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Cybersecurity · head to head

Delinea vs Garden

Delinea logo

Delinea

Cybersecurity

Privileged access management from the merged Thycotic and Centrify

From
On request
Free plan
No
Full reviewWebsite
Garden logo

Garden

Developer Tools

Kubernetes development and testing automation with shared caching, now owned by Incredibuild

From
Free
Free plan
Yes
Full reviewWebsite

The short version

  • Only Garden has a free tier, so it costs nothing to try first.
  • Each has a real cost: Delinea the Thycotic and Centrify lineages are integrated unevenly, so buying the full portfolio means running consoles and agents that do not share one administrative model as cleanly as the marketing suggests.; Garden incredibuild acquired Garden in November 2024 and the pricing page now redirects to documentation, so there is no public commercial offer and no published roadmap for a team betting a platform on it.
  • They diverge on capability: Delinea covers Secret Server, Garden covers Action graph.
  • Prices and features above were last checked on 1 September 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which Delinea and Garden actually diverge.

Attributes where Delinea and Garden differ
AttributeDelineaGarden
Starting priceOn requestFree
Pricing modelquoteOpen source, no licence fee
Free tierNoYes
PlatformsWeb, Windows, Linux, macOSLinux, macOS, Windows, Kubernetes
CategoryCybersecurityDeveloper Tools

Identical on both: user rating (Not yet rated).

What each one covers

Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.

Only in Delinea

  • Secret Server
  • Privileged session recording
  • Privilege Manager
  • Server PAM
  • Discovery
  • DevOps secrets
  • Behaviour analytics

Only in Garden

  • Action graph
  • Shared result caching
  • Remote Kubernetes environments
  • In-cluster builds
  • Same config everywhere
  • Hot reload sync
  • Helm and Kustomize support
  • Templating

What people use each for

The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.

Delinea

  • An organisation whose cyber insurer now requires privileged credentials to be vaulted and rotatednot Garden
  • A mid-market IT team that abandoned a heavier PAM rollout and needs a vault that can be in production in weeksnot Garden
  • A company removing local administrator rights from every workstation after a ransomware incidentnot Garden
  • An audit finding that shared service account passwords are stored in a spreadsheet and used by contractorsnot Garden

Garden

  • A platform team whose integration test suite takes longer than the coffee break and needs caching to cut the loopnot Delinea
  • An organisation with thirty or more services on Kubernetes where docker-compose no longer approximates productionnot Delinea
  • Giving every developer an ephemeral namespace instead of queuing for one shared staging environmentnot Delinea
  • Running the identical build and test definition locally and in CI so failures reproduce on a laptopnot Delinea

Where each one falls short

Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.

Delinea

  • The Thycotic and Centrify lineages are integrated unevenly, so buying the full portfolio means running consoles and agents that do not share one administrative model as cleanly as the marketing suggests.
  • Modules are licensed separately by different units, per privileged user for the vault and per endpoint for privilege management, which makes total cost hard to model and easy to underestimate at scale.
  • Delinea does not publish rates, so buyers benchmark against third party and public sector listings; expect list prices to be negotiable by a wide margin, which means the first quote is not the price.
  • Thoma Bravo ownership since 2021 has coincided with firmer renewal pricing, and buyers with a single-vendor PAM estate have little leverage once credentials are inside the vault.
  • Migrating out of a privileged access vault is a genuinely hard project because every automated process that fetches a secret has to be repointed, so the switching cost is real and the vendor knows it.

Garden

  • Incredibuild acquired Garden in November 2024 and the pricing page now redirects to documentation, so there is no public commercial offer and no published roadmap for a team betting a platform on it.
  • It is tightly bound to Kubernetes, so teams running on ECS, Nomad, plain VMs or serverless get little from it and would need a different tool entirely.
  • The YAML action graph is a real configuration surface: a large monorepo needs someone to own and maintain Garden config as a first-class artefact, which is a standing platform-engineering cost.
  • Shared remote environments mean every developer needs cluster access and a cost allocation model, so cloud spend rises and namespace sprawl becomes a thing you have to police.
  • Caching correctness depends on declaring dependencies accurately; an under-declared action will serve a stale cached pass and hide a genuine test failure, which is a hard class of bug to notice.

Pricing, plan by plan

Delinea

On request
  • Secret Server$undefined/year
    • Priced per privileged user, tiered by edition
    • Cloud or on premises deployment
    • Session recording in higher editions
  • Privilege Manager$undefined/year
    • Priced per endpoint
    • Local admin rights removal and application elevation
    • Licensed separately from Secret Server
  • Server PAM$undefined/year
    • Priced per managed server or per privileged user
    • Just-in-time server access
    • Licensed separately

Garden

Free
  • Garden open sourceFree
    • Apache 2.0 licensed CLI
    • Full action graph and caching
    • Self-managed clusters
  • Commercial tier$undefined/year
    • Hosted caching and team features
    • Support and onboarding
    • Pricing no longer published since the Incredibuild acquisition

Which should you pick?

Choose Delinea if

  • You need secret server.
  • You work on Web, Windows, Linux, macOS.
  • You also want privileged session recording.
Delinea review

Choose Garden if

  • You need action graph.
  • You want to start without paying.
  • You work on Linux, macOS, Windows, Kubernetes.
  • You also want shared result caching.
Garden review

Questions people ask

Is Delinea or Garden better?
Neither clearly leads. Delinea starts at On request and Garden at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, Delinea or Garden?
Garden has a free tier; the other does not. Paid plans start at On request for Delinea and Free for Garden.
Does Delinea or Garden run on more platforms?
Delinea runs on Web, Windows, Linux, macOS. Garden runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, Kubernetes.
Can I use Garden for free?
Yes. Garden has a free tier, so you can try it without paying. Delinea starts at On request.
What is Delinea best used for?
Delinea is most often used for an organisation whose cyber insurer now requires privileged credentials to be vaulted and rotated, a mid-market it team that abandoned a heavier pam rollout and needs a vault that can be in production in weeks, a company removing local administrator rights from every workstation after a ransomware incident, an audit finding that shared service account passwords are stored in a spreadsheet and used by contractors. Of those, an organisation whose cyber insurer now requires privileged credentials to be vaulted and rotated and a mid-market it team that abandoned a heavier pam rollout and needs a vault that can be in production in weeks are not what Garden is typically brought in for.
What can Delinea do that Garden cannot?
Delinea covers Secret Server, Privileged session recording, Privilege Manager, Server PAM. Garden covers Action graph, Shared result caching, Remote Kubernetes environments, In-cluster builds.

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

Delinea: Is Delinea the same as Thycotic?

Delinea is the merged company formed from Thycotic and Centrify in 2021. Secret Server is the former Thycotic product; the server access products come from Centrify.

Garden: Is Garden still maintained?

The open source project remains on GitHub under Incredibuild ownership, but the commercial pricing page redirects to the docs and there is no public paid offer.

Delinea: Is pricing published?

Not by Delinea. Public sector frameworks have listed Secret Server Cloud around 348 GBP per user per year, which is a reference point, not a quote.

Garden: Do I need Kubernetes?

Effectively yes. Garden is built around Kubernetes environments and offers little to teams on other runtimes.

Delinea: Does one licence cover endpoints and servers?

No. Secret Server, Privilege Manager and Server PAM are separately licensed on different units. Scope all three if your requirement spans them.

Garden: Does it replace my CI system?

No. It runs inside GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or similar and speeds up what those pipelines execute.

Garden: What is the actual saving?

It comes from skipping builds and tests whose inputs have not changed, so the benefit scales with how many services you have and how often only a few change.

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