Garden vs Laradock
Garden
garden.ioLaradock
laradock.ioSide by side
| Figure | Garden | Laradock |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $50/mo | Free |
| 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 | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 1 |
| Spec score · Container Development Environments | 9.1 (#1) | 7.7 (#25) |
| Configuration | Garden Core uses YAML declarations to make workflows reproducible and portable across developer machines and CI. | Services can be enabled as needed and configured through a shared .env file. |
| Integrations | Garden provides plugins for Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, Pulumi and local scripts. | Listed services include NGINX, Apache, Caddy, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, Grafana, Jenkins, and Keycloak. |
| Purpose | Garden is a DevOps automation tool for developing and testing Kubernetes apps faster. | Laradock provides a Docker-based PHP development environment with pre-configured containers for PHP, MySQL, Redis, and more than 100 services. |
| Requirements | Garden requires Git 2.14 or newer, and local service builds require a local Kubernetes installation. | Getting started requires Git and Docker with Docker Compose v2.20 or newer. |
| Security | A Garden community response states that the company is SOC 2 compliant and undergoes regular penetration testing. | The getting-started guide says the web server faces the frontend network while PHP-FPM, databases, caches, queues, and search services live on a backend network described as out of reach from outside. |
| Support | Garden directs users to Garden Discussions and its GitHub repository for help and issue reporting. | The help page directs users to open an issue, ask the community, email the project, or follow its security policy for vulnerabilities. |
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.