pinpole vs Cloudcraft

No. Cloudcraft is a diagramming and documentation tool. It can visualise your architecture and provide rough cost estimates, but it cannot provision, deploy, or modify actual AWS infrastructure. You need a separate tool — Terraform, CDK, the AWS console, or a CI/CD pipeline — to act on any Cloudcraft diagram. pinpole deploys directly from the canvas via a secure STS cross-account IAM workflow, with no long-lived credentials stored.

No. Cloudcraft has no concept of traffic load, request throughput, or performance modelling. It cannot tell you whether your architecture will hold at 1,000 or 10 million requests per second. pinpole's traffic simulation is the only pre-deployment load testing capability in the market — running Constant, Ramp, Spike, and Wave patterns from 10 RPS to 100M RPS against your architecture design, before a single resource is provisioned.

Datadog acquired Cloudcraft in November 2022. Since then, Cloudcraft has received incremental updates — primarily Azure diagram improvements and Datadog monitoring integrations — but the core product remains a diagramming tool. Deployment, IaC export, traffic simulation, and recommendations have not been added in the three-plus years since acquisition. Cloudcraft's roadmap is now governed by Datadog's monitoring platform priorities rather than independent architecture tooling.

pinpole Pro is priced at $69/user/month (with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required). Cloudcraft Pro ranges from $41 to $100/user/month depending on the plan and user count. For comparable or lower cost, pinpole includes traffic simulation, recommendations, one-click deployment, IaC export, version history, audit logging, and a cloud terminal — capabilities that simply don't exist in Cloudcraft at any price point.

Currently, pinpole is focused on AWS with 315+ services on the canvas. Cloudcraft supports AWS and Azure. GCP and Azure support are on pinpole's roadmap (Phase 3, Q2–Q3 2027), and this is pinpole's most significant current limitation relative to Cloudcraft. If multi-cloud architecture design is your primary use case today, evaluate Cloudcraft accordingly — but note that Cloudcraft cannot deploy to, simulate, or generate IaC for any cloud platform.

Yes. pinpole supports IaC export in Terraform and CDK at any point in the workflow — you can export from the canvas before or after simulation, or after applying recommendations. Cloudcraft has no IaC export capability; diagrams must be manually translated into Terraform or CDK by the engineer.

No. You can design, simulate, optimise, and receive recommendations entirely without an AWS account. An AWS account is only required at the point of deployment — and even then, pinpole uses a secure STS cross-account IAM workflow so no long-lived credentials are stored. This is the same for Cloudcraft: both tools allow design without an AWS account connected.

Yes — pinpole has a free tier available now at no cost. It includes 1 project, 5 simulations per month, the visual canvas with 315+ AWS services, the Constant traffic pattern, and 3 basic AI suggestions per month. No credit card required. Pro plans include a 14-day free trial with full feature access. Cloudcraft offers a limited free tier for viewing diagrams, but most team and collaboration features require a paid plan.