swarmkit VS Portainer

Compare swarmkit vs Portainer and see what are their differences.

swarmkit

A toolkit for orchestrating distributed systems at any scale. It includes primitives for node discovery, raft-based consensus, task scheduling and more. (by moby)
Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
swarmkit Portainer
14 337
3,244 28,852
1.3% 2.2%
8.0 9.8
11 days ago about 13 hours ago
Go TypeScript
Apache License 2.0 zlib 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.

swarmkit

Posts with mentions or reviews of swarmkit. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-05-26.
  • Questions about Swarm mode
    1 project | /r/docker | 26 Jun 2023
    It's supported, though the development pace is rather slow. The are new features (the latest release brought support for the Container Storage Interface) and bugs and issues are worked on by the few maintainers the project has. You can check the repo here: https://github.com/moby/swarmkit
  • K8s vs Docker Swarm
    2 projects | /r/homelab | 26 May 2023
    So the thing is support for Swarm was delegated to Mirantis, https://www.mirantis.com/blog/mirantis-will-continue-to-support-and-develop-docker-swarm/ since it was delegated very little was done to move forward swarm _> https://github.com/moby/swarmkit/commits/master , docker swarm itself (docker the company) is deprecated https://github.com/docker-archive/classicswarm . I think because there's no way to monetize swarm there's no real push for new features hence my assumption of deprecation.
  • Feature request: Enable "--device" in "stack deploy" for Confidential Computing
    1 project | /r/DockerSwarm | 17 Apr 2023
    Feature request: Enable "--device" in "stack deploy" for Confidential Computing
  • Swarmlet: A self-hosted, open-source Platform as a Service
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Feb 2023
    This doesn't look that abandoned? https://github.com/moby/swarmkit

    Or are you talking about swarm the product (versus docker swarm mode)

  • Docker 23.0.0 is out
    4 projects | /r/docker | 2 Feb 2023
    I don’t feel a momentum in Docker Swarm development, seeing pull requests like #3072 sitting idle for half a year, originally from 2016.
  • Looking to containerize a large production scale nodejs app
    3 projects | /r/docker | 26 Jan 2023
    privileged not being supported is problematic, but there are PRs for it on swarmkit, see https://github.com/moby/swarmkit/pull/3072 - let's see if that gets in.
  • high availability
    1 project | /r/docker | 12 Oct 2022
    swarm ha placement
  • Is docker still the solution for On-Premesis containerization?
    3 projects | /r/docker | 27 Sep 2022
    It is already in a different repo: moby/swarmkit
  • Help convincing IT/IS department to use Kubernetes
    1 project | /r/kubernetes | 20 Oct 2021
    Docker Swarm is dead. It should not be used for new projects because the competitive products are much better and more optimal. Check their repo bro - last commit 3months ago. https://github.com/docker/swarmkit https://www.reddit.com/r/docker/comments/ituysl/why_people_are_saying_docker_swarm_is_in_life/ Why would you start a project with a tool which got no future? Let's then use Silverlight or any shit like that.
  • Why docker swarm is not popular as Kubernetes?
    16 projects | /r/docker | 30 Jul 2021
    Mostly it just needs resource defaults merged and some abstract type support so load balancer config doesn't have to be entirely by labels and I would never shift from it.

Portainer

Posts with mentions or reviews of Portainer. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-22.
  • Homelab Adventures: Crafting a Personal Tech Playground
    7 projects | dev.to | 22 Apr 2024
    Portainer
  • Runtipi: Docker-Based Home Server Management
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Apr 2024
    > Any tips on the minimum hardware or VPS's needed to get a small swarm cluster setup?

    From my testing, Docker Swarm is very lightweight, uses less memory than both Hashicorp Nomad and lightweight Kubernetes distros (like K3s). Most of the resource requirements will depend on what containers you actually want to run on the nodes.

    You might build a cluster from a bunch of Raspberry Pis, some old OptiPlex boxes or laptops, or whatever you have laying around and it's mostly going to be okay. On a practical level, anything with 1-2 CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM will be okay for running any actually useful software, like a web server/reverse proxy, some databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL/MariaDB), as well as either something for a back end or some pre-packaged software, like Nextcloud.

    So, even 5$/month VPSes are more than suitable, even from some of the more cheap hosts like Hetzner or Contabo (though the latter has a bad rep for limited/no support).

