Compare the Top Container Management Software for Linux as of June 2025 - Page 2

  • 1
    Oracle Container Cloud Service
    Oracle Container Cloud Service (also known as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Container Service Classic) offers Development and Operations teams the benefits of easy and secure Docker containerization when building and deploying applications. Provides an easy-to-use interface to manage the Docker environment. Provides out-of-the-box examples of containerized services and application stacks that can be deployed in one click. Enables developers to easily connect to their private Docker registries (so they can ‘bring their own containers’). Enables developers to focus on building containerized application images and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, not on learning complex orchestration technologies.
  • 2
    Photon OS
    Project Photon OS™ is an open source, minimal Linux container host that is optimized for cloud-native applications, cloud platforms, and VMware infrastructure. Photon OS 3.0 introduces ARM64 support, installer improvements and updated packages. We invite partners, customers, and community members to collaborate on using Photon OS to run high-performance virtual machines and containerized applications. Contains everything needed to install. Choose between a minimal or a full installation to suit your deployment needs. Photon can be installed from ISO directly, or can be used with PXE/kickstart environments for automated installations. Portable, ready-to-go virtual environment. Photon OS Open Virtual Appliance packages include a highly sanitized and optimized kernel and packages to streamline and standardize appliance deployments. Use Photon OS as a Development Environment for building modern applications.
  • 3
    Swarm

    Swarm

    Docker

    Current versions of Docker include swarm mode for natively managing a cluster of Docker Engines called a swarm. Use the Docker CLI to create a swarm, deploy application services to a swarm, and manage swarm behavior. Cluster management integrated with Docker Engine: Use the Docker Engine CLI to create a swarm of Docker Engines where you can deploy application services. You don’t need additional orchestration software to create or manage a swarm. Decentralized design: Instead of handling differentiation between node roles at deployment time, the Docker Engine handles any specialization at runtime. You can deploy both kinds of nodes, managers and workers, using the Docker Engine. This means you can build an entire swarm from a single disk image. Declarative service model: Docker Engine uses a declarative approach to let you define the desired state of the various services in your application stack.
  • 4
    MicroK8s

    MicroK8s

    Canonical

    Low-ops, minimal production Kubernetes, for devs, cloud, clusters, workstations, Edge and IoT. MicroK8s automatically chooses the best nodes for the Kubernetes datastore. When you lose a cluster database node, another node is promoted. No admin needed for your bulletproof edge. MicroK8s is small, with sensible defaults that ‘just work’. A quick install, easy upgrades and great security make it perfect for micro clouds and edge computing. Full enterprise support available, with no subscription needed. Optional 24/7 support with 10 year security maintenance. Under the cell tower. On the racecar. On satellites or everyday appliances, MicroK8s delivers the full Kubernetes experience on IoT and micro clouds. Fully containerized deployment with compressed over-the-air updates for ultra-reliable operations. MicroK8s will apply security updates automatically by default, defer them if you want. Upgrade to a newer version of Kubernetes with a single command. It’s really that easy.
  • 5
    Flatcar Container Linux
    The introduction of container-based infrastructure was a paradigm shift. A Container-optimized Linux distribution is the best foundation for cloud native infrastructure. A minimal OS image only includes the tools needed to run containers. No package manager, no configuration drift. Delivering the OS on an immutable filesystem eliminates a whole category of security vulnerabilities. Automated atomic updates mean you get the latest security updates and open source technologies. Flatcar Container Linux is designed from the ground up for running container workloads. It fully embraces the container paradigm, including only what is required to run containers. Your immutable infrastructure deserves an immutable Linux OS. With Flatcar Container Linux, you manage your infrastructure, not your configuration.
  • 6
    Podman

