lxd VS podman

Compare lxd vs podman and see what are their differences.

lxd

Powerful system container and virtual machine manager (by canonical)

podman

Podman: A tool for managing OCI containers and pods. (by containers)
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lxd podman
7 386
4,403 24,638
0.4% 2.9%
10.0 10.0
2 days ago 7 days ago
Go Go
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 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.

lxd

Posts with mentions or reviews of lxd. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-07-31.
  • Running NixOS Guests on QEMU
    3 projects | dev.to | 31 Jul 2024
    Running NixOS on a virtual machine (VM) is a safe and reproducible way to test such configurations. As for VMs, I have used VirtualBox, Vagrant and lxd in the past. However, I have found QEMU to be the simplest and most flexible solution for my needs.
  • Canonical re-licenses LXD under AGPLv3, slaps a CLA on top
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Dec 2023
    Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the post also links the "add Canonical CLA check #12665" [0], and my understanding is that "retain copyright" here is like a typical forum agreement where you going forward must agree to a perpetual worldwide unlimited license to Canonical that they can use as they please per [1]:

    >In effect, you’re giving us a licence, but you still own the copyright — so you retain the right to modify your code and use it in other projects.

    You explicitly do retain ownership, so you can then take that same code and contribute it elsewhere under any license you wish. The same author could contribute the same patch to both the LXD and the Incus fork. But some might object to being required to allow Canonical to specially license as they want.

    So your characterization seems unfair, and then gets kind of nasty at the end:

    >The author is pissed off because he can't build custom versions without redistributing the modifications

    Incus is a full fork, and Canonical has apparently been taking changes back from it as well as is often the case with such forks where both sides get value from each other. It's perfectly understandable for some folks to be bummed if that's no longer the case, and there is nothing evil about the Apache2 license. There's plenty of history that in OSS going back to the beginning, no need for insinuations or attacks.

    ----

    0: https://github.com/canonical/lxd/pull/12665/commits/eb5c773d...

    1: https://ubuntu.com/legal/contributors

  • Vm and hypervisor
    1 project | /r/homelab | 10 Dec 2023
    You could consider LXD which lets you easily run both containers and VMs: https://ubuntu.com/lxd
  • LXD Moves into Canonical
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Jul 2023
    I hope this doesn't affect LXC negatively.

    LXC and LXD share plenty of contributors.

    https://github.com/lxc/lxc/graphs/contributors

    https://github.com/canonical/lxd/graphs/contributors

    I use an "unprivileged LXC container" setup on several Debian bullseye hosts. It works fantastic, and each LXC container feels like a real server.

    Compare that to Docker's "one-container-one-process" philosophy, reinventing the wheel by awkwardly composing multiple containers.

  • LXD Has been moved to Canonical
    1 project | /r/LXD | 6 Jul 2023
    [1] https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/
    1 project | /r/opensource | 5 Jul 2023
  • LXD is now under Canonical
    3 projects | /r/LXD | 4 Jul 2023
    The expected changes are: - https://github.com/lxc/lxd will now become https://github.com/canonical/lxd - https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd will disappear and be replaced with a mention directing users to https://ubuntu.com/lxd - The LXD YouTube channel will be handed over to the Canonical team - The LXD section on the LinuxContainers community forum will slowly be sunset in favor of the Ubuntu Discourse forum run by Canonical - The LXD CI infrastructure will be moved under Canonical’s care - Image building for Linux Containers will no longer be relying on systems provided by Canonical, limiting image building to x86_64 and aarch64.

podman

Posts with mentions or reviews of podman. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-01-21.
  • Troubleshooting Docker Desktop: Tips and Alternatives for Developers
    3 projects | dev.to | 21 Jan 2025
    Podman: A lightweight container runtime that eliminates the need for a desktop app. It’s free, open-source, and compatible with many Docker workflows.
  • Development Environment Configuration
    20 projects | dev.to | 19 Jan 2025
    Container Engines: Docker, Podman
  • Nextcloud on Raspberry Pi - Fedora + Podman Quadlets
    2 projects | dev.to | 15 Jan 2025
    A Quadlet is a way to create a service (with systemd) from a container. It uses Podman, a container engine. As it is OCI complient, the Docker images are compatibles with Podman.
  • I Chose Common Lisp
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Jan 2025
    And there's no REPL for the editor--so I can't actually find out details, let alone fix anything.

