--- title: AWS CloudFormation Reviews meta_title: 'AWS CloudFormation Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 214 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how AWS CloudFormation works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.4 review_count: 214 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-21' parent_category: name: CI/CD Tools url: https://www.g2.com/categories/ci-cd-tools --- # AWS CloudFormation Reviews **Vendor:** Amazon Web Services (AWS) **Category:** [Cloud Infrastructure Automation Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/cloud-infrastructure-automation) **Average Rating:** 4.4/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 214 ## About AWS CloudFormation AWS CloudFormation is a service that enables users to model, provision, and manage AWS and third-party resources in a secure and automated manner. By defining infrastructure as code through JSON or YAML templates, CloudFormation allows for consistent and repeatable deployment of resources, facilitating efficient management of complex infrastructures. Key Features and Functionality: - Infrastructure as Code: Define and provision AWS resources using JSON or YAML templates, enabling version control and repeatable deployments. - Resource Management: Manage a wide range of AWS services, including EC2 instances, S3 buckets, and Lambda functions, through a single template. - Automation and Consistency: Automate the provisioning and updating of infrastructure, ensuring consistency across multiple environments. - Scalability: Scale infrastructure globally and manage resources across multiple AWS accounts and regions through a single operation. - Extensibility: Extend infrastructure management to include third-party resources and custom applications using the AWS CloudFormation Registry. - Safety Controls: Utilize features like Rollback Triggers and Change Sets to monitor and manage stack operations, enhancing the reliability of deployments. Primary Value and Problem Solved: AWS CloudFormation simplifies the process of managing and provisioning cloud infrastructure by treating it as code. This approach reduces manual intervention, minimizes errors, and ensures consistent deployments across various environments. By automating resource management, CloudFormation accelerates the development and deployment cycles, allowing organizations to focus on building applications rather than managing infrastructure. ## AWS CloudFormation Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users appreciate the **automation efficiency** of AWS CloudFormation, allowing easy deployment and management of infrastructure as code. (7 reviews) - Users appreciate the **ease of Infrastructure Automation** with AWS CloudFormation, streamlining deployment and integration processes. (7 reviews) - Users appreciate the **ease of use** of AWS CloudFormation, benefiting from simple setup and streamlined resource management. (6 reviews) - Users find **efficiency** in AWS CloudFormation's easy implementation of Infrastructure as Code for managing resources seamlessly. (5 reviews) - Users appreciate the **automation ease** of AWS CloudFormation, simplifying resource management and reducing human error. (4 reviews) - Users value the **customization capabilities** of AWS CloudFormation, facilitating ease of implementation and integration with AWS services. (3 reviews) - Users value the **deployment ease** of AWS CloudFormation, simplifying setup and management of AWS resources efficiently. (3 reviews) - Easy Integrations (3 reviews) - Setup Ease (3 reviews) - Users find AWS CloudFormation to be a **time-saving tool** , automating resource management and deployment efficiently. (3 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find that the **template complexity** in AWS CloudFormation makes debugging and management challenging and time-consuming. (6 reviews) - Users find the **learning difficulty** significant, particularly for beginners trying to grasp complex concepts and templates. (4 reviews) - Users highlight the **limited cloud support** of AWS CloudFormation, complicating multi-cloud integration and template management. (4 reviews) - Users find the **understanding difficulty** challenging, particularly with concepts like rollback and template complexities. (3 reviews) - Users find the **complex setup** of AWS CloudFormation challenging, particularly with large templates and debugging errors. (2 reviews) - Difficult Customization (2 reviews) - Difficult Learning (2 reviews) - Users often face **difficulties with software bugs** in AWS CloudFormation, as error messages can be unclear and troubleshooting time-consuming. (2 reviews) - Command Line Difficulty (1 reviews) - Delayed Updates (1 reviews) ## AWS CloudFormation Reviews ### 1. Excellent tool for bringing up multiple AWS services at once, but challenging to debug **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ricardo A. | Cloud Nerd, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 07, 2016 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** The fact the with one click of a button I can bring a full stack of services for my application. Just fire and forget, generally if the cloudformation template is bug free. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** The template is purely in JSON (although JSON is a popular data representation format and generally is easy to read) which makes it difficult to debug if you missed a comma or close quotation, etc. It's also difficult to debug if you are have included the right services or right "String" configuration for your service. This actually gets a bit easier if you use tools like troposphere, but out the box is not that easy to debug. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** You generally need to become an expert at debugging JSON with this tool but like I mentioned before there are open source tools that you can use for that such as troposphere. Also, once you move to CloudFormation you generally want to keep using it to bring up all your services for your application because there's no way to decouple parts of the services used in your application. Unless you create another service or microservice to handle parts of the functionality of your application. