apko vs Garden
apko
apko.dev
Garden
garden.ioSide by side
| Figure | apko | Garden |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | $50/mo |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 4 |
| Spec score · Container Build Tools | 7.8 (#14) | 9.1 (#3) |
| Integrations | The project documents use with Docker and provides an apko build action for GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines. | Garden provides plugins for Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, Pulumi and local scripts. |
| Purpose | apko builds and publishes OCI container images from apk packages. | Garden is a DevOps automation tool for developing and testing Kubernetes apps faster. |
| Support | The project README directs users with questions to the #apko channel on Kubernetes Slack. | Garden directs users to Garden Discussions and its GitHub repository for help and issue reporting. |
| What it does | apko is an open-source command-line tool that builds container images from APK packages using declarative YAML configuration. | Garden automates development and testing workflows for Kubernetes and other cloud-native applications. |
Plans
In their own words
Garden
Garden is a DevOps automation tool for developing and testing Kubernetes applications. It creates production-like environments for development, testing, and CI on demand, then represents infrastructure, builds, services, and tests in a dependency-aware action graph. Graph-aware caching avoids rerunning unchanged images and tests. Garden Core uses YAML declarations to make workflows reproducible across developer machines and CI, and sync mode live-syncs changes to running deployments. Plugins cover Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, Pulumi, and local scripts. Its Terraform provider validates and provisions infrastructure and exposes stack outputs to Garden actions; the Pulumi plugin is experimental and deploys stacks in dependency order. Garden Cloud's Remote Container Builder uses managed remote compute and shared Docker layer caches. Garden supports Linux, macOS, Windows, and self-hosted use. It requires Git 2.14 or newer, and local service builds need a local Kubernetes installation. The free tier has limits on build minutes, cache hits, and cache retention. Enterprise is a self-hosted Garden Cloud distribution installed into a customer's Kubernetes infrastructure.