ctop VS colima

Compare ctop vs colima and see what are their differences.

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ctop colima
37 110
15,127 16,793
- -
0.0 8.2
6 months ago 7 days ago
Go Go
MIT License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

ctop

Posts with mentions or reviews of ctop. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-18.
  • Lazydocker
    19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Jul 2023
    This does remind me of ctop as well: https://github.com/bcicen/ctop

    It also let's you look at containers, resource usage graphs, their logs and even do some actions through a TUI.

  • Portainer Business Edition 5 free nodes plan will change to 3 nodes in the future.
    3 projects | /r/selfhosted | 7 Jul 2023
    ssh, nnn, micro and ctop is all I need on my dockerhosts
  • Ctop – Top-like interface for container metrics
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Apr 2023
  • Found an amazingly handy terminal UI for both docker and docker-compose. Have actually just added the bin to my git repo with all my compose files. Great for a quick look at what is going on host machines.
    5 projects | /r/selfhosted | 8 Apr 2023
    My problem with ctop is, that it seems to show wrong memory usage data: https://github.com/bcicen/ctop/issues/314
  • FLaNK Stack Weekly 3 April 2023
    39 projects | dev.to | 3 Apr 2023
  • Portainer Alternatives?
    7 projects | /r/selfhosted | 20 Mar 2023
    When talk about interface and cli... I am a huge fan of ctop
  • What do you think about Portainer?
    4 projects | /r/selfhosted | 10 Mar 2023
    You can use CTOP. It's like a lite portainer on CLI. You can check logs, stats, restart containers.
  • Ask HN: What is the best source to learn Docker in 2023?
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jan 2023
    In the terminal, there are also a few useful projects:

      - for Docker, there is ctop: https://github.com/bcicen/ctop
  • Docker 2.0 went from $11M to $135M in 2 years
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Jan 2023
    > I tried portainer, awful UX experience and all good features are inside paid version.

    This is interesting to me, because it doesn't quite match my experience - I've been using Portainer for around 3 years at this point and it's been pretty decent.

    The worst issues that I've gotten is networking issues in some hybrid configurations with Docker Swarm (e.g. Portainer cannot reach the manager node of the cluster for a bit), or troubles configuring Traefik ingresses when managing Kubernetes (though I think the recent patch notes talked about improving the ingress section, so maybe the experience will get better with non-Nginx ingresses).

    Other than that, it's been great for onboarding new people, illustrating the cluster state at a glance, easily operating with stacks and scaling/restarting services as needed, including pulling new images, viewing the logs or even connecting to containers through a web UI if need be. The webhook functionality in particular is really nice - you can just do a curl request against a given URL and that will pull the new container versions for the given image and do a redeploy, which works nicely with a variety of CI solutions.

    When I last tried, initializing Nomad clusters with networking encryption was a bit less of a smooth experience (needing to essentially manage your own PKI) and the web UI felt more like a dashboard, instead of something that you could click around in, if you're a proponent of that workflow.

    Rancher is probably better than both of those options, though there's a certain overhead in regards to running both that software and a full Kubernetes cluster. If Kubernetes feels like a good fit for a particular project and resources aren't an issue, definitely check it out! You can, of course, also have some success with lightweight clusters, like K3s: https://k3s.io/

    I'll definitely agree that Lazydocker is a nice tool, but I wouldn't call it superior, just different (TUI vs GUI), their demo video is nice though: https://youtu.be/NICqQPxwJWw

    It actually reminds me of ctop, which you might also want to check out, though it's not something that you'd manage clusters in, merely the individual containers on a node (which won't always be enough, same as Docker Compose isn't): https://github.com/bcicen/ctop

    Regardless, for Kubernetes, I'm inclined to say that you'd enjoy k9s a bunch then, it has a similar TUI approach: https://k9scli.io/

  • Looking for a simple Docker dashboard
    5 projects | /r/selfhosted | 29 Nov 2022
    However, something like ctop may be easier to use.

colima

Posts with mentions or reviews of colima. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-20.
  • Lcl.host: fast, easy HTTPS in your local dev environment
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Mar 2024
    If you don't need a GUI, the following combo works pretty well:

    - https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

    - https://github.com/peterldowns/localias

  • Damn Small Linux 2024
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Feb 2024
    You might look into CoLima as a way to get started.

    https://github.com/abiosoft/colima?tab=readme-ov-file

    Its user interface is Docker-like, using containers.

