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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Code Collaboration
  4. Code Collaboration Version Control
  5. AWS CloudFormation vs Beanstalk

AWS CloudFormation vs Beanstalk

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Beanstalk
Beanstalk
Stacks85
Followers270
Votes51
AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation
Stacks1.6K
Followers1.3K
Votes88

AWS CloudFormation vs Beanstalk: What are the differences?

What is AWS CloudFormation? Create and manage a collection of related AWS resources. You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application. You don’t need to figure out the order in which AWS services need to be provisioned or the subtleties of how to make those dependencies work.

What is Beanstalk? Private code hosting for teams. A single process to commit code, review with the team, and deploy the final result to your customers.

AWS CloudFormation and Beanstalk are primarily classified as "Infrastructure Build" and "Code Collaboration & Version Control" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by AWS CloudFormation are:

  • AWS CloudFormation comes with the following ready-to-run sample templates: WordPress (blog),Tracks (project tracking), Gollum (wiki used by GitHub), Drupal (content management), Joomla (content management), Insoshi (social apps), Redmine (project mgmt)
  • No Need to Reinvent the Wheel – A template can be used repeatedly to create identical copies of the same stack (or to use as a foundation to start a new stack)
  • Transparent and Open – Templates are simple JSON formatted text files that can be placed under your normal source control mechanisms, stored in private or public locations such as Amazon S3 and exchanged via email.

On the other hand, Beanstalk provides the following key features:

  • Setup and manage repositories- Import or create Subversion and Git repositories that are instantly available to your team.
  • Invite team members, partners & clients- Restrict access to certain repos and provide read-only or full read/write permissions.
  • Browse files and changes- Every version of every file you’ve committed to Beanstalk is just a click away. See a timeline of who made changes and view the differences between revisions. Syntax highlighting for over 70 languages.

"Automates infrastructure deployments" is the top reason why over 36 developers like AWS CloudFormation, while over 13 developers mention "Ftp deploy" as the leading cause for choosing Beanstalk.

Nubank, Expedia.com, and Accenture are some of the popular companies that use AWS CloudFormation, whereas Beanstalk is used by Accenture, Docplanner, and UNION. AWS CloudFormation has a broader approval, being mentioned in 197 company stacks & 77 developers stacks; compared to Beanstalk, which is listed in 21 company stacks and 8 developer stacks.

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Advice on Beanstalk, AWS CloudFormation

Timothy
Timothy

SRE

Mar 20, 2020

Decided

I personally am not a huge fan of vendor lock in for multiple reasons:

  • I've seen cost saving moves to the cloud end up costing a fortune and trapping companies due to over utilization of cloud specific features.
  • I've seen S3 failures nearly take down half the internet.
  • I've seen companies get stuck in the cloud because they aren't built cloud agnostic.

I choose to use terraform for my cloud provisioning for these reasons:

  • It's cloud agnostic so I can use it no matter where I am.
  • It isn't difficult to use and uses a relatively easy to read language.
  • It tests infrastructure before running it, and enables me to see and keep changes up to date.
  • It runs from the same CLI I do most of my CM work from.
385k views385k
Comments
Daniel
Daniel

May 4, 2020

Decided

Because Pulumi uses real programming languages, you can actually write abstractions for your infrastructure code, which is incredibly empowering. You still 'describe' your desired state, but by having a programming language at your fingers, you can factor out patterns, and package it up for easier consumption.

426k views426k
Comments
Sergey
Sergey

Contractor at Adaptive

Apr 17, 2020

Decided

Overview

We use Terraform to manage AWS cloud environment for the project. It is pretty complex, largely static, security-focused, and constantly evolving.

Terraform provides descriptive (declarative) way of defining the target configuration, where it can work out the dependencies between configuration elements and apply differences without re-provisioning the entire cloud stack.

Advantages

Terraform is vendor-neutral in a way that it is using a common configuration language (HCL) with plugins (providers) for multiple cloud and service providers.

Terraform keeps track of the previous state of the deployment and applies incremental changes, resulting in faster deployment times.

Terraform allows us to share reusable modules between projects. We have built an impressive library of modules internally, which makes it very easy to assemble a new project from pre-fabricated building blocks.

Disadvantages

Software is imperfect, and Terraform is no exception. Occasionally we hit annoying bugs that we have to work around. The interaction with any underlying APIs is encapsulated inside 3rd party Terraform providers, and any bug fixes or new features require a provider release. Some providers have very poor coverage of the underlying APIs.

Terraform is not great for managing highly dynamic parts of cloud environments. That part is better delegated to other tools or scripts.

Terraform state may go out of sync with the target environment or with the source configuration, which often results in painful reconciliation.

