The licence argument is mostly settled and mostly irrelevant to your decision. What matters is your provider surface, your state backend and who carries the risk.
This decision generates more heat than it deserves. For the overwhelming majority of estates the two tools are interchangeable at the HCL level, and a migration is a binary swap plus a state format check.
Reasons to stay on Terraform
- You depend on Terraform Cloud or Enterprise features with no equivalent in your target stack
- Your procurement process requires a single commercial vendor with a support contract
- You are already deep in the HashiCorp ecosystem and the integration cost of leaving exceeds the benefit
Reasons to move to OpenTofu
- The BUSL terms create a genuine problem for your business model — this is rare, and worth confirming with legal rather than assuming
- You want the state encryption and provider-mirroring features that landed in the fork first
- Your organisation has a policy preference for foundation-governed tooling
The honest answer
If you cannot articulate which of the above applies to you, the decision does not matter and you should spend the time on something that does — like the fact that your state bucket is writable by everyone in the account, or that nobody has run a plan in CI for six months. We have never seen an estate where the Terraform-versus-OpenTofu choice was the binding constraint on delivery.