Earthly vs Garden

Earthly Lunar monitors software development activity and applies engineering policies across developer and AI workflows. It collects structured metadata from source repositories and CI/CD pipelines, then evaluates it against policies an organization defines. Lunar can be added to existing CI/CD pipelines without YAML changes or wholesale pipeline rewrites. Its guardrails can run while code is authored, on pull requests, and at deployment gates; enforcement can progress from draft and scoring to comments or blocking pull requests and deployments. Earthly lists more than 200 prebuilt guardrails for testing, security, compliance, and operational readiness. The integrations page lists 66 integrations, with Bash-script options for custom collectors and catalogers. Documentation includes a SQL API for engineering data and a CI agent that can run on self-hosted runners and is compatible with major CI vendors. Earthly says its services and databases are hosted on AWS in the United States, data is encrypted at rest and in transit, and it has SOC 2 Type II compliance. Earthfiles, an open-source portable build syntax, remains available. Earthly says the company was founded in 2020 and Lunar launched in 2026.

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.