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Bring up full stack of services for a software solution in our company with just a click of button. The benefit there is that we reduce the chance of human error but fully automating the bring up of all the AWS services required instead of just bring them up one by one. ### 2. CloudFormation is an excellent tool for organizing your AWS infrastructure **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Arjen S. | Author, Internet, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 12, 2016 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** CloudFormation allows you to easily create an infrastructure, and most importantly it allows you to keep track of the changes you make. This also means that you can quickly copy the infrastructure for a different environment (QA for example) or even an entirely different region. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** As the templates are written in JSON, it's impossible to put comments inside them. There are ways around that, but it is a limitation in the tool. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** If you're going to be using AWS infrastructure, CloudFormation is probably the easiest way to manage it. There are 3rd party alternatives, but using Amazon's solution offers the best support. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** With CloudFormation I can quickly set up new environments, making it far quicker to set this up for different clients. As it's all code, I can also easily reuse (parts of) a template for different uses. ### 3. Making the infrastructure admin's life easier **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Paulo Vitor R. | Software Developer, Environmental Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 07, 2016 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** CloudFormation is one of the amazing parts from the AWS ecosystem. The flexible and reusable way you can handle a group of services, like a template, makes any infrastructure admin's life much easier. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** I don't think it's a huge limitation but so far it's not possible to name the resources once they are created by CloudFormation. The main reason for this is to avoid name collision between resources which is fair enough, but still, sometimes I miss it. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** I would recommend this service for environment replication (easily allowing A/B tests and ephemeral environments). I used this service a couple of times to create environment templates and then I was able to recreate them many times. Very useful for building environments or even replicate production environments to debug problems. ### 4. I've use cloudformation for about one and half year **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jonathan H. | Senior System Engineer, Consumer Electronics, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 12, 2016 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** I like the ability to create nested stack (using a stack to create another stack), this feature allows us to create a button up or top down design of the architecture and achieve the structure as code goal. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** The document and the cloudformation function/feature is not always up to date with latest amazon features, so that sometimes we have to enable the feature from the AWS Web console manually or using AWS cli to enable that new feature. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** It's hard to tell that cloudformation can do much if you are running small architecture at single environment. But if you run your business in different amazon regions with multiple environment, You should consider use cloudformation to manage all the architecture and deployment, it's quite easy to integrate with chef (or just shell script). **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** As an system engineer in a cellphone company, we have to handle multiple environment such as dev/test/staging/production. It become much more easy to create a new environment in new region or crate a sandbox environment during testing cycles with cloudformation template and chef, and it allows us to make both architecture and deployment changes at the same time which reduce both time and costs to deal with the inconsistence of different environments. ### 5. Professional **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Simone S. | Graduate Software Developer, Broadcast Media, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 08, 2016 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** I'm a JSON lover, and I like the idea to keep everything I need under control by simply describing the infrastructure. It may sounds a bit verbose (it is), but I'd rather prefer it than creating resources via the Console, since I can't reproduce it in case of disaster recovery or rollback. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** It's pretty powerful. Maybe the lack of versioning of the infrastructure. At the moment I'm implementing it by myself, by storing the templates along with the codebase on Git). The documentation cover all the aspects, but I would improve the examples. Sometimes I prefer look for a snippet on Google rather than using the official docs **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Using a library that generates the template programmatically is tempting, and is often useful. But if you want full control of Cloudformation, better go plain JSON. