crun vs Podman

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 manages containers, pods, and images, with workflows for finding, running, building, and sharing container workloads. It is a free, daemonless container engine with a command line comparable to Docker’s CLI; most commands can run as a regular user without additional privileges. Podman Desktop adds a graphical application for installing and working with Podman and other container engines on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It can build images from Dockerfiles or Containerfiles, pull images from remote repositories, and manage accounts for pushing images to registries. Podman can run Kubernetes YAML locally, generate YAML from pods, and deploy to existing Kubernetes environments. It can find and pull containers from Docker Hub, Quay.io, internal registries, or vendors. On macOS and Windows it listens for Docker API clients. The project lists integrations including Visual Studio Code, Cirrus CLI, GitHub Actions, and kind. Podman is licensed under Apache License 2.0. Its security foundations include rootless and daemonless containers, SELinux support, network policy enforcement, and immutable containers.