DDEV vs Garden
DDEV
ddev.com
Garden
garden.ioSide by side
| Figure | DDEV | 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 |
| Plans published | 1 | 4 |
| Spec score · Container Development Environments | 8.1 (#12) | 9.1 (#1) |
| Audience | DDEV describes itself as made for people who make websites and says it handles Docker so teams can focus on their work. | Garden is intended for platform engineers, DevOps engineers and application developers running workloads on Kubernetes. |
| Extensibility | Users can add add-ons, run lifecycle hook scripts, and provide their own Dockerfiles. | Garden is plugin-based and its repository includes an SDK area for building provider and action integrations. |
| Purpose | DDEV is a local development environment for web developers that launches Docker based environments for PHP and Node.js. | Garden is a DevOps automation tool for developing and testing Kubernetes apps faster. |
| Support | The project points users to documentation, GitHub issues, Discord, and contact options for support. | Garden directs users to Garden Discussions and its GitHub repository for help and issue reporting. |
Plans
In their own words
DDEV
DDEV is a free, open-source local development environment for people who build websites. It launches Docker-based projects for PHP and Node.js on macOS, Windows, and Linux. A project can be started, customized, shared, and extended, with compose workflows, IDE integration, and resource controls. The supported stack includes PHP, Node.js, MySQL, PostgreSQL, nginx, Apache, Redis, and Mailpit. Presets cover Laravel, WordPress, Drupal, TYPO3, Backdrop, Magento, Craft CMS, and other projects. Its router manages custom domain names and HTTPS automatically. Add-ons, lifecycle hooks, and user-supplied Dockerfiles provide extension points. Provider recipes and integrations include Acquia, Git, Lagoon, local files, Pantheon, Upsun, and rsync. DDEV concentrates on local development and does not deploy code. Public hosting is described as experimental, without backing from a security team. Support is available through documentation, GitHub issues, Discord, and contact options.
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.