Developer Tools · head to head
Cortex vs Garden
Cortex
Developer Tools
Internal developer portal that scores service ownership and maturity rather than just cataloguing services
- From
- On request
- Rated
- -
Garden
Developer Tools
Kubernetes development and testing automation with shared caching, now owned by Incredibuild
- From
- Free
- Rated
- -
The short version
- Only Garden has a free tier, so it costs nothing to try first.
- Each has a real cost: Cortex pricing is quote only, so a platform team cannot build a business case or compare against the true cost of self-hosted Backstage without entering a sales cycle first.; 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: Cortex covers Service catalogue, Garden covers Action graph.
- Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.
Where they differ
Only the attributes on which Cortex and Garden actually diverge.
Identical on both: user rating (Not yet rated), category (Developer Tools).
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 Cortex
- Service catalogue
- Scorecards
- Initiatives
- Self-service templates
- Query language
- Eng intelligence
- Integrations layer
- On-call and ownership mapping
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.
Cortex
- A platform team that needs to prove to leadership how far a Kubernetes or framework migration has actually progressed across hundreds of servicesnot Garden
- An organisation where ownership of production services is genuinely unknown after reorganisations or acquisitionsnot Garden
- Enforcing production readiness standards on new services at creation time rather than at incident reviewnot Garden
- Replacing a self-hosted Backstage that is consuming a full-time engineer or two just to stay upgradednot Garden
Garden
- A platform team whose integration test suite takes longer than the coffee break and needs caching to cut the loopnot Cortex
- An organisation with thirty or more services on Kubernetes where docker-compose no longer approximates productionnot Cortex
- Giving every developer an ephemeral namespace instead of queuing for one shared staging environmentnot Cortex
- Running the identical build and test definition locally and in CI so failures reproduce on a laptopnot Cortex
Where each one falls short
Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.
Cortex
- Pricing is quote only, so a platform team cannot build a business case or compare against the true cost of self-hosted Backstage without entering a sales cycle first.
- The catalogue is only as accurate as the metadata you supply, so an organisation with inconsistent repository conventions spends its first quarter cleaning data before any scorecard means anything.
- Scorecards create political friction: publishing a per-team grade turns an engineering standard into a performance metric, and teams will game the rules rather than fix the underlying issue.
- It is closed source and hosted, so organisations with strict data residency or air-gap requirements have limited options compared with running Backstage themselves.
- Value scales with organisation size, so a company with fifty engineers and thirty services will find the catalogue tells them nothing they did not already know while still paying an enterprise contract.
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
Cortex
On request- Cortex$undefined/year
- Service catalogue and ownership mapping
- Scorecards and initiatives
- Self-service templates
Garden
Free- Garden open sourceFree
- Apache 2.0 licensed CLI
- Full action graph and caching
- Self-managed clusters
- Commercial tier$undefined/year
- Hosted caching and team features
- Support and onboarding
- Pricing no longer published since the Incredibuild acquisition
Which should you pick?
Choose Cortex if
- You need service catalogue.
- You work on Web, API.
- You also want scorecards.
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.
Questions people ask
- Is Cortex or Garden better?
- Neither clearly leads. Cortex 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, Cortex or Garden?
- Garden has a free tier; the other does not. Paid plans start at On request for Cortex and Free for Garden.
- Does Cortex or Garden run on more platforms?
- Cortex runs on Web, API. 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. Cortex starts at On request.
- What is Cortex best used for?
- Cortex is most often used for a platform team that needs to prove to leadership how far a kubernetes or framework migration has actually progressed across hundreds of services, an organisation where ownership of production services is genuinely unknown after reorganisations or acquisitions, enforcing production readiness standards on new services at creation time rather than at incident review, replacing a self-hosted backstage that is consuming a full-time engineer or two just to stay upgraded. Of those, a platform team that needs to prove to leadership how far a kubernetes or framework migration has actually progressed across hundreds of services and an organisation where ownership of production services is genuinely unknown after reorganisations or acquisitions are not what Garden is typically brought in for.
- What can Cortex do that Garden cannot?
- Cortex covers Service catalogue, Scorecards, Initiatives, Self-service templates. Garden covers Action graph, Shared result caching, Remote Kubernetes environments, In-cluster builds.
Answered from the vendors’ own pages
Cortex: How is Cortex different from Backstage?
Backstage is an open source framework you build and staff. Cortex is a hosted product with scorecards and initiatives out of the box and no platform team required to keep it running.
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.
Cortex: Is pricing published?
No. Cortex requires a sales conversation and prepares a custom proposal.
Garden: Do I need Kubernetes?
Effectively yes. Garden is built around Kubernetes environments and offers little to teams on other runtimes.
Cortex: Can it self-host?
It is offered as a hosted product; on-premise arrangements are handled through sales rather than published.
Garden: Does it replace my CI system?
No. It runs inside GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or similar and speeds up what those pipelines execute.
Cortex: What is the main adoption risk?
Bad or missing service metadata. The catalogue and every scorecard on top of it inherit whatever quality your repositories already have.
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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