Incus vs LXD
Incus
linuxcontainers.org
LXD
canonical.comSide by side
| Figure | Incus | LXD |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $2.08/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 4 |
| Spec score · Container Runtime Software | 8.7 (#2) | 8.3 (#8) |
| Spec score · Container Engines | 8.7 (#3) | 8.3 (#7) |
| Commercial support | The Incus project says commercial support is available from Zabbly. | Canonical makes commercial LXD support available through Ubuntu Pro. |
| Founded | 2023 | 2004 |
| Integrations | The documentation links to third-party tools and documents storage drivers including Btrfs, LVM, ZFS, Ceph, LINSTOR, and TrueNAS. | LXD integrations are available for Juju, MAAS, Ansible, Terraform, Puppet Bolt, and Packer. |
| Release support | Incus offers LTS and feature releases; its page states that Incus 6.0 LTS is supported until June 2029, while feature releases are normally supported for about a month. | LXD LTS releases are created every two years and receive standard support for five years. |
| What it does | Incus is a system container, application container, and virtual machine manager. | LXD is an open source solution for managing virtual machines and system containers. |
Plans
LXD
- LXD open sourceFree
- Ubuntu Pro PersonalFree
- Ubuntu Pro Enterprise workstation$25 a year
- Ubuntu Pro Enterprise server$500 a year
In their own words
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.
LXD
LXD is an open-source platform for managing system containers and virtual machines on Linux. It brings LXC-based containers and KVM-based virtual machines together, with images for many Linux distributions and Windows virtual machines. Management options include a command line, REST API, web UI and third-party tools; the same HTTP API supports local and remote access. An official web UI is available by default starting with LXD 5.21.0 LTS. Features include resource limits, scheduled and expiring snapshots, projects, hardware passthrough, live migration and advanced networking. Containers run unprivileged by default, and virtual machines support UEFI Secure Boot and vTPM. LXD can run from a laptop to a data-center deployment; documentation describes clusters of up to 50 servers with thousands of instances. LXD is free, with the open-source plan listed at free. Ubuntu Pro Personal is also free for up to five physical Ubuntu systems. Enterprise workstation and server subscriptions are $25 a year and $500 a year, respectively.