Developer Tools · head to head
Garden vs Soketi
Garden
Developer Tools
Kubernetes development and testing automation with shared caching, now owned by Incredibuild
- From
- Free
- Rated
- -
Soketi
Developer Tools
Self-hosted, Pusher-compatible WebSockets server with a stalled maintenance record
- 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.; Soketi maintenance has effectively stalled: the maintainer has said time is severely limited, releases are infrequent, and the community has been discussing whether the project is abandoned, which means security fixes may not arrive.
- They diverge on capability: Garden covers Action graph, Soketi covers Pusher protocol compatibility.
- Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.
Where they differ
Only the attributes on which Garden and Soketi actually diverge.
Identical on both: starting price (Free), pricing model (Open source, no licence fee), 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 Soketi
- Pusher protocol compatibility
- Presence and private channels
- Horizontal scaling
- App management backends
- Webhooks
- Prometheus metrics
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 Soketi
- An organisation with thirty or more services on Kubernetes where docker-compose no longer approximates productionnot Soketi
- Giving every developer an ephemeral namespace instead of queuing for one shared staging environmentnot Soketi
- Running the identical build and test definition locally and in CI so failures reproduce on a laptopnot Soketi
Soketi
- A Laravel application that already uses Echo and wants to stop paying a hosted realtime providernot Garden
- Realtime notifications or presence indicators where data must not leave your own infrastructure for compliance reasonsnot Garden
- A local or CI environment that needs a Pusher-compatible server without hitting a paid accountnot Garden
- A high-connection-count application where hosted per-connection pricing has become the largest line in the infrastructure billnot 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.
Soketi
- Maintenance has effectively stalled: the maintainer has said time is severely limited, releases are infrequent, and the community has been discussing whether the project is abandoned, which means security fixes may not arrive.
- Dependency drift on Node and uWebSockets.js will eventually force you to fork or migrate, and that cost is unbudgeted at the point you adopt it.
- There is no commercial support to buy, so a production incident at three in the morning is entirely your problem with no escalation path.
- Scaling beyond a single node needs Redis and careful configuration, and getting presence channels correct across nodes is a genuine source of subtle bugs.
- It implements the Pusher protocol rather than tracking it, so any protocol feature Pusher adds later will not appear, and the compatibility guarantee slowly decays.
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
Soketi
Free- SoketiFree
- MIT licensed
- Unlimited connections subject to your own hardware
- No vendor billing
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 Soketi if
- You need pusher protocol compatibility.
- You want to start without paying.
- You work on Linux, macOS, Windows.
- You also want presence and private channels.
Questions people ask
- Is Garden or Soketi better?
- Neither clearly leads. Garden starts at Free and Soketi at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
- Which is cheaper, Garden or Soketi?
- Garden starts at Free and Soketi at Free.
- Does Garden or Soketi run on more platforms?
- Garden runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, Kubernetes. Soketi runs on 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 Soketi is typically brought in for.
- What can Garden do that Soketi cannot?
- Garden covers Action graph, Shared result caching, Remote Kubernetes environments, In-cluster builds. Soketi covers Pusher protocol compatibility, Presence and private channels, Horizontal scaling, App management backends.
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.
Soketi: Is Soketi still maintained?
Barely. The maintainer has stated that available time is very limited and releases have been sparse; treat it as community-maintained.
Garden: Do I need Kubernetes?
Effectively yes. Garden is built around Kubernetes environments and offers little to teams on other runtimes.
Soketi: Do I need to change my client code?
No. Pusher client SDKs and Laravel Echo work by changing the host, port and credentials.
Garden: Does it replace my CI system?
No. It runs inside GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or similar and speeds up what those pipelines execute.
Soketi: What does it cost?
Nothing in licence fees. It is MIT licensed; you pay for the server it runs on.
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.
Soketi: What are people moving to?
Laravel Reverb for Laravel applications, and Sockudo, a Rust reimplementation, for others.
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