Keel vs Terraform & OpenTofu

Keel generates and runs OpenTofu for a defined set of application infrastructure. State stays in your AWS account, and the generated configuration remains readable. OpenTofu is more flexible; Keel reduces the amount you have to design and maintain for supported workloads.

What you'd be writing by hand

A production web app on AWS may need a VPC, subnets, routes, NAT, security groups, ECS resources, a load balancer, certificates, DNS, a container registry, a build pipeline, IAM roles, secrets, logs, autoscaling, and a firewall.

Keel generates these resources from keel.yml, including the relationships and IAM policies between them.

Deploying, logs, and rollbacks included

OpenTofu manages infrastructure state but does not define an application deployment workflow. Keel adds commands for builds, logs, one-off tasks, scaling, and rollbacks:

keel deploy            # build, migrate, promote
keel logs -f
keel exec
keel scale web 6
keel rollback

What Keel adds

Know the bill before you build. keel cost prices your app straight from your config — before anything exists. More →

A built-in access model. Least-privilege roles, MFA, short-lived sessions, and staged team onboarding. More →

A dashboard over live state. What's running, what deployed, what it's costing you. More →

You keep the parts you trust

A plan to review before anything changes. State in your own bucket, locked so two people can't collide. Whatever you already manage, linked in rather than rebuilt.

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