Four in five UK permanent job ads that name Ansible also name Terraform, 80.14% over the six months to 27 August 2026, according to IT Jobs Watch. The reverse share is 28.96%. This post sets out what developer surveys and UK vacancy counts record about Terraform vs Ansible vs Pulumi usage, and where the three measurements disagree.
Terraform vs Ansible vs Pulumi usage
How many developers report Terraform vs Ansible vs Pulumi usage?
Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey put Terraform at 17.8% of all respondents and 18.7% of professional developers. Ansible came in at 11.7% and 11.2% of the same two groups.
The question is opt-in and multi-select, so the figures describe respondents who chose to answer, not the developer population. Pulumi was not on the 2025 option list.
| Tool | All respondents | Professional developers | Professionals using AI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Docker | 71.1% | 73.8% | 75.0% |
| Kubernetes | 28.5% | 30.1% | 30.7% |
| Terraform | 17.8% | 18.7% | 19.2% |
| Ansible | 11.7% | 11.2% | 10.8% |
| Responses to this question | 24,473 | 20,070 | 17,258 |
Source: Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025, cloud development question, fielded 2025
Why the 2024 figures are not a baseline
The 2024 survey asked about Terraform and Ansible under a separate “Other tools” question answered by 42,105 professional developers. Terraform scored 11.9%, Ansible 8.1% and Pulumi 1.0% there.
In 2025 both tools moved into the “Cloud development” question, and the professional sample answering it fell to 20,070. The two years measure different question sets and different respondent pools, so the gap between 11.9% and 18.7% is not a growth rate.
| Tool | 2024 professional devs | 2025 professional devs | Question in 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Terraform | 11.9% | 18.7% | Other tools |
| Ansible | 8.1% | 11.2% | Other tools |
| Pulumi | 1.0% | not asked | Other tools |
| Responses to the question | 42,105 | 20,070 | — |
Source: Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024 and 2025, professional developer columns
Terraform vs Ansible vs Pulumi usage in UK job advertisements
IT Jobs Watch counts UK permanent IT vacancies that cite a named skill. Terraform reached 2,324 ads in the six months to 23 August 2026, ranking 79th among all IT skills.
Ansible fell to 836 ads and rank 248, down from 1,370 in the equivalent 2025 window. Terraform also sits below its own 2024 count of 2,373, so its 2026 total is a recovery rather than a new high.
| Tool | To Aug 2024 | To Aug 2025 | To Aug 2026 | Share of UK permanent IT ads, 2026 | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Terraform | 2,373 | 1,679 | 2,324 | 2.15% | 79 |
| Ansible | 1,101 | 1,370 | 836 | 0.76% | 248 |
| Pulumi | 30 | 24 | 45 | 0.042% | 741 |
| OpenTofu | 1 | 5 | 19 | 0.017% | 764 |
Source: IT Jobs Watch, permanent vacancies, six months to 23 August 2026 (Terraform, Pulumi), 26 August 2026 (OpenTofu) and 27 August 2026 (Ansible)
OpenTofu is the only one of the four that rose in both comparison windows, from 1 ad to 5 to 19. Its counts stay small enough that a handful of postings moves the total.
Which skills sit alongside Terraform vs Ansible vs Pulumi usage?
Every list below is a share of that tool’s own ads, so the columns have different denominators and should be read separately. Infrastructure as Code leads the Terraform list at 69.66%; Terraform itself leads the Ansible list at 80.14%.
Python appears in 52.87% of Ansible ads against 44.97% of Terraform ads, which tracks Ansible’s own implementation language and the work of keeping a Python toolchain current. Linux reaches 46.05% in Ansible ads and 19.75% in Terraform ads, a split that matches configuration work landing on machines rather than on cloud APIs, alongside routines such as listing the services a host is running.
| Skill cited | In Terraform ads | In Ansible ads | In Pulumi ads |
|---|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure as Code | 69.66% | 58.37% | 91.11% |
| CI/CD | 67.56% | 57.54% | 77.78% |
| AWS | 60.71% | 54.78% | 80.00% |
| Python | 44.97% | 52.87% | 57.78% |
| Kubernetes | 43.80% | 51.44% | 40.00% |
| Terraform | — | 80.14% | 97.78% |
| Base ads | 2,324 | 836 | 45 |
Source: IT Jobs Watch co-occurring skills, six months to 23 August 2026 (Terraform, Pulumi) and 27 August 2026 (Ansible)
Pulumi rarely appears alone. Terraform is cited in 44 of its 45 ads, and Ansible in one. Bash turns up in 27.27% of Ansible ads, the kind of glue work a script scaffold covers, while firewalls appear in 16.87% and pull in tooling such as nftables packet filtering.
