Dory vs Garden
Dory
usedory.dev
Garden
garden.ioSide by side
| Figure | Dory | Garden |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | $50/mo |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 4 |
| Spec score · Container Development Environments | 7.1 (#35) | 9.1 (#1) |
| Integrations | Dory provides a versioned local MCP tool contract over stdio, including a read-only mode that blocks writes. | Garden provides plugins for Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, Pulumi and local scripts. |
| License | Dory is GPL-3.0 and open to inspection. | The Garden repository is open source under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. |
| Purpose | Dory combines Docker, Compose, Kubernetes, virtual machines, and agent sandboxes in a local development system for Apple Silicon Macs. | Garden is a DevOps automation tool for developing and testing Kubernetes apps faster. |
| Security | The maker says Dory requires no account, telemetry, or cloud control plane; the Docker socket is owner-only and published ports bind to localhost by default. | A Garden community response states that the company is SOC 2 compliant and undergoes regular penetration testing. |
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.