Argo Rollouts vs Garden
Argo Rollouts
argoproj.github.io
Garden
garden.ioSide by side
| Figure | Argo Rollouts | Garden |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $50/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 4 |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Deployment Tools | 8.9 (#2) | 9.1 (#1) |
| Dashboard | An optional kubectl plugin provides command-line management and visualization, and the docs also list a dashboard installation manifest. | Garden Cloud's dashboard visualizes CI/CD flows, logs and command history. |
| Integrations | Documented integrations include NGINX, AWS ALB, Apache APISIX, Istio, Linkerd, SMI, Prometheus, Datadog, New Relic, Graphite, and InfluxDB. | Garden provides plugins for Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, Pulumi and local scripts. |
| Purpose | Argo Rollouts is a Kubernetes controller and set of CRDs for advanced deployment and progressive delivery. | Garden is a DevOps automation tool for developing and testing Kubernetes apps faster. |
| Security | The project documents cosign verification of signed container images and SLSA Level 3 provenance for container image attestations. | A Garden community response states that the company is SOC 2 compliant and undergoes regular penetration testing. |
Plans
In their own words
Argo Rollouts
Argo Rollouts is a self-hosted Kubernetes controller for managing how application updates reach users. It supports BlueGreen, Canary and Rolling Update strategies, with weighted traffic shifting through ingress controllers or service meshes. Without a traffic-routing provider, it can adjust ReplicaSet counts instead. Metric integrations let it assess KPIs and automate promotion or rollback, while leaving room for manual judgment. Supported providers include NGINX, AWS ALB, Istio and Traefik for traffic, and Prometheus, Datadog, New Relic, Graphite and InfluxDB for metrics. It can operate independently of Argo CD and respond to Kubernetes manifest changes whether they come from GitOps or traditional CI/CD. Each cluster running Rollout workloads needs its own controller and CRD; a Rollout specification covers one application, not dependencies among applications. Shared-resource or worker-queue applications may be a poor fit, and infrastructure applications are not recommended. Argo Rollouts is free and open source. It runs on Linux, macOS, Windows or self-hosted environments.
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.