Dagger vs ko

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.

ko is an open-source builder for container images of Go applications. It runs `go build` locally, so Docker does not need to be installed. The project positions it for a single Go application with few operating-system base-image dependencies, such as one without cgo or OS package requirements. Builds can target all platforms supported by the configured base image or selected platforms such as linux/amd64 and linux/arm64. For Kubernetes, `ko resolve` builds images for `ko://` references in YAML and replaces those references with image references; `ko apply` can apply the resolved configuration. ko reuses the normal Go build cache and avoids pushing image blobs already present in the remote registry. It generates and uploads SPDX-format SBOMs by default, with an option to disable this. Registry credentials can come from Docker configuration, with built-in environment credential support for Google, Amazon, Azure, and GitHub container registries. A Terraform provider supports Infrastructure-as-Code workflows. ko supports Go applications only and defaults to CGO_ENABLED=0. Windows container image support is experimental and requires a Windows base image.