Garden vs Toolbx
Garden
garden.io
Toolbx
containertoolbx.orgSide by side
| Figure | Garden | Toolbx |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | — |
| Plans published | 4 | 1 |
| Spec score · Container Development Environments | 9.1 (#1) | 7.1 (#36) |
| Integrations | Garden provides plugins for Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, Pulumi and local scripts. | GNOME Builder integrates Toolbx for building and testing desktop applications inside a selected container. |
| Purpose | Garden is a DevOps automation tool for developing and testing Kubernetes apps faster. | Toolbx provides interactive Linux command line environments for software development and host troubleshooting without installing tools on the host. |
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.