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Spacelift
Spacelift: Infrastructure-as-code governance and orchestration platform
Earthly
Engineering guardrails for the AI era
As of 29 August 2026, Earthly is free to use. Earthly Lunar is a platform that converts engineering standards, compliance requirements, and operational processes into automated guardrails. Softwr lists it under Developer Tools. Earthly is made by Earthly Labs, launched in 2020, available on Web, API.
Overview
What Earthly does
Earthly addresses the challenge of maintaining consistent engineering standards as teams scale and AI agents become part of development workflows. The Earthly Lunar platform transforms documentation like AGENTS.md files, engineering wikis, incident postmortems, and compliance mandates into enforceable policies that run as code throughout the development lifecycle. Rather than relying on scattered standards communicated through emails and Slack, Lunar centralizes enforcement so any standard, process, or incident response can be converted into a guardrail across every repository in minutes. The platform applies the same guardrails deterministically to both human developers and AI coding agents, ensuring consistent behavior across different tools and development stages. Founded in 2020 by Vlad A. Ionescu, Earthly built on the success of the open-source Earthfiles tool (12,000 GitHub stars) and launched Lunar in 2025 after conducting over 100 enterprise interviews. Earthly is based on the vision of building the developer infrastructure teams always wished existed.
What people use it for
- Enforcing engineering standards across AI and human developers
- Automating incident response procedures across all repositories
- Embedding compliance requirements into development workflows
- Standardizing build processes with Earthfiles
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Earthly.
- Pricing model not published; requires sales contact
- Earthly Lunar is a recent launch (2025) with limited track record
- Primarily GitHub-focused; limited integration with other platforms
- No public documentation on pricing or feature tiers
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Earthly
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
Capabilities
Features
Policy as code
Convert standards into enforceable guardrails
Multi-stage enforcement
Apply policies from code authoring through deployment
AI agent governance
Enforce same standards on AI-generated code
Repository-wide policies
No per-repository configuration required
Incident response automation
Convert postmortems into enforced processes
Compliance management
Embed regulatory requirements into guardrails
Earthfiles build tool
Open-source CI/CD build automation
Satellites
Distributed build infrastructure for speed
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
What is the difference between Earthfiles and Earthly Lunar?
Earthfiles is an open-source build tool that reached 12,000 GitHub stars and is used by companies like NVIDIA, Intel, and Databricks. Earthly Lunar is a separate governance platform launched in 2025 for enforcing standards across development workflows.
SourceHow does Earthly Lunar enforce standards?
Lunar converts engineering standards, compliance requirements, and processes documented in AGENTS.md files, wikis, and incident postmortems into enforceable guardrails that apply consistently across repositories and development stages.
SourceWhat is the pricing for Earthly Lunar?
Pricing is not published on the website. Interested customers should contact Earthly's sales team for current pricing and feature tiers.
SourceBehind it
Who makes Earthly
- Company
- Earthly Labs
- Based in
- Remote
- Founders
- Vlad A. Ionescu
Timeline
Earthly over time
Keep looking
Where to go from Earthly
- Earthly alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Earthly pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Earthly badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Developer Tools softwareThe full category
- Best Developer Tools softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Developer Tools software for
Compare Earthly with
- Spacelift
- Dagger
- Nixpacks
- Cloud Native Buildpacks
- OpsLevel
- Namespace
- Depot
- Blacksmith
- WarpBuild
- Ona (formerly Gitpod)
- Garden
- Nx Cloud
- ConfigCat
- Cortex
- Deep Code
- Deno
- Fig
- Dagger
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Earthly, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Earthly
Earthly alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
Earthly pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare Earthly
Put it head to head with anything we hold
Earthly badge
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