Dagger vs Garden

Dagger is a software stack for continuous integration built around an API, executable code, and a portable DAG execution engine. Pipeline logic can run locally or in Dagger Cloud, with automatic caching and end-to-end tracing. Cloud Checks connect a GitHub repository to Dagger Cloud and run checks on Cloud Engines after events such as pushes or pull requests, without a CI workflow file. Official modules cover testing, linting, formatting, type checking, browser tests, and Helm chart validation, and can be extended in a user's preferred language. The CLI has installation instructions for macOS, Linux, and Windows, and the documentation includes a self-hosting guide. Individual is free and allows one user, 1,000,000 monthly events, one month of run history, and community support. Team costs $50 a month after a two-week trial, for up to 10 users, 10,000,000 monthly events, one year of run history, and email support. Enterprise pricing is custom; SSO and managed single-tenant deployment are contact items. The site links to security and compliance information.

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.