Shuttle vs Garden
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Shuttle and Garden.
Quick Verdict
3.4/5
Shuttle
0 reviews
3.5/5
Garden
0 reviews
Garden is rated higher (3.5 vs 3.4). Shuttle deploys Rust backend services with zero configuration — annotate your code with macros and Shuttle handles the infrastructure. No YAML, no Terraform. Pay-per-use serverless Rust. 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.
Shuttle Deploy Rust backends from your code — no config | Garden Kubernetes development platform with local testing and remote deployment | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.4 (0 reviews) | 3.5 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best for | Rust developers — solo or small teams — who want a backend live in minutes from annotated code and can accept a London-only region and no contractual uptime guarantee. | 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. |
| Specifications (entry plan) | ||
| CPU cores | 0 vCPU | — |
| RAM | 1 GB | — |
| Storage | 1 GB | — |
| Bandwidth | — | — |
| SLA uptime | — | — |
| Data-center count | 1 | — |
| €/GB RAM/mo | €0.00 | — |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | AWS eu-west-2 (London) | — |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tieropen sourceus datacenter | free tierapi accesskubernetes support |
| Visit Shuttle → | Visit Garden → | |
Shuttle
Pros
- + Infrastructure from code annotations: databases, secrets and static assets provisioned from function signatures, no YAML or Terraform
- + Real free tier (0.25 vCPU, 0.5 GB RAM, 0.5 GB database, 100 build minutes/month) with custom domain support
- + Published, itemized usage rates ($0.12/GB storage, $0.025/build minute, $0.10/GB egress) instead of sales-quoted pricing
- + Clear isolation tiering: spot instances on free, reserved VM-isolated instances from Pro
- + First-class Rust framework support (Axum, Actix Web, Rocket, Serenity) and open-source platform code
Cons
- - Rust only — other language stacks are not supported today
- - Single AWS region (London, eu-west-2) with no region choice below the not-yet-available Enterprise tier
- - No published uptime SLA on any current tier; support is Discord-based with 1-business-day response on Pro
- - Steep jump from $20/mo Pro to $250/mo Growth, with metered usage on top of every paid tier
- - Tier contents have changed materially over time (projects and included egress were cut in 2025)
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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