Garden vs rules_img
Garden
garden.iorules_img
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Garden | rules_img |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $50/mo | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 0 |
| Spec score · Container Build Tools | 9.1 (#3) | 7.0 (#31) |
| License | The Garden repository is open source under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. | The repository identifies its license as Apache-2.0. |
| Purpose | Garden is a DevOps automation tool for developing and testing Kubernetes apps faster. | rules_img provides Bazel rules for building OCI container images with performance optimizations. |
| Remote builds | Garden Cloud's Remote Container Builder uses managed remote compute and shared Docker layer caches. | It integrates with Remote Build Execution and Content Addressable Storage, and can push layers from the remote execution cluster to a registry at build time. |
| Security | A Garden community response states that the company is SOC 2 compliant and undergoes regular penetration testing. | The project is published under the Apache-2.0 license and documents image signing with pluggable signer plugins including Notation and cosign. |
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.