Developer Tools · head to head
Garden vs Restate
Garden
Developer Tools
Kubernetes development and testing automation with shared caching, now owned by Incredibuild
- From
- Free
- Rated
- -
Restate
Developer Tools
Durable execution engine in Rust with a free tier and low-latency workflows
- 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.; Restate the runtime is under a Business Source Licence rather than an open source licence, so building a competing managed offering on it is prohibited and some procurement functions will reject it on licence grounds alone.
- They diverge on capability: Garden covers Action graph, Restate covers Durable execution.
- Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.
Where they differ
Only the attributes on which Garden and Restate 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 Restate
- Durable execution
- Virtual objects
- Single binary runtime
- Multi-language SDKs
- Workflows and sagas
- Restate Cloud
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 Restate
- An organisation with thirty or more services on Kubernetes where docker-compose no longer approximates productionnot Restate
- Giving every developer an ephemeral namespace instead of queuing for one shared staging environmentnot Restate
- Running the identical build and test definition locally and in CI so failures reproduce on a laptopnot Restate
Restate
- Payment or order flows where a crash between two external API calls must not double-charge or lose the ordernot Garden
- AI agent loops that call tools over minutes or hours and must survive a deployment mid-runnot Garden
- Replacing hand-rolled retry, idempotency key and outbox code across a set of microservicesnot Garden
- A small team that wants durable workflows without operating a Temporal cluster and its databasenot 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.
Restate
- The runtime is under a Business Source Licence rather than an open source licence, so building a competing managed offering on it is prohibited and some procurement functions will reject it on licence grounds alone.
- Restate Cloud jumps from a free fifty thousand actions straight to 300 US dollars a month for twenty million, so a workload sitting at a few hundred thousand actions pays enterprise-shaped money for hobby-shaped volume.
- It is a young project against Temporal’s established base, so hiring engineers who already know it is unrealistic and the answer to most questions is in the docs rather than on Stack Overflow.
- The programming model requires structuring code around durable handlers and virtual objects, which is a genuine rewrite for existing services rather than a library you add.
- The single-binary simplicity that makes small deployments cheap also means fewer operational knobs at very large scale than a system designed as separable components.
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
Restate
Free- FreeFree
- Fifty thousand durable actions per month
- No credit card required
- Community support
- Starter$300/month
- Twenty million actions per month
- Two hundred actions per second, bursting to one thousand
- Twenty GB storage
- Pro$1000/month
- Fifty million actions per month
- Five hundred actions per second, bursting to two thousand
- Fifty GB storage
- Enterprise$undefined/year
- Negotiated volume
- Twenty-four seven P0 support
- 99.99 per cent SLA
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 Restate if
- You need durable execution.
- You want to start without paying.
- You work on Linux, macOS, Web.
- You also want virtual objects.
Questions people ask
- Is Garden or Restate better?
- Neither clearly leads. Garden starts at Free and Restate at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
- Which is cheaper, Garden or Restate?
- Garden starts at Free and Restate at Free.
- Does Garden or Restate run on more platforms?
- Garden runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, Kubernetes. Restate runs on Linux, macOS, Web.
- 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 Restate is typically brought in for.
- What can Garden do that Restate cannot?
- Garden covers Action graph, Shared result caching, Remote Kubernetes environments, In-cluster builds. Restate covers Durable execution, Virtual objects, Single binary runtime, Multi-language SDKs.
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.
Restate: Is Restate open source?
The SDKs are MIT. The runtime is under a Business Source Licence, which permits self-hosting but not offering it as a competing service.
Garden: Do I need Kubernetes?
Effectively yes. Garden is built around Kubernetes environments and offers little to teams on other runtimes.
Restate: How does it compare with Temporal?
Same problem, different shape: one Rust binary with embedded storage instead of a server plus database plus workers, and lower per-step latency.
Garden: Does it replace my CI system?
No. It runs inside GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or similar and speeds up what those pipelines execute.
Restate: Is there a free tier?
Yes, fifty thousand durable actions a month on Restate Cloud with no card required.
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.
Restate: Which languages are supported?
TypeScript, Java, Kotlin, Go, Python and Rust.
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