    Podman

    Containers

    What is Podman? Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System. Containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode. Simply put: alias docker=podman. Manage pods, containers, and container images. Supporting docker swarm. We believe that Kubernetes is the defacto standard for composing Pods and for orchestrating containers, making Kubernetes YAML a defacto standard file format. Hence, Podman allows the creation and execution of Pods from a Kubernetes YAML file (see podman-play-kube). Podman can also generate Kubernetes YAML based on a container or Pod (see podman-generate-kube), which allows for an easy transition from a local development environment to a production Kubernetes cluster.
  • 7
    balenaEngine
    An engine purpose-built for embedded and IoT use cases, based on Moby Project technology from Docker. 3.5x smaller than Docker CE, packaged as a single binary. Available for a wide variety of chipset architectures, supporting everything from tiny IoT devices to large industrial gateways. Bandwidth-efficient updates with binary diffs, 10-70x smaller than pulling layers in common scenarios. Extract layers as they arrive to prevent excessive writing to disk, protecting your storage from eventual corruption. Atomic and durable image pulls defend against partial container pulls in the event of power failure. Prevents page cache thrashing during image pull, so your application runs undisturbed in low-memory situations. balenaEngine is a new container engine purpose-built for embedded and IoT use cases and compatible with Docker containers. Based on Moby Project technology from Docker, balenaEngine supports container deltas for 10-70x more efficient bandwidth usage.
  • 8
    kpt

    kpt

    kpt

    kpt is a package-centric toolchain that enables a WYSIWYG configuration authoring, automation, and delivery experience, which simplifies managing Kubernetes platforms and KRM-driven infrastructure at scale by manipulating declarative configuration as data, separated from the code that transforms it. Most Kubernetes users either manage their resources using conventional imperative graphical user interfaces, command-line tools (kubectl), and automation (e.g., operators) that operate directly against Kubernetes APIs, or declarative configuration tools, such as Helm, Terraform, cdk8s, or one of the dozens of other tools. At a small scale, this is largely driven by preference and familiarity. As companies expand the number of Kubernetes development and production clusters they use, creating and enforcing consistent configurations and security policies across a growing environment becomes difficult.
  • 9
    Kata Containers

    Kata Containers

    Kata Containers

    Kata Containers is Apache 2 licensed software consisting of two main components: the Kata agent, and the Kata Containerd shim v2 runtime. It also packages a Linux kernel and versions of QEMU, Cloud Hypervisor and Firecracker hypervisors. Kata Containers are as light and fast as containers and integrate with the container management layers—including popular orchestration tools such as Docker and Kubernetes (k8s)—while also delivering the security advantages of VMs. Kata Containers supports Linux (host and guest) for now. On the host side, we have installation instructions for several popular distributions. We also have out-of-the-box support for Clear Linux, Fedora, and CentOS 7 rootfs images through the OSBuilder which can also be used to roll your own guest images.
  • 10
    LXD

    LXD

    Canonical

    LXD is a next generation system container manager. It offers a user experience similar to virtual machines but using Linux containers instead. It's image based with pre-made images available for a wide number of Linux distributions and is built around a very powerful, yet pretty simple, REST API. To get a better idea of what LXD is and what it does, you can try it online! Then if you want to run it locally, take a look at our getting started guide. The LXD project was founded and is currently led by Canonical Ltd with contributions from a range of other companies and individual contributors. The core of LXD is a privileged daemon which exposes a REST API over a local unix socket as well as over the network (if enabled). Clients, such as the command line tool provided with LXD itself then do everything through that REST API. It means that whether you're talking to your local host or a remote server, everything works the same way.
  • 11
    LXC

    LXC

    Canonical

    LXC is a userspace interface for the Linux kernel containment features. Through a powerful API and simple tools, it lets Linux users easily create and manage system or application containers. LXC containers are often considered as something in the middle between a chroot and a full fledged virtual machine. The goal of LXC is to create an environment as close as possible to a standard Linux installation but without the need for a separate kernel. LXC is free software, most of the code is released under the terms of the GNU LGPLv2.1+ license, some Android compatibility bits are released under a standard 2-clause BSD license and some binaries and templates are released under the GNU GPLv2 license. LXC's stable release support relies on the Linux distributions and their own commitment to pushing stable fixes and security updates.