What is the difference between Terraform and Crossplane?

Terraform is a widely adopted Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool that allows users to define, provision, and manage infrastructure resources across various cloud providers using a declarative configuration language. Crossplane, in contrast, is a Kubernetes-native IaC tool that integrates directly into the Kubernetes control plane, enabling infrastructure management using Kubernetes custom resources. While both tools use declarative configurations, Crossplane aligns more naturally with GitOps workflows and Kubernetes-native patterns, allowing infrastructure to be managed as part of a cluster’s lifecycle, whereas Terraform operates outside the cluster and is typically managed through separate CI/CD pipelines.