Terraform vs Ansible vs Pulumi salary benchmarks
Pulumi and OpenTofu both post a £90,000 median, £15,000 above Terraform. Both figures rest on thin samples: 41 quotations for Pulumi and 17 for OpenTofu, against 1,663 for Terraform.
Ansible’s £72,500 median is unchanged from the same window in 2025. Ads for it also cite SSH client configuration and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, at 72 ads each for CentOS and RHEL.
| Tool | Median annual salary | 25th percentile | 75th percentile | Salaries quoted |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pulumi | £90,000 | £82,500 | not published | 41 |
| OpenTofu | £90,000 | £57,500 | not published | 17 |
| Terraform | £75,000 | £58,750 | £90,000 | 1,663 |
| Ansible | £72,500 | £57,500 | £90,000 | 554 |
Source: IT Jobs Watch, UK permanent vacancies, six months to 23 August 2026 (Terraform, Pulumi), 26 August 2026 (OpenTofu) and 27 August 2026 (Ansible)
What developers say about Terraform vs Ansible vs Pulumi
Stack Overflow reports two more scores per tool. Admired is the share of people who used it in the past year and want to keep using it; desired is the share who want to use it next year.
Terraform scored 51.8% admired and 15.7% desired in 2025, Ansible 49.6% and 9.8%. Pulumi’s only measured year was 2024, when it drew a 63.4% admired score on 1.8% desired, a high satisfaction reading from a small user base.
Ansible ranked below Podman at 57.4% admired and Prometheus at 54.7% in the 2025 set. Those are shares of each tool’s own users, not shares of one market.
What Terraform vs Ansible vs Pulumi usage data does not measure
None of these sources counts production deployments. Stack Overflow records self-reported use among people who opted into a survey; IT Jobs Watch counts UK permanent advertisements and excludes contract roles and every other country.
Scale is absent too. A playbook run against 5,000 hosts and one run against a single virtual machine register identically, and no source publishes state file counts or the Terraform and OpenTofu split inside organisations running both. Groundwork such as subnet planning and systemd unit definitions sits outside every counter here.
Ownership has changed under two of the three. IBM completed its acquisition of HashiCorp on 27 February 2025 at $35 per share, a total equity value of roughly $7.2 billion by IBM’s Form 10-Q. Ansible belongs to Red Hat, and Pulumi remains independent.
FAQs
Is Terraform more widely used than Ansible?
Both available measures point the same way. Stack Overflow 2025 put Terraform at 18.7% of professional developers against Ansible’s 11.2%, and IT Jobs Watch counted 2,324 UK permanent ads citing Terraform against 836 citing Ansible.
How much smaller is Pulumi than Terraform?
Pulumi appeared in 45 UK permanent ads in the six months to 23 August 2026, or 0.042% of all permanent IT vacancies. Terraform reached 2,324 ads, 2.15%, over the same period.
Do Terraform and Ansible compete for the same jobs?
The overlap is one-sided. IT Jobs Watch found 80.14% of Ansible ads also cite Terraform, while 28.96% of Terraform ads cite Ansible. Employers list Terraform as the primary requirement more often.
Which tool pays the most in the UK?
Pulumi and OpenTofu both show a £90,000 median against Terraform’s £75,000 and Ansible’s £72,500. The Pulumi median rests on 41 salary quotations and OpenTofu’s on 17, so treat both as thin data.
What do Reddit threads say about switching from Terraform to OpenTofu?
Reddit discussion is anecdotal and no source publishes migration counts. The measurable signal is small: OpenTofu reached 19 UK permanent ads in the six months to 26 August 2026, up from 5 a year earlier.
Sources
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology
https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/terraform.do
https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/ansible.do
