CDK tag manager vs Cloudformation stack tags

With CloudFormation, tags are applied at the Resource level. In other words, if you want to apply a tag on all the supported resources in your stack, you have to specify the tag's key and value each time for each resource as a property. This is quite repetitive and verbose, and also error-prone. Alternatively, you can supply a --tags command line argument or API argument to create-stack or CreateStack, but this is outside the template context and applies to all resources, which limits flexibility.

Imagine, too, that you need to add, modify, or remove a tag on each supported resource in a stack template. That's an O(n) operation on the template on every resource, and again is error-prone.

With CDK, on the other hand, tagging can be an automated recursive operation. By tagging a higher level construct, like a Stack, all of its children automatically inherit the tag. You can also apply the tag only to other constructs, which may consist of multiple resources. Modifications are simple; just add, remove, or modify the tag at that level. And CDK knows which resource types are taggable and which aren't, so you can avoid running into unsupported-tag errors. You can also exclude certain resource types from being tagged if you like.