The best free alternative to Docker is Podman, which is also Open Source. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 25 alternatives to Docker and many of them is free so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting free alternatives to Docker are Portainer, Podman Desktop, Distrobox and Docker Desktop.
Podman is a daemon-less container runtime for managing containers, pods, and container images. It is intended as a counterpart to CRI-O, to provide low-level debugging not available through the CRI interface used by Kubernetes.
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Portainer Community Edition is a lightweight service delivery platform for containerized applications that can be used to manage Docker, Swarm, and Kubernetes environments. It is designed to be as simple to deploy as it is to use.
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This tool allows to browse, manage lifecycle of containers, inspect containers, images from different container engines. It includes a tray icon support. It can connect to multiple engines at the same time and provides an unified interface.
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Use any Linux distribution inside your terminal. Enable both backward and forward compatibility with software and freedom to use whatever distribution you’re more comfortable with. Distrobox uses podman or docker to create containers using the Linux distribution of your choice.
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Docker Desktop is a one-click-install application that lets you to build, share, and run containerized applications and microservices.
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Containers which offer an environment as close as possible as the one you'd get from a VM but without the overhead that comes with running a separate kernel and simulating all the hardware.
Rancher Desktop is an open-source desktop application for Mac, Windows and Linux. It provides Kubernetes and container management. You can choose the version of Kubernetes you want to run. You can build, push, pull, and run container images.
Native macOS GUI for ArcBox — containers, VMs, and sandboxes at your fingertips. Open Source alternative to OrbStack and Docker Desktop.
OrbStack is an alternative to Docker Desktop for macOS, designed to offer improved performance for Docker and virtual machines on Linux running on Mac computers. It addresses performance issues that have been experienced in the past, particularly on models with Apple Silicon.
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BitNami Stacks make it incredibly easy to deploy your favorite open source software. BitNami Stacks include an open source application and all of the other software necessary to run it, such as Apache, MySQL, PHP or Ruby.
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An industry-standard container runtime with an emphasis on simplicity, robustness and portability
