Best Indoor Garden Systems (2025), Tested and Reviewed

Gardyn Home 4.0 (9/10, WIRED Recommends) had one of the easiest assemblies and setups out of the box and the most dramatic success of any of the brands I tried. Flowers, kohlrabi, thyme, even a whole cauliflower—all thrived in this pipe-based system with the lights in front to allow for taller plant growth.

Part of the success is due to the subscription app add-on, “Kelby,” which monitors your plants via attached sensors and cameras and delivers customized watering and lighting schedules, as well as maintenance suggestions. This subscription adds an additional $400 a month to the base purchase price (this includes 10 “credits” per month with which to buy additional seed pods). While you can use the Gardyn without it, if you want an indoor garden that's totally foolproof for beginners, it might be worth at least signing up for the free 30-day trial.

Each Gardyn purchase comes with your choice of seed starter kit: “salad lover,” “budding florist,” or “chef faves.” I chose “chef faves,” which had an interesting variety of everything from breen and Toyko bekana greens to Thai basil and miniature sunflowers. The seeds are germinated right in the system. They arrive tucked in mineral wool stuffed into what Gardyn calls yCubes. The yCubes are designed to fit into the yPods, little cups that slot into holes in the pipes. When Gardyn waters the plants, the yPods fill with nutrient-infused water, and the roots grow right into the water.

Every few weeks, the roots need to be checked for root rot and growth outside the yCube, examined for whether it's time to prune, and/or tucked back in if they've wandered too far. I've had no complaints with the Gardyn over the four months I've been using it, and I especially like that Gardyn has users completely empty out and clean the water tank every month with baking soda to prevent algae growth and/or bacteria.

I was not aware until I opened the box that Lettuce Grow was founded by Zooey Deschanel and her ex-husband, Jacob Pelenchik, and that despite their divorce they continue to work together promoting it. Lettuce Grown's Farmstand (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is certainly a unique-looking structure, with a bulbous base topped by four tiers with LED rings. The whole setup looks not unlike an old-school strawberry planter redesigned as a set piece for 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are models for indoor and outdoor use (the latter is the same, just sans light rings), both of which can hold up to 36 plants. I found the Farmstand to be on the easy end of average to assemble and set up.

The biggest issue I had with the Farmstand is that the company sends grown seedlings (each Farmstand comes with credits for users to pick the plants they want), which is helpful in terms of success, but in my case resulted in a massive whitefly and aphid outbreak. A search through Lettuce Grow's Farmstand Community Facebook group revealed pest-infested seedlings to be an extremely common issue. Otherwise, I highly recommend the add-on smart plug ($25), because otherwise your pump and light timer options are limited to the dial-style timers that come with the growing system. My smart plug kept disconnecting from the Lettuce Grow app (which I didn't find necessary in using the Farmstand), but the ability to set the timing for the lights and pump was well worth the price.

We haven't tested it yet, but if you're looking for something simpler, Lettuce Grow recently released the Counterstand Set ($149), a trio of amber vases that relies on the Kratky method, a set-it-and-forget-it hydroponic system that doesn't require pumps or electricity.

“Like a coffee capsule machine, but for plants,” reads Click & Grow’s marketing copy. Sure enough, the Click & Grow Smart Garden's seed pods come in a Nespresso-evoking plastic three-pack with a tear-off lid. Put a nutrient-packed “smart soil” seed pod in one of the Click & Grow’s cups with the wicking bottom, fill the reservoir, and that’s it. In what was the most simple watering system I tried, a wick at the bottom of the cup will bring water up to the pods, and the roots stay in the cups. Plug it in, and the LED grow lights will stay on for the next 16 hours.

I tested the Smart Garden 9 with three pods each of lettuce, basil, and tomato plants. Overall, there are about 75 pods to choose from, including herbs, flowers, leafy greens like arugula, and vegetables. There is a Smart Garden Pro that connects to Wi-Fi and has app control, but despite the “smart” in the name, this is not that—there's no app needed or required for the non-Pro version.