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** The entire infrastructure of the components I contributed to develop (stateless/stateful resources) has been described and set under revision control. The benefit is that I can reproduce my infrastructure, and gain more control over the rollback (which is not only a matter of codebase). ### 6. If you love JSON, you'll love CloudFormation **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 07, 2016 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** My favorite feature of CloudFormation is the ability to natively group resources. As an operations engineer I often find that business requirements change fast, and you need to stand up services in a consistent and repeatable fashion. Properly designed CloudFormation stacks serve this need. Although there are a number of frustrating limitations I still find it easier to use than something like boto/troposphere. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** I wish that Amazon would offer CloudFormation resources for all of their services. As an example, they released ElasticSearch but have yet to provide any CloudFormation APIs to deploy these resources. It is also really confusing and frustrating to learn, especially things like data types in nested stacks and the proper usage of AWS::NoValue. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** If you have a lot of resources and need to easily manage many stacks, look at a Cloudformation template management tool such as Ansible. Using the EC2 API to query things like security group IDs is helpful and can eliminate a lot of the drudgery of maintaining parameter files. CloudFormation is JSON, but it's also still code. You can't really add comments, but you can define organizational standards and make sure that your team sticks to them. Peer review and VCS management of your CF stacks is essential. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** It provides repeatability and consistency across team members. It really shines when you need to decommission infrastructure. You don't have to rely on tagging or tribal knowledge to find all of the resources to delete when shutting down resources. ### 7. AWS CloudFormation experience **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bryan M. | Platform Architect, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 11, 2016 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Allows us to quickly implement true "infrastructure as code" on AWS; also, excellent documentation and examples really helped us climb the learning curve quickly. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** I wouldn't call it a dislike but it seems like a graphical editor would allow users to visualize their environments while generating the required JSON in the background. The only other complaint I really have is the overall performance of complicated CloudFormation runs - the develop/debug process can be quite time-consuming. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** If you are targeting deployment on AWS, CloudFormation is extremely powerful. The ability to merge core infrastructure with AWS platform services, all tied together with security groups, and network routing is extremely powerful. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are building a new multitenant platform to support a suite of products for our public safety products. We are developing in public cloud regions but finalizing test, staging, and production in the AWS GovCloud region. ### 8. AWS Cloudformation **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 07, 2016 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** it work well with many amazon components almost all amazon services as compared to its competitors like Chef Provisioning or Bosh. it has capabilities to update the stack which is good. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** work well with in AWS only, you can not reuse the work if you are not on AWS. like other tools chef provisioning or bosh which can work on other cloud provider. Update do not update current machine user data which is good and bad **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** all in AWS solution CF is best .. in class and have most AWS services then any other tool **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** creating software stack on AWS with LB, machines DB's ### 9. Easy to use with prepared configuration json **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tzu-Chi Y. | Software Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 24, 2016 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** I like the way that we can design our infrastructure using pure GUI. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** I may need better knowledge of the backend for fine-tuning the infrastructure. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Need better small examples for CloudFormation configurations, so that newbies get easier to learn it. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** I just want to set up the private VPN to use in China. ### 10. Invaluable tool for AWS resource provisioning **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 08, 2016 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Ability to define infrastructure as code, apply versioning and other SDLC-like methods, ability to automate resource provisioning, creating a repeatable process, applicable across environments and locations. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** JSON is a difficult format to work with. It's great for transporting data, but not for programming logic or defining structures. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** It is a great tool, but do consider alternatives and tools to supplement it, e.g. terraform or troposphere **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Repeatable process for instantiating environments. Development agility - new dev environments ready in minutes. ### 11. Fantastic experience for automated system deployments and upgrade on AWS **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 13, 2016 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Ability to fully embrace IaC (infrastructure as code) with the very powerful "descriptive" approach (as opposed to the imperative approach you usually use with scripting) that enables seamless updates to running infrastructures. