nerdctl VS podman

Compare nerdctl vs podman and see what are their differences.

nerdctl

contaiNERD CTL - Docker-compatible CLI for containerd, with support for Compose, Rootless, eStargz, OCIcrypt, IPFS, ... (by containerd)

podman

Podman: A tool for managing OCI containers and pods. (by containers)
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nerdctl podman
38 402
9,039 27,505
1.6% 2.2%
9.9 10.0
7 days ago 2 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.

nerdctl

Posts with mentions or reviews of nerdctl. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-04-23.
  • Kubernetes Without Docker: Why Container Runtimes Are Changing the Game in 2025
    7 projects | dev.to | 23 Apr 2025
    nerdctl CLI for containerd (Docker replacement) Feels like Docker. But lighter. And hipster-approved.
  • How to be Test Driven with Spark: Chapter 5: Leverage spark in a container
    7 projects | dev.to | 15 Mar 2025
    If you are unfamiliar with the concept of containers and docker images, I suggest you have a look at docker. It will be leveraged here to start the Spark server for the tests; it's important to mention there are other opensource alternatives like podman or nerdctl to allow containerization.
  • Creating containers with containerd on ARM
    3 projects | dev.to | 23 Feb 2025
    NERDCTL_VERSION=2.0.3 wget https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl/releases/download/v2.0.3/nerdctl-$NERDCTL_VERSION-linux-arm64.tar.gz tar -xzvf nerdctl-$NERDCTL_VERSION-linux-arm64.tar.gz -C /sbin CNI_VERSION wget https://github.com/containernetworking/plugins/releases/download/v1.6.2/cni-plugins-linux-arm64-vCNI_VERSION.tgz mkdir -p /opt/cni/bin tar -xzvf cni-plugins-linux-arm64-vCNI_VERSION.tgz -C /opt/cni/bin
  • Techniques I Use to Create a Great User Experience for Shell Scripts
    16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Sep 2024
    Here's a script that left me in awe the first time I saw it:

    https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl/blob/main/extras/rootl...

    I have since copied this pattern for many scripts: logging functions, grouping all global vars and constants at the top and creating subcommands using shift.

  • 5 Alternatives to Docker Desktop
    7 projects | dev.to | 24 Jul 2024
    Rancher Desktop allows you to choose between the Moby engine (offered by Continered) and the dockerd engine (offered by Docker) for building, pushing, and running containers. Compared with Docker Desktop, which provides Docker CLI as a CLI tool, Rancher provides both kubectl and nerdctl for managing Kubernetes and containers, respectively.
  • Colima k8s nix setup
    4 projects | dev.to | 16 Apr 2024
    What about the docker-cli? colima also ships with a docker-compatible cli to interact with containerd called nerdctl. We can execute the same docker cli commands like:
  • Nerdctl v2 Beta
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Feb 2024
  • Nginx Unit – Universal web app server
    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Sep 2023
    Using nerdctl: https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl

    I'd really disagree that compose files are somehow one-shot, or blindly modified. To the contrary, really, we have them checked in with the source code. Upon deployment to the cluster, the (running) services will be intelligently updated or replaced (in a rolling manner, causing zero downtime). LXC might be more elegant, but I have no idea what simple, file-based format I could use to let engineers describe the environment their app should run in without compose.

    I need something that even junior devs can start up with a single command, that can be placed in the VCS along with the code, and that will not require deep Linux knowledge to get running. Open for suggestions here, really.

  • Jenkins Agents On Kubernetes
    7 projects | dev.to | 4 Sep 2023
    Now since Kubernetes works off of containerd I'll be taking a different approach on handling container builds by using nerdctl and the buildkit that comes bundled with it. I'll do this on the amd64 control plane node since it's beefier than my Raspberry Pi workers for handling builds and build related services. Go ahead and download and unpack the latest nerdctl release as of writing (make sure to check the release page in case there's a new one):
  • Going through a Kubernetes training with autogenerated captions and about half are coming up like this.
    1 project | /r/kubernetes | 29 Jun 2023
    That's why nerdctl, their cli binary, is so well named.

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 2025-06-24.

What are some alternatives?

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

podman-compose - a script to run docker-compose.yml using podman

containerd - An open and reliable container runtime

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

Portainer - Making Docker and Kubernetes management easy.

kaniko - Build Container Images In Kubernetes

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Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure.
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