All in all, this garden was refreshingly low-maintenance. A little bobber on one end tells you when the water level is low and needs a top-off simply by floating lower than the growing surface. That’s it. No adding nutrients or checking pH or worrying about pumps. It's also small, so you can plop it on a shelf or countertop.

At the same time, this was also the slowest-growing garden I tested. I had it set up the same week as the Gardyn, above, and had already been harvesting months’ worth of greens and vegetables by the time I got one Click & Grow lettuce leaf. One of my lettuce pods didn’t even sprout at all. After two months, I have now gotten a handful of basil and lettuce leaves (literally, one handful), and the cherry tomatoes have grown past the lights without making a single flower. Meanwhile, the Lettuce Grow, which was started after the Click & Grow, has at least 15 visible tomatoes. Still, this isn't a bad garden by any stretch, and it’s a viable option for busy people who are interested in growing something like flowers, where yields aren't a concern.

There are multiple sizes of the Rise 3 garden, but all of them follow the same design playbook: A metal frame with a cabinet hiding a water tank, multiple levels of shallow reservoirs, and an LED “roof" above each level. I tested the three-level version; each level's reservoir had a lid with varied numbers of pod slots adding up to 48 for the whole system, but you can buy lids with more slots to allow your garden to hold up to 108 plants. The water is pumped from the tank in the bottom cabinet and flows through each level's reservoir. The plant roots just spread out inside the reservoir.

The Rise has far and away the biggest capacity of any non-DIY indoor garden I’ve seen and would be more than enough to keep a large family in nightly salads for months. Overall it's a pretty traditional form factor—in fact, I'm pretty sure I saw one of these in the corner of my college biology class. Since it's so large, assembly was a bit tricky, and vague instructions weren't helpful. However, Rise does come with a smart plug for the lights and pump, as well as an app that offers reminders on when and how to add water and nutrients and balance the pH.

Unfortunately, I didn't find out until after I had already set it up that the pods need to germinate first in plastic lidded “nurseries.” My test unit didn't come with enough nurseries for the number of seed pods I had, so I had to improvise with shallow plastic containers, with the pods weighted to keep them upright in water. After a few days, I noticed the containers—all of them, including the provided nurseries—had begun to grow algae, and the black-plastic surface of the Rise trays was noticeably warm. I brought out my infrared temperature gun to test—the 195-watt LEDs paired with the black plastic had brought the surface up to 95 degrees Fahrenheit. For reference, the other indoor gardening systems were room temperature, in the mid-70s.

Once the plants were grown, the temperature came down to something warmer than “normal” but more reasonable: 83 degrees Fahrenheit. Still, this is something to consider in terms of room placement and what plants might thrive. Over time, I noticed herbs and lettuce bolted faster in the Rise 3 than in other gardens, likely due to this heat. I'm still a big fan of the Rise's form factor and its capacity, but I think it's best for heat-tolerant crops like tomatoes and peppers. Also note that, unlike other systems, the Rise 3's pump runs continuously, resulting in an audible splashing noise—if this bothers you, it may not be the best choice for small spaces.

Plantaform is “the world's first smart indoor garden that uses fog to grow plants,” according to the company's press release, and it has definitely garnered attention, winning an Innovation Award at 2025's CES. The “fogponics" technology, ostensibly building on NASA-developed aeroponics, delivers water and nutrients to plants' roots via an ultrafine mist.

We were certainly captivated by the futuristic look of the egg-shaped planter, but contributor Lisa Wood Shapiro tested it to grow lettuce (4/10, WIRED Review) and found that not only can different types of plants not be combined (i.e., you can only grow lettuce at one time, or tomatoes, or herbs), the machine degraded her indoor air quality, as tested with an air quality monitor. Users are to add an included fertilizer mix to the water, with the resulting concoction being what's aerosolized in the container. Which, as Wood Shapiro found, was not airtight. She suggested the Plantaform's use in a basement or other space where air quality wasn't as much of a concern, but it's probably best to hold off on this one until Plantaform can work out some more kinks.