Coasts vs Garden
Coasts
coasts.dev
Garden
garden.ioSide by side
| Figure | Coasts | Garden |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $50/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 4 |
| Spec score · Container Development Environments | 8.9 (#2) | 9.1 (#1) |
| License | The project is MIT-licensed and described as free and open source. | The Garden repository is open source under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. |
| Purpose | Coasts runs multiple isolated local development environments for the same project on one machine. | Garden is a DevOps automation tool for developing and testing Kubernetes apps faster. |
| Requirements | The documented requirements are macOS or Linux, Docker, Git, Node.js, and socat. | Garden requires Git 2.14 or newer, and local service builds require a local Kubernetes installation. |
| Support | The site links to a Discord community and a contact page. | Garden directs users to Garden Discussions and its GitHub repository for help and issue reporting. |
| Workflows | Coasts works with agentic coding workflows that use Git worktrees and says no special harness-side configuration is required. | Workflows combine Garden commands and shell scripts and can run locally, in CI or through Garden Cloud triggers. |
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.