Apple container vs Incus

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.

Incus is free software for managing system containers, application containers, and virtual machines. Instances can share storage and networking, and administrators can manage them through a command-line tool, REST API, or third-party integrations. The software supports snapshots, backup and recovery, migration, configurable storage pools and networks, and resource controls. The project describes its API as suitable for use from a laptop through clusters of thousands of compute nodes. Documented integrations include Terraform, OpenTofu, Ansible, Packer, Distrobuilder, GARM, Kubernetes Cluster API, and Incant. The daemon runs on Linux; client applications are available for Windows and macOS, with FreeBSD client packages also listed. Upstream does not directly provide packages, so installation is through Linux distributions, third-party repositories, or source. Incus is developed under the Apache 2 license. Containers are unprivileged by default, but access to the Unix socket grants full control, so it should be limited to trusted users. The 6.0 LTS release is supported until June 2029; feature releases are normally supported until the next release.