    For full desktop, I've only used the commercial app "Parallels", which can set up an Ubuntu desktop for you. Also Fedora and Alpine and Debian I believe.

    But

    > I don't really have any resources to share. I just know how to boot a vmlinuz with an initramfs using QEMU, and decided to download the Linux kernel source code and try compiling it.

    I highly recommend working through Linux from Scratch and possibly the Gentoo Handbook. It's a journey.

  • Howto: WASM runtimes in Docker / Colima
    5 projects | dev.to | 12 Jan 2024
    I could not find any guide how to add WASM container capability to Docker running on Colima. This guide provides a few Colima templates for exactly this, which adds WasmEdge, Wasmtime and Wasmer runtime types.
  • RamRamRamEveryoneSleepingOnDocker
    3 projects | /r/ProgrammerHumor | 7 Dec 2023
    Colima runs much faster on Macos: https://github.com/abiosoft/colima
  • Podman Desktop v1.5 with Compose onboarding and enhanced Kubernetes pod data
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Nov 2023
    After docker desktop became unusable, I jumped to colima and never looked back. I still use the docker runtime in it (the non-proprietary part) but it also supports containerd. On Mac it's just a "brew install colima" and then "colima start"

    I also install the compose and ecr credentials plug-ins (since I use ecr for my container registry.) It has the full functionality of docker desktop minus the UI, which I never used anyways.

    https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

  • K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes
    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Oct 2023
    On my M1 Pro system, I have nothing but positive things to say about the experience of using Colima (https://github.com/abiosoft/colima). Quick to set up and fast to use.
  • abiosoft/colima
    1 project | /r/programming | 4 Sep 2023
  • UTM – Virtual Machines for iOS and macOS
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Aug 2023
    I'd say Lima and Colima should be enough for most use cases:

    https://lima-vm.io/

    https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

  • Lazydocker
    19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Jul 2023
    The bash/zsh equivalent wouldn't be too hard, but I use fish.

    [0] https://github.com/abiosoft/colima, https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fabiosof...

    [1] https://orbstack.dev [3], https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Forbstack.dev

    [2] https://github.com/abiosoft/colima#customizing-the-vm and https://github.com/abiosoft/colima/blob/main/docs/FAQ.md#edi...

    [3] I’m on OrbStack now, but it isn’t so much better at how I use Docker than Colima is that I think that it’s an instant buy, especially with the planned subscription model. If I used anything other than the Docker integration, I might think it's better, but as of right now, no.

    I also have some issues with its insistence on asking for elevated permissions. I will never grant permission[4] to make a symlink to the "standard" Docker socket; context and `$DOCKER_HOST` work well enough. It should not ask if the permission hasn't been given once. I also worry about other "advanced" features that may need an elevated permissions helper[5].

    [4] https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/281#issuecomment...

    [5] https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/281#issuecomment... and following

  • FLaNK Stack Weekly for 17 July 2023
    13 projects | dev.to | 17 Jul 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ctop and colima you can also consider the following projects:

Plausible Analytics - Simple, open source, lightweight (< 1 KB) and privacy-friendly web analytics alternative to Google Analytics.

lima - Linux virtual machines, with a focus on running containers

go-dry - DRY (don't repeat yourself) package for Go

Podman Desktop - Podman Desktop - A graphical tool for developing on containers and Kubernetes

minify - Go minifiers for web formats

minikube - Run Kubernetes locally

csvtk - A cross-platform, efficient and practical CSV/TSV toolkit in Golang

rd - Container Management and Kubernetes on the Desktop

git-time-metric - Simple, seamless, lightweight time tracking for Git

podman - Podman: A tool for managing OCI containers and pods.

hub - A command-line tool that makes git easier to use with GitHub.

multipass - Multipass orchestrates virtual Ubuntu instances