426k views426k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Beanstalk
Beanstalk
AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation

A single process to commit code, review with the team, and deploy the final result to your customers.

You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application. You don’t need to figure out the order in which AWS services need to be provisioned or the subtleties of how to make those dependencies work.

Setup and manage repositories- Import or create Subversion and Git repositories that are instantly available to your team.;Invite team members, partners & clients- Restrict access to certain repos and provide read-only or full read/write permissions.;Browse files and changes- Every version of every file you’ve committed to Beanstalk is just a click away. See a timeline of who made changes and view the differences between revisions. Syntax highlighting for over 70 languages.;Preview, Compare & Share- Instantly preview HTML and image files in Beanstalk, compare versions side by side, and share them with your team, colleagues or clients, even if they don’t have a Beanstalk account.;Code Editing- Make and commit changes directly in the web interface of Beanstalk.;Blame Tool- View the line-by-line history of every file using Beanstalk's blame tool. Quickly see who was responsible for each line of code and which revision it belonged to.;Instantly deploy static assets from Beanstalk to your development, staging and production servers via Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files, Heroku, DreamObjects;
AWS CloudFormation comes with the following ready-to-run sample templates: WordPress (blog),Tracks (project tracking), Gollum (wiki used by GitHub), Drupal (content management), Joomla (content management), Insoshi (social apps), Redmine (project mgmt);No Need to Reinvent the Wheel – A template can be used repeatedly to create identical copies of the same stack (or to use as a foundation to start a new stack);Transparent and Open – Templates are simple JSON formatted text files that can be placed under your normal source control mechanisms, stored in private or public locations such as Amazon S3 and exchanged via email.;Declarative and Flexible – To create the infrastructure you want, you enumerate what AWS resources, configuration values and interconnections you need in a template and then let AWS CloudFormation do the rest with a few simple clicks in the AWS Management Console, via the command line tools or by calling the APIs.
Statistics
Stacks
85
Stacks
1.6K
Followers
270
Followers
1.3K
Votes
51
Votes
88
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 14
    Ftp deploy
  • 9
    Deployment
  • 8
    Easy to navigate
  • 4
    HipChat Integration
  • 4
    Code Editing
Pros
  • 43
    Automates infrastructure deployments
  • 21
    Declarative infrastructure and deployment
  • 13
    No more clicking around
  • 3
    Any Operative System you want
  • 3
    Infrastructure as code
Cons
  • 4
    Brittle
  • 2
    No RBAC and policies in templates
Integrations
Amazon S3
Amazon S3
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront
Basecamp
Basecamp
Campfire
Campfire
FogBugz
FogBugz
Lighthouse
Lighthouse
Harvest
Harvest
Zendesk
Zendesk
HipChat
HipChat
Bugify
Bugify
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Beanstalk, AWS CloudFormation?

GitHub

GitHub

GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.

Bitbucket

Bitbucket

Bitbucket gives teams one place to plan projects, collaborate on code, test and deploy, all with free private Git repositories. Teams choose Bitbucket because it has a superior Jira integration, built-in CI/CD, & is free for up to 5 users.

GitLab

GitLab

GitLab offers git repository management, code reviews, issue tracking, activity feeds and wikis. Enterprises install GitLab on-premise and connect it with LDAP and Active Directory servers for secure authentication and authorization. A single GitLab server can handle more than 25,000 users but it is also possible to create a high availability setup with multiple active servers.

RhodeCode

RhodeCode

RhodeCode provides centralized control over distributed code repositories. Developers get code review tools and custom APIs that work in Mercurial, Git & SVN. Firms get unified security and user control so that their CTOs can sleep at night

AWS CodeCommit

AWS CodeCommit

CodeCommit eliminates the need to operate your own source control system or worry about scaling its infrastructure. You can use CodeCommit to securely store anything from source code to binaries, and it works seamlessly with your existing Git tools.

Gogs

Gogs

The goal of this project is to make the easiest, fastest and most painless way to set up a self-hosted Git service. With Go, this can be done in independent binary distribution across ALL platforms that Go supports, including Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

Gitea

Gitea

Git with a cup of tea! Painless self-hosted all-in-one software development service, including Git hosting, code review, team collaboration, package registry and CI/CD. It published under the MIT license.

Upsource

Upsource

Upsource summarizes recent changes in your repository, showing commit messages, authors, quick diffs, links to detailed diff views and associated code reviews. A commit graph helps visualize the history of commits, branches and merges in your repository.

Packer

Packer

Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image. It embraces modern configuration management by encouraging you to use automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images.

GitBucket

GitBucket

GitBucket provides a Github-like UI and features such as Git repository hosting via HTTP and SSH, repository viewer, issues, wiki and pull request.

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