Fly Machines vs Garden
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Fly Machines and Garden.
Quick Verdict
3.9/5
Fly Machines
0 reviews
3.5/5
Garden
0 reviews
Fly Machines is rated higher (3.9 vs 3.5). Fly Machines are Fly.io's fast-starting virtual machines for containerised workloads. Start in 300ms, stop when idle to save costs. Used for auto-scaling web services and ephemeral compute. Garden streamlines Kubernetes development by syncing code changes instantly, running tests in containers, and deploying to local or remote clusters. Built for teams developing microservices.
Fly Machines Fast-starting VMs for containerised apps at the edge | Garden Kubernetes development platform with local testing and remote deployment | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.9 (0 reviews)✓ | 3.5 (0 reviews) |
| Pricing model | usage-based | freemium |
| Starting price | From $2.19/mo | Free tier available✓ |
| Best for | Developers who want fast-starting containers that scale to zero between requests at the edge, and teams building custom control planes on a VM-per-container API | Platform teams running multi-service Kubernetes stacks who lose hours to rebuild-and-retest cycles and want one workflow from laptop to production-like clusters. |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ✓ | |
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ✓ | |
| Free tier | ||
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | Netherlands, Sweden, France, Germany, UK, US, Canada, Brazil, South Africa, Japan, Singapore, Australia | — |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tiermanaged optioneu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenter | free tierapi accesskubernetes support |
| Visit Fly Machines → | Visit Garden → | |
Fly Machines
Pros
- + ~300ms VM boot with automatic stop when idle — real scale-to-zero economics for request-driven workloads
- + Billed by the second with a fully published rate card; smallest Machine $2.19/30 days running
- + Low-level lifecycle control via REST API: create, start, stop, clone, update, destroy per VM
- + 17 regions on Fly's own hardware with per-Machine region placement
- + Fast restart from stopped state — assembled rootfs stays on the worker host
Cons
- - Fly.io-only API and infrastructure — no orchestration portability
- - Running the raw API means building your own scaling, placement retry and health logic
- - Always-on and idle costs accumulate: stopped rootfs $0.15/GB/month, volumes $0.15/GB/month, dedicated IPv4 $2/month
- - Capacity limits per region and host can make Machine placement fail
- - No free tier — only a 2-VM-hour/7-day trial — and no uptime SLA outside Enterprise plans
Garden
Pros
- + Dependency-aware action graph skips unchanged builds and tests — real time savings in CI
- + Same config drives local dev, staging, and production-like environments
- + Open-source Apache 2.0 CLI with a genuine free community tier (up to 3 seats)
- + Falls back to local builds and local cache when the cloud quota or login lapses
- + Hot reload syncs code into running containers without rebuild cycles
Cons
- - Own config language and action model — steeper learning curve than Docker Compose
- - Commercial pricing unclear since the Incredibuild acquisition (Nov 2024)
- - Value concentrates in multi-service Kubernetes projects; overhead for small stacks
- - Cross-cluster caching and remote builds want a Garden Cloud account
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