Apple container vs BuildKit

Apple container creates and runs Linux containers as lightweight virtual machines on a Mac. Written in Swift and optimized for Apple silicon, it gives each container its own lightweight virtual machine with core utilities and libraries. Host data is shared by mounting only the data needed inside each virtual machine. The tool consumes and produces OCI-compatible images that can be pulled from and pushed to standard registries. Documented features include CPU and memory limits, bind mounts, named volumes, tmpfs, DNS-based names, port forwarding, and isolated networks. It can run local single-node or multi-node Kubernetes clusters for development and testing, and documentation covers building, running, and publishing images for Apple silicon and x86-64. Integrations include macOS Virtualization, vmnet, XPC, launchd, Keychain services, and unified logging. Apple container is free, Apache-2.0 licensed, and supported on macOS 26, but requires Apple silicon. The project is under active development.

BuildKit is a free toolkit for turning source code into build artifacts. It consists of the buildkitd daemon and buildctl client, and uses LLB, a binary format for describing process dependency graphs. Builds can use Dockerfiles or other LLB-compatible frontends, resolve dependencies concurrently, cache instructions, import and export caches, run nested jobs, and collect unused data automatically. BuildKit supports execution without root privileges and OCI (runc) or containerd workers. Results can be exported as images, local directories, tarballs, Docker tarballs, or OCI tarballs. Cache options include inline, registry, local-directory, and GitHub Actions backends; the README marks GitHub Actions, S3, and Azure Blob options experimental. The daemon provides a gRPC API over a Unix socket by default, with TCP sockets also supported. Binaries are available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. The unofficial Homebrew formula for macOS omits buildkitd; the project gives Lima in a Linux virtual machine as one way to run it. BuildKit is licensed under Apache-2.0.