Garden vs Kaniko
Garden
garden.ioKaniko
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Garden | Kaniko |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $50/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 1 |
| Spec score · Container Build Tools | 9.1 (#3) | 7.6 (#21) |
| Purpose | Garden is a DevOps automation tool for developing and testing Kubernetes apps faster. | Kaniko builds container images from Dockerfiles inside a container or Kubernetes cluster. |
| Security | A Garden community response states that the company is SOC 2 compliant and undergoes regular penetration testing. | Kaniko relies on container runtime security features and says it does not by itself make untrusted builds safe to run. |
| Support | Garden directs users to Garden Discussions and its GitHub repository for help and issue reporting. | The project directs community questions to GitHub issues and offers Matrix support and announcements rooms. |
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.