Developer Tools · head to head
Garden vs Hookdeck
Garden
Developer Tools
Kubernetes development and testing automation with shared caching, now owned by Incredibuild
- From
- Free
- Rated
- -
Hookdeck
Developer Tools
Event gateway that receives, queues, retries and replays inbound webhooks
- From
- Free
- Rated
- -
The short version
- Each has a real cost: 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.; Hookdeck pricing meters delivered events, so fan-out multiplies the bill: one inbound event routed to four services counts as four deliveries.
- They diverge on capability: Garden covers Action graph, Hookdeck covers Ingest and persist.
- Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.
Where they differ
Only the attributes on which Garden and Hookdeck actually diverge.
Identical on both: starting price (Free), free tier (Yes), 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 Garden
- Action graph
- Shared result caching
- Remote Kubernetes environments
- In-cluster builds
- Same config everywhere
- Hot reload sync
- Helm and Kustomize support
- Templating
Only in Hookdeck
- Ingest and persist
- Automatic retries
- Filters and fan-out
- Transformations
- Local development CLI
- Rate limiting
What people use each for
The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.
Garden
- A platform team whose integration test suite takes longer than the coffee break and needs caching to cut the loopnot Hookdeck
- An organisation with thirty or more services on Kubernetes where docker-compose no longer approximates productionnot Hookdeck
- Giving every developer an ephemeral namespace instead of queuing for one shared staging environmentnot Hookdeck
- Running the identical build and test definition locally and in CI so failures reproduce on a laptopnot Hookdeck
Hookdeck
- A payments integration where losing a Stripe event during a deploy causes an order to go unfulfillednot Garden
- Fanning one provider webhook out to several internal services without each subscribing separatelynot Garden
- Debugging a partner integration by replaying the exact failing payload after shipping a fixnot Garden
- Receiving production-shaped webhooks on a developer laptop without running a public tunnelnot Garden
Where each one falls short
Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.
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.
Hookdeck
- Pricing meters delivered events, so fan-out multiplies the bill: one inbound event routed to four services counts as four deliveries.
- Free-tier retention is three days, which is shorter than the time it typically takes to notice a failing integration, so the payloads needed for a replay are often already gone.
- It becomes a single point of failure in front of every third-party integration, and an outage there means every provider webhook queues or fails at once.
- The transformation layer runs JavaScript in a constrained environment, so anything that needs a database lookup or an external call has to happen downstream instead.
- For a team already running Kafka or SQS the value is mostly the console and the replay UI, which is a hard cost to justify against infrastructure they already operate.
Pricing, plan by plan
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
Hookdeck
Free- DeveloperFree
- Up to ten thousand events per month
- Three-day retention
- One user
- Team$39/month
- Ten thousand events included
- Unlimited users
- Pay as you go metering above the included events
- Growth$499/month
- Ten thousand events included plus metered usage
- Thirty-day retention
- Uptime and latency SLAs
- Enterprise$undefined/year
- Negotiated event volume
- Custom retention
- Dedicated support
Which should you pick?
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.
Choose Hookdeck if
- You need ingest and persist.
- You want to start without paying.
- You work on Web, Linux, macOS, Windows.
- You also want automatic retries.
Questions people ask
- Is Garden or Hookdeck better?
- Neither clearly leads. Garden starts at Free and Hookdeck at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
- Which is cheaper, Garden or Hookdeck?
- Garden starts at Free and Hookdeck at Free.
- Does Garden or Hookdeck run on more platforms?
- Garden runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, Kubernetes. Hookdeck runs on Web, Linux, macOS, Windows.
- Can I use Garden for free?
- Both have a free tier, so you can try either at no cost before committing.
- What is Garden best used for?
- Garden is most often used for a platform team whose integration test suite takes longer than the coffee break and needs caching to cut the loop, an organisation with thirty or more services on kubernetes where docker-compose no longer approximates production, giving every developer an ephemeral namespace instead of queuing for one shared staging environment, running the identical build and test definition locally and in ci so failures reproduce on a laptop. Of those, a platform team whose integration test suite takes longer than the coffee break and needs caching to cut the loop and an organisation with thirty or more services on kubernetes where docker-compose no longer approximates production are not what Hookdeck is typically brought in for.
- What can Garden do that Hookdeck cannot?
- Garden covers Action graph, Shared result caching, Remote Kubernetes environments, In-cluster builds. Hookdeck covers Ingest and persist, Automatic retries, Filters and fan-out, Transformations.
Answered from the vendors’ own pages
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.
Hookdeck: Is there a free plan?
Yes, ten thousand events a month with three-day retention and one user.
Garden: Do I need Kubernetes?
Effectively yes. Garden is built around Kubernetes environments and offers little to teams on other runtimes.
Hookdeck: How is usage counted?
By delivered events, so a single inbound webhook fanned out to three destinations counts as three.
Garden: Does it replace my CI system?
No. It runs inside GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or similar and speeds up what those pipelines execute.
Hookdeck: Can I replay a failed webhook?
Yes, individually or in bulk from the console, with the original payload.
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.
Hookdeck: Does it work for outbound webhooks too?
Yes, the same queueing, retry and observability applies to webhooks you send.
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