    I had thought emacs DX was bad--but I've revised my opinion now: compared to vscode DX, emacs DX is great. You live with VSCode if you want to.

    And note, vscode was made after emacs was made. There's no excuse for this.

    I think this now was about all the time that I want to waste on this thing, again.

    How is this a problem in 2025? shakes head

    >VS Code managed to by-pass the qualitiy and amount of extensions/plugins in a fraction of time Emacs took decades.

    Yeah? Seems to me these vscode extensions are written in crayon. Bad quality like that would never make it into emacs mainline. And it's not even strictly about that! I wonder who would write a developer tool that the developer can't easily debug its own extensions in. That flies about as well as a lead balloon.

    For comparison, there's emacs bufferenv that does dev containerization like this and it works just fine. Configuration: 1 line--the names of the containerfiles one wants it to pick up. Also, if I wanted to debug what it did (which is rare) I could just evaluate any expression whatsoever in emacs. ("Alt-ESC : «expression»" anywhere)

    PS. manually running "podman-compose up" in an example project as a regular user works just fine--starts up the project and everything needed. So what are they overcomplicating here? Pipes too hard?

    PPS. I've read some blog article to make socket activation work for rootless podman[1] but it's not really talking about vscode. Instead, it talks how one would set up "linger" so that the container stays there when I'm logged out. So that's not for dev containers (why would I possibly want that there? I'm not ensuring Heisenbugs myself :P).

    [1] https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/docs/tutorial...

  • Ask HN: What are the biggest PITAs about managing VMs and containers?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Jan 2025
    Podman kube has support for k8s Jobs now: https://github.com/containers/podman/pull/23722

    k8s docs > concepts > workloads > controllers > job:

  • A story on home server security
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Jan 2025
    There is a third option: enable the Docker socket and use Docker Compose as usual.

    https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/docs/tutorial...

  • Podman for Windows
    1 project | dev.to | 1 Jan 2025
    To install Podman on Windows, start by downloading the Windows installer from the official GitHub release page. Make sure to grab version 4.1 or later for all the features in this guide.
  • Beyond Docker - A DevOps Engineer's Guide to Container Alternatives
    4 projects | dev.to | 26 Dec 2024
    In the intensity of working as a DevOps engineer with the container, I have found Podman to be a game-changer in teams that take the security aspect seriously-that means avoiding root privileges. It's daemonless compared with Docker, which is a big architectural change. Daemonless approach just magically changes how teams do container security in production environments.
  • Top 8 Docker Alternatives to Consider in 2025
    6 projects | dev.to | 24 Dec 2024
    Podman implements a daemonless container architecture that eliminates the need for a central runtime service. This approach fundamentally differs from Docker's client-server model.
  • Day 3: What is Docker and why should I care?
    7 projects | dev.to | 3 Dec 2024
    Docker is a company that maintains the Docker software and also offers a cloud service to run Docker containers in the cloud. They run DockerHub, which is a platform to store share and run Docker images. The actual standard for Docker containers is called OCI (Open Container Initiative). Because Docker is based on OCI there are many other tools that can interact with Docker containers, like Podman or Lima. If you want to go really deep, I really recommend reading the OCI specification! It's long but super interesting.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing lxd and podman you can also consider the following projects:

kata-containers - Kata Containers is an open source project and community working to build a standard implementation of lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs) that feel and perform like containers, but provide the workload isolation and security advantages of VMs. https://katacontainers.io/

containerd - An open and reliable container runtime

kubevirt - Kubernetes Virtualization API and runtime in order to define and manage virtual machines.

Portainer - Making Docker and Kubernetes management easy.

firecracker-containerd - firecracker-containerd enables containerd to manage containers as Firecracker microVMs

kaniko - Build Container Images In Kubernetes

firecracker-container

Moby - The Moby Project - a collaborative project for the container ecosystem to assemble container-based systems

packer-plugin-lxd - Packer plugin for LXD Builder

colima - Container runtimes on macOS (and Linux) with minimal setup

lxd-demo-server - The LXD demo server

rancher - Complete container management platform

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SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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