Devilbox vs Garden

Devilbox is a Dockerized LAMP and MEAN stack for local development on Linux, macOS, and Windows hosts. It supports an unlimited number of projects: adding a project directory creates a virtual host without restarting services. New projects get SSL certificates signed by Devilbox's certificate authority, and its built-in wildcard DNS makes project addresses available to the host system.

The stack supports Apache or Nginx with PHP, plus services such as MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcached, and MongoDB. Configuration can be set globally, by service version, or for a specific project. Its intranet includes phpMyAdmin, phpPgAdmin, phpRedMin, Adminer, OpcacheGui, and a GUI for viewing sent emails. Outgoing project email is intercepted and stored locally for review. After the required Docker images are first downloaded, Devilbox can run offline. Its documentation says official Docker images are built nightly and published with available security patches. The free plan is listed at free, with no price or usage limits stated on the opened pages.

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.