crun vs Podman Desktop
crun
github.com
Podman Desktop
podman-desktop.ioSide by side
| Figure | crun | Podman Desktop |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Container Runtime Software | 8.6 (#3) | 7.3 (#23) |
| Integrations | The README documents an Ansible role for automating installation of a statically linked binary and says a Lua binding is available. | Extensions can add container engines such as Podman or Docker, virtual machine integrations such as Lima, and tools such as Kind or Compose. |
| Purpose | crun is a fast, low-memory-footprint OCI container runtime written in C. | Podman Desktop is a graphical developer tool for creating, managing, and running containers, pods, and Kubernetes workloads locally. |
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.
Podman Desktop
Podman Desktop has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.