crun vs Incus
crun
github.comIncus
linuxcontainers.orgSide by side
| Figure | crun | 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 Runtime Software | 8.6 (#3) | 8.7 (#2) |
| Spec score · Container Engines | 8.5 (#5) | 8.7 (#3) |
| Integrations | The README documents an Ansible role for automating installation of a statically linked binary and says a Lua binding is available. | The documentation links to third-party tools and documents storage drivers including Btrfs, LVM, ZFS, Ceph, LINSTOR, and TrueNAS. |
| Purpose | crun is a fast, low-memory-footprint OCI container runtime written in C. | Incus is a system container, application container, and virtual machine manager. |
| Releases | The releases page lists Linux amd64 and arm64 binaries, including variants built with systemd disabled. | The Incus 6.0 LTS release is supported until June 2029, while feature releases are published about monthly and normally supported until the next release. |
Plans
In their own words
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.
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.