crun vs runc
crun
github.comrunc
github.comSide by side
| Figure | crun | runc |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 0 |
| Spec score · Container Runtime Software | 8.6 (#3) | 6.6 (#26) |
| Spec score · Container Engines | 8.5 (#5) | 6.6 (#29) |
| Integrations | The README documents an Ansible role for automating installation of a statically linked binary and says a Lua binding is available. | The project documents using runc with Docker to prepare a root filesystem and with systemd or other process supervisors to manage containers. |
| Purpose | crun is a fast, low-memory-footprint OCI container runtime written in C. | runc is a command-line tool for spawning and running containers on Linux according to the OCI specification. |
| Security reporting | The security policy directs vulnerability reports through GitHub Security Advisories rather than public issues or pull requests. | The OCI security policy directs vulnerability reports to [email protected] rather than GitHub issues or pull requests. |
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.