inheritance from parent to child spaces. Key differences include: HCP Terraform has no nesting or cross-project inheritance, while Spacelift supports unlimited depth and inherited resources; Spacelift offers full multi-tenancy support and fine-grained custom RBAC roles; and Spacelift supports multiple IaC tools (Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Ansible, Kubernetes) versus Terraform-only for HCP. HCP Terraform Projects suit smaller teams with simple needs already in the HashiCorp ecosystem, while Spacelift Spaces are better for complex multi-team, multi-environment, or multi-tool setups.