kaniko VS buildah

Compare kaniko vs buildah and see what are their differences.

kaniko

Build Container Images In Kubernetes (by GoogleContainerTools)
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kaniko buildah
59 30
15,616 7,956
- 1.9%
7.1 9.7
15 days ago 6 days ago
Go Go
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
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.

kaniko

Posts with mentions or reviews of kaniko. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-04-23.

buildah

Posts with mentions or reviews of buildah. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-03-31.
  • A Safer Container Runtime
    2 projects | dev.to | 31 Mar 2025
    Buildah is another tool that can build OCI container images without requiring root privileges:
  • I don't like Docker or Podman
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jan 2025
    I avoid dockerfiles and prefer using buildah for building containers. Since they're all using the same specification, it doesn't matter what runtime is then used to run them: it can be docker, podman, k8s, whatever.

    Here's the official example of building a lighttpd container:

    https://github.com/containers/buildah/blob/92015b7f4301d7eb8...

    You can eschew bash and call these commands however you want — from a python script, or Go, or even assembly.

  • Using S3 as a Container Registry
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Jul 2024
    If $PROGRAMMING_LANGUAGE = go, you might be looking for https://github.com/containers/storage which can create layers, images, and so on. I think `Store` is the main entry: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/containers/storage#Store

    Buildah uses it: https://github.com/containers/buildah/blob/main/go.mod#L27C2...

  • Podman Desktop 1.11: Light mode and new Kubernetes features
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jun 2024
    Like wayland, podman was one of those things that took a lot of "I'll give it another shot? Nope, not ready" before I could switch.

    Lately the only real incompatibility I run in to with podman is that the handling of `RUN --mount=type=secret` in a Containerfile/Dockerfile is a bit broken (https://github.com/containers/buildah/issues/5282).

  • Using ARG in a Dockerfile – beware the gotcha
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 May 2024
    I wish we would rather get rid of Dockerfile in favor of something like buildah does:

    https://github.com/containers/buildah/blob/main/examples/lig...

    Since Dockerfile is a rather limited and (IMHO) poorly executed re-implementation of a shell script, why not rather use shell directly? Not even bash with coreutils is necessary: even posix sh with busybox can do far more than Dockerfile, and you can use something else (like Python) and take it very far indeed.

  • A gopher’s journey to the center of container images
    5 projects | dev.to | 23 Nov 2023
    For the task of building the graph image, my first idea was to rely on buildah. In fact, our design was already heavily relying on containers/image for all things regarding copying images from one registry to the other, or from one registry to an archive. The obvious choice was to use the same suite of modules in order to keep dependencies to a minimum.
  • Podman Desktop for Java Development
    1 project | /r/java | 8 May 2023
    I appreciate that podman can run daemonless, but I've gotten tired of waiting for them to implement heredoc support and have continued to use docker.
  • How to use Podman inside of a container
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Apr 2023
    You do realize that, under the hood, buildah uses a container engine (runc by default)? See https://github.com/containers/buildah/blob/main/docs/buildah...
  • Container and image vocabulary
    4 projects | dev.to | 3 Apr 2023
    buildah
  • How to use Buildah to create a build-service written in golang
    1 project | /r/podman | 14 Mar 2023
    I found this small tutorial: https://github.com/containers/buildah/blob/main/docs/tutorials/04-include-in-your-build-tool.md and it works.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing kaniko and buildah you can also consider the following projects:

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

buildkit - concurrent, cache-efficient, and Dockerfile-agnostic builder toolkit

skopeo - Work with remote images registries - retrieving information, images, signing content

rules_docker - Rules for building and handling Docker images with Bazel

SSVM - WasmEdge is a lightweight, high-performance, and extensible WebAssembly runtime for cloud native, edge, and decentralized applications. It powers serverless apps, embedded functions, microservices, smart contracts, and IoT devices.

InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads
InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
www.influxdata.com
featured
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
www.saashub.com
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