Open source at HashiCorp

When Mitchell and Armon created their first automation projects, they had no idea they would eventually build a company around their ideas. They learned the theory of computer science through university, but the practice of building software and communities through open source software. To enable the free use of their projects and to support a vibrant community around HashiCorp, they chose an open source model, which evolved over time to include free, enterprise, and managed service versions. This commitment continues today, with all HashiCorp projects accessible through a source-available license that allows broad copying, modification, and redistribution, while helping support a vibrant community and partner ecosystem.

  • HashiCorp Product logos for Terraform, Vault, Consul, Packer, Waypoint, Boundary, Nomad and Vagrant

    Over half a billion

    Software downloads

    (in FY24)
  • 60+ Countries

    HashiCorp User Groups

    (as of FY24)
  • 180+

    HashiCorp User Groups

    (as of FY24)
  • 50,000+

    HashiCorp User Group members

    (as of FY24)

Community ethos

HashiCorp has always focused on enabling a community of practitioners around the products, and around the world. We believe in an open approach built around the following tenets:

Group of individuals at a conference
  • Enabling practitioners

    We want to enable practitioners to freely download the software, inspect source code, and make modifications to solve their problems.

  • Building an ecosystem and community

    We want to make the products easily extensible by partners and end users. We understand there is a broad universe of tools people use and enabling integrations with those is key.

  • Creating transparency

    Sharing our source code is key to creating transparency for our users, partners, and customers. We want to make it easy to understand how our products work and to assess them for security, performance, or other concerns.

  • Driving vision

    We fundamentally believe that great software requires having a unified vision, and we’ve always taken a strong lead in the direction of our products.

A successful business model

Today, we have eight products in our portfolio for which the source code is broadly open and available: Packer, Vagrant, Terraform, Consul, Boundary, Vault, Nomad, and Waypoint. Many of these products also have enterprise offerings as well as managed service offerings, with both free and paid tiers.

We offer our products through a free, source-available license because we believe that enabling practitioners to innovate in infrastructure helps create broad ecosystems, and allows organizations to more easily solve integration problems.

Our investments in an open ecosystem are made possible by the thousands of companies who partner with us commercially. We aim to drive standardization to accelerate the benefit to practitioners, while our commercial products are designed to solve organizational challenges of managing infrastructure at scale. We are proud to count more than 450 million downloads of HashiCorp’s free community products during our 2023 fiscal year.

Explore resources

License FAQs

Learn more about how we approach licensing

Contributor License Agreement (CLA)

Review the text of our CLA for community contributors

HashiCorp Business Source License

Review the formal BSL text