balenaEngine vs crun
balenaEngine
balena.iocrun
github.comSide by side
| Figure | balenaEngine | crun |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 1 |
| Spec score · Container Engines | 7.3 (#20) | 8.5 (#5) |
| Purpose | balenaEngine is a container engine purpose-built for embedded and IoT use cases, based on Moby Project technology from Docker. | crun is a fast, low-memory-footprint OCI container runtime written in C. |
Plans
In their own words
balenaEngine
balenaEngine has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
crun
crun is a free, self-hosted OCI container runtime for Linux, written in C. It conforms to the OCI Container Runtime specifications and provides CLI operations for creating, running, executing commands in, listing, pausing, resuming, updating, checkpointing and restoring containers. It can generate a configuration for unprivileged use and creates a user namespace when run by a non-root user. The project documents integration with Podman, an Ansible role for installing a statically linked binary and a Lua binding. Build instructions cover Fedora, RHEL/CentOS Stream 9 and 10, Ubuntu, Alpine and openSUSE Tumbleweed; release binaries are listed for Linux amd64 and arm64, including variants without systemd. Official release artifacts are signed, with GPG verification commands provided. The project reports a benchmark of 100 sequential `/bin/true` containers completing in 1.69 seconds with crun versus 3.34 seconds with runc on the author's machine. The manual marks cgroup v1 support as deprecated. Regular patch releases target the latest version; fixes for earlier versions are best effort and not guaranteed.