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** The awful JSON based syntax which is hard to maintain and validate. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Have a look at troposphere (a project for generating CloudFormation templates using a validating Python syntax) **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** System deployments and updates on AWS with top-level traceability on what's running. ### 12. I would not recommend to use cloudformation for infra provisioning automation **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Anton B. | Senior Software Engineer, Research, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 07, 2016 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** You can write specs of your systems and store those specs in a VCS **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** - Procedural DSL implemented using JSON - Cascading resource removal does not work well **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Have a look at Teraform **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** When trying to automate infrastructure provisioning no significant benefits were found over plain shell scripts. ### 13. Build faster, grow up quickly. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 07, 2016 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Ways to build everything I want on AWS just using unique file. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Learning curve is complicated. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Any problem, because when we try AWS we already thinking about CloudFormation to avoid problems. The benefits are greats because we can setup a new stack in seconds. ### 14. cloud formation review **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Entertainment | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 12, 2016 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Its easy to use with a low learning curve **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** It does not have the ability to configure all aws services **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Verify it can configure the aws services that you are using or want to be using. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Automation, automation, automation. ## AWS CloudFormation Discussions - [Should I use CloudFormation?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/should-i-use-cloudformation) - [Which are characteristics of the CloudFormation service?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/which-are-characteristics-of-the-cloudformation-service) - [What is AWS CloudFormation?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-aws-cloudformation) - [What is AWS CloudFormation used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-aws-cloudformation-used-for) - [View AWS CloudFormation pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-aws-cloudformation/reviews?page=5§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-23+02%3A30%3A14+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=18b2745f-a9d4-42ef-954a-9e031492ea03&secure%5Btoken%5D=27680597db2238dfad0afadfdf1bbaa1234397a175956e3195f14181539fb235&format=llm_user) ## AWS CloudFormation Integrations - [Amazon Aurora](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-aurora/reviews) - [Amazon DocumentDB](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-documentdb/reviews) - [Amazon DynamoDB](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-web-services-aws-amazon-dynamodb/reviews) - [Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-elastic-container-service-amazon-ecs/reviews) - [Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-elastic-kubernetes-service-amazon-eks/reviews) - [Amazon Redshift](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-redshift/reviews) - [Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-relational-database-service-rds/reviews) - [Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-simple-email-service-amazon-ses/reviews) - [Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-simple-notification-service-sns/reviews) - [Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-simple-queue-service-sqs/reviews) - [Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-simple-storage-service-s3/reviews) - [Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-virtual-private-cloud-amazon-vpc/reviews) - [AWS Auto Scaling](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-auto-scaling/reviews) - [AWS Cloud9](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-cloud9/reviews) - [AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK)](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-cloud-development-kit-aws-cdk/reviews) - [AWS Elastic Beanstalk](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-elastic-beanstalk/reviews) - [AWS Fargate](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-fargate/reviews) - [AWS Glue](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-glue/reviews) - [AWS Lambda](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-lambda/reviews) - [SimpleDB](https://www.g2.com/products/simpledb/reviews) ## AWS CloudFormation Features **Administration ** - Administration Console - Task Management - Dashboards and Visualizations - Access Control **Automation** - Test Automation - Intelligent Automation - Release Automation - Automated Provisioning **IT Management** - Workflow Management - Infrastructure Management - IT Discovery ## Top AWS CloudFormation Alternatives - [Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform](https://www.g2.com/products/red-hat-ansible-automation-platform/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (369 reviews) - [Google Cloud Deployment Manager](https://www.g2.com/products/google-cloud-deployment-manager/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (26 reviews) - [Azure Automation](https://www.g2.com/products/azure-automation/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (32 reviews)