The best open source alternative to Packer is Docker. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked five alternatives to Packer and four of them is open source so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting open source alternatives to Packer are Vagrant, Crane and Singularity.
Docker is an open-source engine that automates the deployment of any application as a lightweight, portable, self-sufficient container that will run virtually anywhere.
Create and manage virtualized development environments. Vagrant is a tool for building complete development environments. With an easy-to-use workflow and focus on automation, Vagrant lowers development environment setup time, increases development/production parity, and makes...
Crane is a container image tool that includes building local Docker images; connecting to DockerHub; listing local and remote container images; pushing local images to the DockerHub registry, and importing remote container images into an MLOps platform cluster.
Singularity is a container solution with a focus on building reproducible software stacks and running them most efficiently on existing HPC, scientific, compute farm and even enterprise architectures.
United States
Taiwan
Docker creates portable container images for runtime environments, while Packer builds machine images (like AMIs, VM templates) for provisioning infrastructure.