Canopy vs Garden
Canopy
canopydev.app
Garden
garden.ioSide by side
| Figure | Canopy | Garden |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | $50/mo |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 4 |
| Spec score · Container Development Environments | 7.8 (#20) | 9.1 (#1) |
| Audience | The use-cases page describes workflows for onboarding teammates, running polyglot stacks, managing agency client projects, and monitoring local environments. | Garden is intended for platform engineers, DevOps engineers and application developers running workloads on Kubernetes. |
| Configuration | Canopy provides a visual nginx configuration editor with syntax highlighting and Save & Reload. | Garden Core uses YAML declarations to make workflows reproducible and portable across developer machines and CI. |
| Security | Canopy says the app is notarized by Apple and runs local Docker containers without modifying core system files beyond standard proxy, SSL routing, and hosts file changes. | A Garden community response states that the company is SOC 2 compliant and undergoes regular penetration testing. |
| Support | Canopy lists [email protected] for beta questions and access requests. | Garden directs users to Garden Discussions and its GitHub repository for help and issue reporting. |
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.