Whenever you pick a technology, you are also picking a community. In many cases, the ecosystem around the project can have a bigger impact on your experience than the inherent quality of the technology itself. The community determines how many people contribute to the project; how many plugins, integrations, and extensions are available; how easy it is to find help online (e.g., blog posts, questions on Stack Overflow); and how easy it is to hire someone to help you (e.g., an employee, consultant, or support company).

It’s difficult to do an accurate comparison between communities, but you can spot some trends by searching online. The table below shows a comparison of popular IaC tools, with data I gathered in June 2022, including whether the IaC tool is open source or closed source, what cloud providers it supports, the total number of contributors and stars on GitHub, how many open source libraries are available for the tool, and the number of questions listed for that tool on Stack Overflow (note: the data on contributors and stars comes from the open source repositories for each tool, but as CloudFormation is closed source, this information is not available).