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)
Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
nerdctl podman
33 358
7,356 21,645
2.5% 3.0%
9.6 10.0
8 days ago 1 day 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 2024-04-16.
  • 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.
  • Python + containerd? Who might be interested?
    2 projects | /r/Python | 27 Apr 2023
    Well, it is indeed a good option. However, containerd is a good alternative that is growing even among developers. Please see: https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl
  • How to own your own Docker Registry address
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Mar 2023
    Nerdctl/containerd has IPFS support :)

    https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl/blob/main/docs/ipfs.md

  • DockerHub replacement stratagy and options
    5 projects | /r/ipfs | 16 Mar 2023
    nerdctl supports IPFS for both image pulling and pushing, including encrypted images and eStargz lazy pulling. For building, the current method is a locally hosted translator so that the traditional pulls can be converted to work over IPFS. They even have docs on running it on k8s node, though if my reading is correct this isn't exactly a cloud native approach (running systemd services on each node...).
  • Docker's deleting Open Source images and here's what you need to know
    23 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Mar 2023
  • Release v1.0.0 · containerd/nerdctl
    1 project | /r/devopsish | 21 Oct 2022

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 2024-03-26.

What are some alternatives?

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

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

Portainer - Making Docker and Kubernetes management easy.

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

kaniko - Build Container Images In Kubernetes

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

rancher - Complete container management platform

k3s - Lightweight Kubernetes

containerd - An open and reliable container runtime

kind - Kubernetes IN Docker - local clusters for testing Kubernetes

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