Charliecloud vs Incus
Charliecloud
charliecloud.ioIncus
linuxcontainers.orgSide by side
| Figure | Charliecloud | Incus |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Container Engines | 7.9 (#10) | 8.7 (#3) |
| Spec score · Container Runtime Software | 8.0 (#12) | 8.7 (#2) |
| Installation | Charliecloud can be built from a release tarball or Git checkout and is also available through package managers including Spack and Fedora/EPEL. | Incus upstream does not directly provide packages; packages are available through Linux distributions or third-party repositories, and it can also be installed from source. |
| License | Charliecloud is open source software distributed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. | Incus is free software developed under the Apache 2 license. |
| Purpose | Charliecloud is a lightweight, fully unprivileged, open source container implementation for high performance computing applications. | Incus is a system container, application container, and virtual machine manager. |
| Support | Users can report bugs or request features through the GitLab project and can get usage help through mailing lists and chat channels. | Community support is available through the Linux Containers forum, and Zabbly provides commercial support for users of its Debian or Ubuntu packages. |
Plans
In their own words
Charliecloud
Charliecloud is free, open-source container software for high-performance computing on Linux. It runs containers without privileged operations or daemons by using Linux user namespaces, with minimal configuration changes on computing-center resources. Users can build images, push and pull them to registries, and use accelerators such as GPUs. Its layer-free build cache is based on Git rather than union-mount filesystems and tarballs, and Dockerfiles are parsed with a formal grammar. The ch-image tool supports registry authentication and registries including GitLab Container Registry. At runtime, ch-run can inject host resources through the Container Device Interface, including NVIDIA GPUs and Cray networking. Installation is available from a release tarball, Git checkout, Spack, or Fedora/EPEL. Charliecloud requires Linux user namespaces and has been run on x86-64, ARM, and Power; current testing covers x86_64 and ARM. It is distributed under Apache License, Version 2.0. The project supports only the current release and provides no internal security boundary.
Incus
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.