Garden vs Vessel
Garden
garden.ioVessel
vessel.shippingdocker.comSide by side
| Figure | Garden | Vessel |
|---|---|---|
| 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 Development Environments | 9.1 (#1) | 6.8 (#38) |
| Purpose | Garden is a DevOps automation tool for developing and testing Kubernetes apps faster. | Vessel provides simple Docker development environments for Laravel projects. |
| Requirements | Garden requires Git 2.14 or newer, and local service builds require a local Kubernetes installation. | The docs state that Docker is Vessel's only requirement. |
| Support | Garden directs users to Garden Discussions and its GitHub repository for help and issue reporting. | The opened Vessel pages link to usage and customization documentation and do not state a support service or response time. |
| Supported operating systems | Official installation instructions cover macOS, Windows 10 or later, and Linux. | Vessel currently works on Macintosh and Linux; the docs say Windows is not currently supported. |
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.
Vessel
Vessel has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.