Open-source Docker Desktop alternatives

Podman, short for the POD MANager, manages containers and images, along with the volumes attached to them and pods composed of container groups. It runs containers natively on Linux and works on Mac and Windows through a Podman-managed virtual machine. It is written in Go, released under the Apache-2.0 license, and often used as an alternative to Docker.

Podman is built on libpod, a library in the same repository that exposes APIs for container lifecycle, pods, images and volumes. It supports OCI and Docker image formats, pulls and pushes images with trust verification, builds from Containerfiles or Dockerfiles, and handles checkpoint and restore through CRIU. Networking is handled by Netavark. Major and minor releases arrive four times a year and are PGP signed, with only the most recent release supported upstream.

Colima gives you container runtimes on macOS and Linux without much configuration. It supports Intel and Apple Silicon Macs as well as Linux, and offers a command-line interface with sensible defaults, so a single start command gets a working Docker environment without a desktop application. It is written in Go, builds on Lima, and is released under the MIT license.

Colima starts with Docker as the default runtime, optionally with Kubernetes, and can instead use containerd with nerdctl or Incus for containers and virtual machines. It handles automatic port forwarding, volume mounts and multiple instances, and mentions GPU-accelerated containers for AI workloads. Settings can be supplied through flags or a config file. Colima is available from Homebrew, MacPorts, Nix and Mise, and the Docker or kubectl client is installed separately.

Lima, short for Linux Machines, starts Linux virtual machines from the command line with file sharing and port forwarding set up automatically, similar to how WSL2 works on Windows. It was created to bring containerd and its nerdctl command line tool to Mac users, but it can host any Linux workload, not only containers.

Besides containerd, Lima can be used to run Docker, Podman or Kubernetes inside the virtual machine. Hosts other than macOS are supported too, including Linux and NetBSD. It can be installed with Homebrew, and the project publishes software bills of materials in CycloneDX format alongside its downloads.

Lima is written in Go, released under the Apache 2.0 license, and documented on its own website. It suits developers who want a Linux environment for building and running containers on a laptop without adopting a full desktop virtualization product.

Podman Desktop is a graphical interface that lets application developers work with containers and Kubernetes. It sets up Podman, configures it and keeps it current on a local machine, and adds a system tray so you can check status and interact with the container engine without leaving other tasks.

The application provides a dashboard for containers, images, pods and volumes, and it configures OCI registries and network settings. Developers can build, run, manage and debug containers and pods, run pods on the container engine or on Kubernetes, and convert pods to run on Kubernetes. It also connects to Kubernetes environments to deploy pods. Several engines are supported, including Podman, crc, Lima and Docker, and capabilities can be extended through extensions.

Podman Desktop is written in TypeScript and released under the Apache-2.0 licence. It is downloaded from the project website as a desktop application, and an optional early adopter program lets users try pre-release builds. Documentation covers managing containers, images, pods, clusters and extensions.

Rancher Desktop is an open-source project that puts Kubernetes and container tooling on a developer's computer. It supports Windows, macOS and Linux and is aimed at developers who want to build and run containers and try Kubernetes locally without setting up a cluster by hand.

It is an Electron application written mainly in TypeScript that bundles a variety of other technologies into one cohesive application. It also includes rdctl, a command-line tool written in Go. The repository README focuses on development, covering building from source, running unit and end-to-end tests with yarn scripts and setting up a Windows development environment, while user documentation lives on the project website.

Rancher Desktop is released under the Apache-2.0 licence and is hosted in the rancher-sandbox organization. Installers and user guides are published through rancherdesktop.io and docs.rancherdesktop.io.