    That said, you might also want to look at something like Portainer for a nice web based UI, for administering the cluster more easily, it really helps with discoverability and also gives you redeploy web hooks, to make CI easier: https://www.portainer.io/ (works for both Docker Swarm as well as Kubernetes, except the Kubernetes ingress control was a little bit clunky with Traefik instead of Nginx)

  • Cómo instalar Docker CLI en Windows sin Docker Desktop y no morir en el intento
    2 projects | dev.to | 19 Mar 2024
  • Setup Portainer for Server App
    1 project | dev.to | 23 Jan 2024
    In this section, we will add Portainer to help us in managing our Docker containers. You can find more details about it here. To integrate Portainer into our EC2 project, we can follow these steps:
  • Old documentation url on Github issues gives ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS.
    1 project | /r/portainer | 19 Oct 2023
    Git issues pointing to: https://docs.portainer.io/v/ce-2.9/start/install/agent/swarm/linux gives a ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS.
  • Docker CI/CD with multiple docker-compose files.
    2 projects | /r/homelab | 17 Oct 2023
    I am currently running Portainer, but webhooks (GitOps) appear to be broken ( [2.19.0] GitOps Updates not automatically polling from git · Issue #10309 · portainer/portainer · GitHub ) and so I cannot send webhook to redeploy a stack. So, looking for alternatives. Using this as a good excuse to learn more about docker and CI/CD etc.
  • Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Sep 2023
    A Synology NAS running Portainer (https://www.portainer.io/) running Paperless NGX (https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx)

    This works better than I can possibly tell you.

    I have an Epson WorkForce ES-580W that I bought when my mother passed away to bulk scan documents and it scans everything, double-sided if required, multi-page PDFs if required, at very high speed and uploads everything to OneDrive, at which point I drag and drop everything into Paperless.

    I could, thinking about it, have the scanner email stuff to Paperless. Might investigate that today.

    Paperless will OCR it and make it all searchable. This setup is amazing, I love living in the future.

  • Bare-Metal Kubernetes, Part I: Talos on Hetzner
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Sep 2023
    > I've come to the conclusion (after trying kops, kubespray, kubeadm, kubeone, GKE, EKS) that if you're looking for < 100 node cluster, docker swarm should suffice. Easier to setup, maintain and upgrade.

    Personally, I'd also consider throwing Portainer in there, which gives you both a nice way to interact with the cluster, as well as things like webhooks: https://www.portainer.io/

    With something like Apache, Nginx, Caddy or something else acting as your "ingress" (taking care of TLS, reverse proxy, headers, rate limits, sometimes mTLS etc.) it's a surprisingly simple setup, at least for simple architectures.

  • What are some of your fav panels and why?
    3 projects | /r/homelab | 23 Aug 2023
    casaos it just makes things like backups, offsite syncing and many other nas related things so much easier to manage. And gives you a proper nas like experience similar to that in which you'd fine on companies like tnas or synology. I actually also use it as a replacement for portainer when i don't need the more advanced features it offers
  • Kubernetes Exposed: One YAML Away from Disaster
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Aug 2023
    > I moved to docker swarm and love it. It's so much easier, straight forward, automatic ingress network and failover were all working out of the box. I'll stay with swarm for now.

    I've had decent luck in the past with the K3s distribution, which is a bit cut down Kubernetes: https://k3s.io/

    It also integrates nicely with Portainer (aside from occasional Traefik ingress weirdness sometimes), which I already use for Swarm and would suggest to anyone that wants a nice web based UI: https://www.portainer.io/

    Others might also mention K0s, MicroK8s or others - there's lots of options there. But even so, I still run Docker Swarm for most of my private stuff as well and it's a breeze.

    For my needs, it has just the right amount of abstractions: stacks with services that use networks and can have some storage in the form of volumes or bind mounts. Configuration in the form of environment variables and/or mounted files (or secrets), some deployment constraints and dependencies sometimes, some health checks and restart policies, as well as resource limits.

    If I need a mail server, then I just have a container that binds to the ports (even low port numbers) that I need and configure it. If I need a web server, then I can just run Apache/Nginx/Caddy and use more or less 1:1 configuration files that I'd use when setting up either outside of containers, but with the added benefit of being able to refer to other apps by their service names (or aliases, if they have underscores in the names, which sometimes isn't liked).

    At a certain scale, it's dead simple to use - no need for PVs and PVCs, no need for Ingress and Service abstractions, or lots and lots of templating that Helm charts would have (although those are nice in other ways).

What are some alternatives?

When comparing swarmkit and Portainer you can also consider the following projects:

roadmap - Welcome to the Public Roadmap for All Things Docker! We welcome your ideas.

Yacht - A web interface for managing docker containers with an emphasis on templating to provide 1 click deployments. Think of it like a decentralized app store for servers that anyone can make packages for.

docker - Moby Project - a collaborative project for the container ecosystem to assemble container-based systems [Moved to: https://github.com/moby/moby]

swarmpit - Lightweight mobile-friendly Docker Swarm management UI

Docker Compose - Define and run multi-container applications with Docker

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

kubespray - Deploy a Production Ready Kubernetes Cluster

OpenMediaVault - openmediavault is the next generation network attached storage (NAS) solution based on Debian Linux. Thanks to the modular design of the framework it can be enhanced via plugins. openmediavault is primarily designed to be used in home environments or small home offices.

Nomad - Nomad is an easy-to-use, flexible, and performant workload orchestrator that can deploy a mix of microservice, batch, containerized, and non-containerized applications. Nomad is easy to operate and scale and has native Consul and Vault integrations.

CasaOS - CasaOS - A simple, easy-to-use, elegant open-source Personal Cloud system.

distribution-spec - OCI Distribution Specification

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