Brainboard

Diagram first, code second

Most infrastructure tools start from text. Brainboard starts from a canvas: you place cloud resources on a diagram, connect them, and the product writes the Terraform or OpenTofu that matches. Its stated audience is teams migrating existing estates into IaC, standardising how many people write it, or lowering the learning curve for engineers who have not used Terraform before.

What sits around the designer

Several pieces make it a platform rather than a diagram tool:

• A module registry for private, public and community Terraform/OpenTofu modules
• Git integration, so the architecture lives in a repository
• Drift detection and remediation against what the cloud provider actually has
• Synchronised architectures, to keep dev, QA, staging and prod consistent
• An embedded visual CI/CD engine with a remote backend

It lists AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI, and is sold through the AWS and Azure marketplaces, which matters if you want to burn down an existing cloud commitment.

Plans and what they gate

The vendor's pricing page shows three tiers. Free costs nothing and has no stated numeric caps: unlimited architectures, unlimited Terraform code generation, public templates, and public and private modules. Pro adds unlimited members and teams, architecture versioning, Git integration, the embedded CI/CD engine, remote backend, RBAC and unlimited deployments. Enterprise adds a self-hosted runner, SSO, a private registry, audit logs, an SLA, single-tenant or self-hosted deployment, and migration help.

Note where the lines fall. Git integration, the CI/CD engine and RBAC are all Pro, so the free plan is a real way to design and generate code but not to run a team workflow. Importing existing AWS or Azure resources is a separate add-on charged per resource, which is the cost that matters most when the main goal is bringing an existing estate under management.

Pricing is hard to read

Pro shows $99 monthly and $999 yearly, but both are labelled per user / month. Taken literally the yearly figure would be nearly ten times the monthly rate, which is not plausible, so it most likely means $999 per user per year. Confirm with sales before budgeting. Either way, around $99 per seat is high next to usage-based IaC platforms.

What is awkward

Visual-to-code tools carry a standing tension: the diagram is the source of truth, and hand-edited HCL can fall out of step with it. Brainboard puts the ability to edit generated code on the Enterprise tier, so teams on lower plans work through the canvas. If your engineers prefer to write HCL directly and review it in pull requests, a design-first tool adds a layer rather than removing one.