Sencai vs. DIY Terraform + Ansible
Terraform and Ansible are the default answer to managing infrastructure as code, and for many teams still the right one. This page compares what that stack does well, what it leaves for you to build, and where Sencai covers day-2 operations, an audit trail, and one workflow across eleven providers plus your own servers.
What Terraform and Ansible actually get right
Terraform's declarative model, where you describe the end state and it works out the plan, is a good way to think about infrastructure, and its provider ecosystem is enormous. Ansible covers configuration and orchestration. Both are free, with no vendor who can raise your price. Sencai is priced per resource and per user: 100 managed resources at standard automation is EUR 299 a month, plus EUR 44.50 for five people on Plus (see /pricing/). If you already have trusted modules and a safe CI pipeline, that investment stays valuable.
The part the getting-started guide skips
The cost of the DIY stack appears after the first apply. State files need a remote backend, locking, and a recovery plan for applying from a stale checkout. Drift, the gap between state and what exists at the provider, is a debugging session. Neither tool answers who changed a security group and whether anyone approved it, so teams add a ticketing system and a hand-built dashboard. This is not a flaw in either tool; it is the cost of assembling parts not designed as one system.
One control plane, eleven providers, your own servers too
Sencai connects to the accounts you already have: Hetzner, OVHcloud, Scaleway, UpCloud, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Akamai/Linode, and Oracle Cloud. It inventories what is running and you opt resources into management at your own pace. Provisioning, starting, stopping, resizing, and destroying instances is then one workflow across all eleven, and a lightweight fleet agent brings on-premise and bare-metal servers in too. See /platform/inventory-and-provisioning/.
An audit trail that is a query, not a project
Every action in Sencai writes to an append-only, hash-chained log, so "who changed this, and when" is a query against a record that cannot be quietly edited, not an investigation across state history, CI logs, and chat. Sencai does not hold ISO 27001 or SOC 2 and says so; it provides an exportable audit trail, records of processing, a sub-processor register, a data-residency statement, and a published Data Processing Agreement, all available without a sales call. Sencai is a Czech company operating under EU law. See /platform/security-and-compliance/ and /for/regulated-industries/.
Terraform provisions. It does not operate.
Terraform's job ends once the resource exists. Patching, monitoring, and knowing what is installed where fall to Ansible, and only if someone writes and maintains the playbooks. Sencai's fleet agent runs on any Linux server and handles monitoring, patching, a live software inventory, and approval-gated runbooks. Incident procedures are written once and run identically everywhere. A separate agent covers in-cluster Kubernetes. FinOps cost visibility and anomaly detection span every connected provider. See /platform/hybrid-and-on-premise/ and /platform/finops/.
Who should pick which
If you already have a Terraform and Ansible practice that works, switching is not an obvious win. Sencai fits better for a team without a dedicated platform engineer, a team that wants audit and compliance evidence without building it, or a team keeping Terraform for some providers and wanting one place to see the rest. The free organisation is the cheapest way to find out.
See what your own setup would look like
Connect a cloud account or start from the free plan: one user, five managed resources, no time limit, no card.