Brainboard turns visual cloud architecture diagrams into production-ready Terraform. See its features, pricing, pros and cons for multi-cloud infrastructure…
Brainboard's starting point is a drag-and-drop canvas where users assemble cloud architecture visually - placing compute, storage, networking, and database resources for AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, or Scaleway and connecting them the way they would in an architecture diagram. The difference from a typical diagramming tool is that every element on the canvas maps to a real, configurable cloud resource, and as the design changes, Brainboard's engine continuously generates the corresponding Terraform code behind the scenes.
This means the visual diagram and the infrastructure-as-code stay in sync automatically, so the diagram can double as accurate, living documentation of the environment rather than a picture that goes stale the moment someone makes a manual change. Brainboard also supports the reverse direction: generating a visual diagram from an existing Terraform codebase, or from infrastructure that's already deployed in a cloud account, which helps teams retroactively document and understand environments that were built up ad hoc.
Brainboard goes beyond just generating Terraform code by including an embedded CI/CD engine that lets teams run Terraform plan and apply directly from within the platform, reducing the need to bolt on a separate pipeline tool just to deploy the infrastructure they've designed. Drift detection continuously compares live cloud infrastructure against the intended blueprint and alerts teams when reality has diverged from the design, which is a common and often under-monitored source of configuration risk in growing cloud environments.
On the cost and security side, Brainboard integrates Infracost for cost estimation before changes are applied, and connects to policy and security scanning tools including Checkov, tfsec, Terrascan, and Open Policy Agent (OPA) so misconfigurations and policy violations can be caught before they reach production. Combined with native Git integration across GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps, and role-based access control, Brainboard positions itself less as a pure diagramming tool and more as a governance layer for infrastructure-as-code teams.
Brainboard is aimed squarely at cloud architects, platform engineering teams, and DevOps practitioners who want the clarity of visual architecture design combined with the rigor of version-controlled, production-grade Terraform, without every team member needing deep HCL fluency to contribute to or review infrastructure changes. Its multi-cloud support in a single workspace also appeals to organizations managing resources across more than one cloud provider.
Teams that prefer a purely code-first workflow, or that are fully committed to a different IaC toolchain, may find the visual abstraction layer less necessary. Brainboard offers a free plan for smaller teams and individuals to evaluate the core workflow, with paid plans priced per user for teams that need the CI/CD, drift detection, cost, and governance features at scale; exact current pricing for paid tiers is best confirmed directly with Brainboard, since detailed figures are not fully published on its own site.
Brainboard lets teams visually design cloud infrastructure and automatically generates production-ready Terraform code from that design, while adding CI/CD, drift detection, cost estimation, and security scanning.
No. Brainboard generates and manages Terraform code rather than replacing it; the output is standard Terraform that can be used with existing Terraform tooling.
Brainboard supports AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and Scaleway within a single workspace.
Yes, Brainboard offers a free plan that lets individuals and small teams try its core visual design and Terraform generation workflow.
Yes. Brainboard can generate a visual diagram from existing Terraform code or reverse-engineer a diagram from infrastructure already deployed in a cloud account.
Yes, Brainboard includes an embedded CI/CD engine that can run Terraform plan and apply directly from within the platform.
Brainboard is built for cloud architects, platform engineering teams, and DevOps practitioners managing multi-cloud infrastructure as code.
Brainboard is headquartered in Paris, France, and was founded in 2019 with backing from Y Combinator.