firecracker-containerd vs Incus
firecracker-containerd
github.comIncus
linuxcontainers.orgSide by side
| Figure | firecracker-containerd | 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 | 7.8 (#14) | 8.7 (#2) |
| Integrations | The getting-started guide describes CNI plugins including bridge, ptp, host-local, firewall, and tc-redirect-tap. | The documentation links to third-party tools and documents storage drivers including Btrfs, LVM, ZFS, Ceph, LINSTOR, and TrueNAS. |
| License | The project is licensed under Apache 2.0. | Incus is free software developed under the Apache 2 license. |
| Purpose | firecracker-containerd enables containerd to manage containers as Firecracker microVMs. | Incus is a system container, application container, and virtual machine manager. |
| Support | The README directs bug reports, roadmap discussion, and feature requests to GitHub Issues, and general discussion to the Firecracker Slack #containerd channel. | Community support is available through the Linux Containers forum, and Zabbly provides commercial support for users of its Debian or Ubuntu packages. |
Plans
In their own words
firecracker-containerd
firecracker-containerd lets containerd manage containers as Firecracker microVMs, adding isolation through the KVM hypervisor. Potential uses include sandboxing untrusted third-party containers and bin-packing different workloads on multi-tenant hosts. It uses OCI image format where possible. The project includes a control plugin and API, an out-of-process shim runtime, an agent inside the microVM, and a root filesystem image builder. That agent invokes runC through containerd-shim-runc-v1 to create Linux containers inside the microVM. Networking supports pre-created tap devices and tap devices created by CNI plugins such as bridge, ptp, host-local, firewall, and tc-redirect-tap. The software is free under Apache 2.0. Hosts require Linux 4.14 or later, Intel x86_64, and KVM; AMD and Arm are not supported. Building requires git, gcc, Docker CE, and Go 1.23 or later. The guide describes the project as very early, and multi-tenant use is at the user’s own risk.
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.