crun vs youki
crun
github.comyouki
github.comSide by side
| Figure | crun | youki |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Container Runtime Software | 8.6 (#3) | 7.5 (#20) |
| Spec score · Container Engines | 8.5 (#5) | 7.5 (#19) |
| Integrations | The README documents an Ansible role for automating installation of a statically linked binary and says a Lua binding is available. | The README shows how to configure Docker to use youki as a container runtime and includes a Podman example. |
| Purpose | crun is a fast, low-memory-footprint OCI container runtime written in C. | youki is an implementation of the OCI runtime specification written in Rust, similar to runc. |
| Security reporting | The security policy directs vulnerability reports through GitHub Security Advisories rather than public issues or pull requests. | Security issues can be reported through GitHub Security Advisories or by emailing the project’s committers. |
| Security response | The project aims to acknowledge security reports within three business days and says confirmed issues are handled according to severity and impact. | The security policy says committers will try to triage a report and send a first response within seven days. |
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.
youki
youki is a Linux container runtime written in Rust that implements the OCI runtime specification. It provides commands to create, start, list, inspect, and delete containers, and can run containers without root privileges. The project documents using it as a runtime with Docker and Podman, and reports passing containerd’s end-to-end test and adoption in several production environments. Building locally requires Rust edition 2024 and Linux kernel 5.3 or later; local builds are supported on Linux, with Vagrant environments and GitHub Codespaces available for trying it elsewhere. The project is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project. youki is free under the Apache License, Version 2.0, which grants no-charge, royalty-free copyright and patent licenses subject to its terms. Security reports can be sent through GitHub Security Advisories or to the committers by email. The committers aim to triage reports and respond within seven days, though a fix may take longer.