Garden vs Testcontainers Desktop
Garden
garden.io
Testcontainers Desktop
testcontainers.comSide by side
| Figure | Garden | Testcontainers Desktop |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $50/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 2 |
| Spec score · Container Development Environments | 9.1 (#1) | 8.3 (#10) |
| Purpose | Garden is a DevOps automation tool for developing and testing Kubernetes apps faster. | Testcontainers Desktop is a companion app for the open source Testcontainers libraries, intended to improve local development and testing with real dependencies. |
| Support | Garden directs users to Garden Discussions and its GitHub repository for help and issue reporting. | The docs direct users experiencing embedded-runtime issues to the public Testcontainers Slack channel. |
| Supported operating systems | Official installation instructions cover macOS, Windows 10 or later, and Linux. | The desktop app is available for macOS, Windows and Linux. |
| What it does | Garden automates development and testing workflows for Kubernetes and other cloud-native applications. | Testcontainers Desktop is a system-tray companion for running and debugging Testcontainers-based development and tests. |
Plans
Testcontainers Desktop
- Free individual developer planFree
- Free plan for individual developersFree
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.
Testcontainers Desktop
Testcontainers Desktop is a companion app for the open source Testcontainers libraries, for local development and testing with real dependencies. The closed-source app runs in the system tray and lets users switch between local container runtimes, including Podman and Colima. It can also run containers through Testcontainers Cloud on demand without local resources or a local Docker daemon. Users can expose services on fixed ports for debugging tools, inspect container logs, and open a shell for a configured service. A beta freeze option can stop containers from shutting down after tests, while session tracking feeds collaborative dashboards with desktop and CI data from an organization. More than 15 example service configurations include PostgreSQL and Kafka. The embedded runtime is beta and requires macOS 11 or later. A Docker account is required to sign in. The free plan includes 300 minutes of cloud runtime per month; Turbo mode requires a paid account.