AIVory Architect vs Brainboard: AI Terraform Compared

Nobody has written this comparison, because AIVory Architect is small enough that nobody’s had a reason to yet. But the “draw your infrastructure, get Terraform” idea has real competitors, and Brainboard is the most mature one, so here’s an honest look at both, checked against Brainboard’s live docs and pricing as of August 2026.

What Brainboard actually is

Brainboard is a browser-based, multi-cloud architecture platform. You design on a canvas, it generates Terraform behind the scenes, and it’s built from the ground up for teams working on the same infrastructure together, not a single developer’s IDE session. It supports five cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, and Scaleway), and the free tier is genuinely generous: unlimited architectures, unlimited Terraform generation, all providers, at $0.

Where Brainboard pulls ahead is governance tooling. It integrates with Checkov, Tfsec, Terrascan, and OPA for policy-as-code scanning, Infracost for cost estimation, and GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps for a proper GitOps workflow, plus Slack and Teams for notifications. The Pro tier ($99 per user/month) adds unlimited team members, architecture versioning, an embedded CI/CD engine, remote state backend, and RBAC. Enterprise adds self-hosted runners, SSO, a private module registry, and cloud-provider infrastructure import.

That’s a real, mature product built specifically for teams who need multiple people editing the same cloud architecture with an audit trail and a policy gate in front of every deploy. If that’s your team, Brainboard is doing things AIVory Architect doesn’t document doing at all.

What Architect actually is

AIVory Architect lives inside your IDE, not a browser tab. You drag AWS, Azure, GCP, Hetzner, RunPod, DeepInfra, or Cloudflare resources onto a canvas in JetBrains, VS Code, Cursor, or Antigravity, connect them, and click Generate. It produces actual .tf files, main.tf, variables.tf, outputs.tf, providers.tf, with dependency resolution and topological sorting, not a diagram export or pseudocode. It also does the reverse: point it at an existing project with .tf files already in it, and it parses and visualizes your current infrastructure on the canvas, in both the free and paid tiers.

Hetzner has full resource coverage (servers, volumes, networks, load balancers, firewalls). AWS covers EC2, RDS, ELB, VPC, EBS, and S3. Azure, GCP, RunPod, DeepInfra, and Cloudflare are also documented with specific resource sets, though I’d treat Architect’s per-provider depth as narrower than Brainboard’s, since Architect’s own product notes flag AWS as the most recently verified coverage and don’t claim parity with a five-year-mature multi-cloud platform.

Deployment (terraform init/plan/apply from inside the IDE, with streaming logs and state-drift indicators on the canvas) is a premium feature, same as Kubernetes pod management and SSH access to deployed resources. Designs save as JSON to .aivory/designs/ in your project folder, which means they’re git-versioned the same way your code is, just not simultaneously co-edited by multiple people in a live session the way Brainboard’s browser canvas is.

Price is a flat $9.99/month or $99.99/year, no per-seat multiplier. For a five-person team, that’s the cost of one Brainboard Pro seat for the whole team’s Architect licenses combined, though it’s also not solving the same problem, Architect doesn’t have Brainboard’s RBAC, remote state backend, or policy-as-code integrations.

Side by side

Two other names worth a mention

Cloudairy is a broader AI diagramming workspace, flowcharts, ER diagrams, UML, whiteboarding, with a cloud architecture diagram maker as one feature among many. From what’s on its own site, it doesn’t generate deployable Terraform or IaC, it’s for visualizing an architecture, not producing runnable code from it, which puts it in a different category than either Architect or Brainboard.

Workik takes the opposite approach from both: no canvas, you describe your infrastructure in a chat prompt and it generates Terraform, with support for choosing between GPT, Claude, Gemini, and other models. It has a VS Code extension and a free trial (20 requests, then 7/day), with a paid Starter tier at $25/month. If you think in prompts rather than diagrams, that’s a genuinely different workflow than dragging resources onto a canvas, worth knowing exists even though this comparison is mainly about the visual-canvas category.

Which one to actually use

If your team already collaborates on shared cloud architecture in a browser, wants policy-as-code gates before every deploy, and needs RBAC and audit trails, Brainboard is the more complete product for that job today, and I’d say so even writing about my own competitor. It has years of maturity Architect doesn’t have yet.

If you want the diagram and the Terraform to live in the same place as your code, in the IDE you’re already in, without opening a separate browser tab, and you’re on Hetzner, AWS, or one of the smaller providers Architect covers, that’s the specific gap Architect fills. It won’t replace a policy-as-code pipeline or a multi-user RBAC setup, it was never built to.

Try Architect’s free tier at aivory.net/architect, or go to Brainboard directly if your team needs the collaboration and policy tooling more than the IDE-native canvas.