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Comparison

A visual alternative to Terraform for AWS

Terraform is powerful and text-based. If you'd rather see your infrastructure as a diagram that deploys for real, here's how a canvas-based approach compares.

Updated 2026-07-15

Terraform is excellent, and for a platform team managing hundreds of resources across environments, code is the right answer. But a lot of people reach for Terraform for a much smaller job — stand up a few resources, wire them together, see them run — and end up fighting HCL, state files, and providers for something they could have drawn in a minute.

If that's you, a visual approach is worth a look. Here's an honest comparison.

What Terraform gives you

• Declarative code you can review, diff, and version in Git.
• State that tracks what exists so plans show precise changes.
• A huge provider ecosystem and reusable modules.

That's genuinely great for teams and scale. The cost is a learning curve, a state file to manage, and the fact that your infrastructure lives as text you have to build a mental picture from.

What a canvas gives you

Korve takes the same idea — declare what you want, let the tool reconcile it with reality — but the declaration is a diagram you drag together, and deploying provisions real AWS resources:

• You see the architecture instead of imagining it from HCL. The bucket, the instance, the connection between them are objects on a canvas.
• Connections create the IAM. Drawing a line from EC2 to S3 generates the scoped role and policy for you — no trust-policy boilerplate. See what wiring EC2 to S3 actually creates.
• Dry runs before deploys. You preview every resource and permission before anything is created, then deploy for real.
• Cost is attached to the picture. The expensive resource is a node you can see, not a line in a report.

Where each one wins

Reach for Terraform when infrastructure-as-code review, multi-environment pipelines, and a large team are the point. The text is the feature.

Reach for a canvas when you want to understand a system at a glance, stand something up quickly, or hand a non-Terraform-fluent teammate something they can actually read. The picture is the feature.

They're not mutually exclusive philosophies — they're different answers to "how do I want to see my infrastructure." If you've ever drawn your architecture on a whiteboard before writing the HCL, the canvas is that whiteboard, except it deploys.

Try it

Connect an AWS account and build a two-resource stack. It takes about as long as reading this did.